John Kernick (2)

Rasta-Brahmin vibration: Rotondi pursues his case from the exile of Sharm el-Sheikh, above, while his former clients make the scene near the Blue Hole.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israeli Army took the Sinai peninsula, and in the years that followed, a puny Bedouin village called Dahab became something of a Middle Eastern Goa, a Red Sea Kathmandu, a tiny hippie hangout known for the easy availability of cheap oasis-grown marijuana and not much else. Israeli kibbutzniks and Scandinavian drifters loitered in Dahab because no one else would. The beach was flinty; there was no pavement, no electricity, no scuba divers with credit cards. Egypt regained the territory in 1982 after the 1979 Camp David accords and, to consolidate its hold on the region, settled many nomadic Bedouin onto land claims and encouraged a Sinai-wide boom in big hotels.

In 1988, Rod Rotondi stumbled onto this Eden, ripping into town on an Africa Twin motorcycle with UN plates. Twenty-seven years old, Rotondi had a freshly minted masters in diplomacy from Tufts and was working in the occupied West Bank, running development projects for Palestinians right in the middle of the Intifadah uprising. Dahab's decadent vibe put a new twist on the idea of getting stoned.

At first Rotondi just went diving and then left, but by the early 1990s he was hooked. He had a little family money—his maternal grandfather was John A. Volpe, a construction magnate and three-term governor of Massachusetts—and so he quit his UN job to invest his cash and future in Dahab. He established residency and opened a scuba shop, and then later another scuba shop, and after that a third scuba shop. The last of these ventures was located in one of the aforementioned whitewashed buildings near the shores of the Red Sea. Rotondi leased the building and grounds from five Bedouin brothers, the Hameids, whose father had bought land in Dahab during the 1970s rush. A powerful family with jewelry stores and real estate holdings centered in the town of El Tûr, on the western Sinai coast, the Hameids were also Rotondi's partners, and in the beginning it all went well enough. Rotondi called the place Club Red, a play on the name of the famously hedonistic resort chain Club Med, but also on the location and (perhaps) on the eye color of Dahab's herb-happy denizens. Like other scuba outfits in town, Club Red's first floor was crowded with air tanks and wetsuits and dive maps; the second floor had 12 hotel rooms. Rotondi made money lodging people upstairs, outfitting them downstairs, and guiding them around the fantastic dive sites being discovered every month. Underwater arches, eel gardens, reef walls, sharks, octopi—everything a diver could want, especially deep water close inshore. Dahab was, for divers, about that deep blue. Rotondi himself once scuba dived as deep as 430 feet—a "crazy and stupid" move, he says now.

"In the early days," he recalls, "we definitely smoked way too much dope, drove fast motorcycles, dove too deep, and partied too hard." Since then Rotondi, now 39, has replaced drugs and motorcycles with veganism and meditation, and has become serious enough about yoga to pick up an extra moniker—Swami Rishimurti Saraswati. And in the intervening years, he expanded Club Red. But he still looks back with nostalgia on that earlier Dahab. "It was idyllic," he says. "Now it's different."

The town has indeed lost some of its rough edge, getting (some) pavement and (some) water and (overflowing) sewers; in recent years, the police have cracked down on (open) dope-smoking. The Goa days are largely gone, but the reputation lingers, and clusters of cruise-ship tourists periodically appear on Dahab's main street to videotape the increasingly rare dreadlocked freaks. Rotondi complains, perhaps ungratefully, about the anesthetized lifestyle of kids who come here only to avoid being anywhere at all, and laments, perhaps romantically, the despoilation of the traditional culture that flourished in the desert for thousands of years.

Ten years ago, he recalls, the Bedouin used to be "so Zen, mellow, friendly, great." Now, he says, it's all about money. "The Bedouin kids in Dahab grow up on the beach, selling bracelets. They speak English by four and German by five."

Maybe Dahab was perfect, once, but I doubt it. Westerners are always projecting Shangri-la onto some spot on this earth, papering over the cracks with money and optimism and an infatuation with the exotic, and then later recoiling from the changes their presence has wrought. I noticed that the only two books in evidence in Dahab—sticking out of battered backpacks or lying facedown on the cushions of Turkish restaurants—were the PADI dive manual and Alex Garland's novel The Beach, both of which describe the many ways you can get in trouble while escaping solid ground.