BUCHAREST, Romania - Two flights. Both were canceled within days of each other. That was the starting point.
When you're trying to leave Israel during a war, you quickly learn that the usual rules of travel don't apply. Airlines pull routes with little warning, rebooking options evaporate, and you find yourself scrolling through group chats and forums at odd hours looking for a Plan C. The recommendation that kept surfacing was the same: go south, cross at Taba into Egypt, and fly out from Sharm el-Sheikh.
I'd never been to Egypt. I'd never been to Taba. I'd barely thought about either as a transit option before all of this.
But here I was, packing a bag before dawn and settling in for a route I hadn't planned on taking.
We left at 5:30 in the morning. I fell asleep almost immediately.
When I opened my eyes, we were somewhere past Dimona, deep in the Negev, and the landscape had flattened from sheer rocks into a vast, open nothing. Sandy brown earth stretching to the horizon in every direction, not a building in sight, certainly not an Iron Dome battery.
The thought settled in quietly, the way uncomfortable realizations do when you're still half-asleep: if something were fired in this direction right now, there would be nothing between it and us. No interception. No siren. No shelter. Just road and desert.
I watched the emptiness scroll past the window for a while, then fell asleep again.
By the time I woke up the second time, we were approaching Eilat, and minutes later, we were essentially at the border.
Taba border crossing experience
The Israeli side of the Taba crossing was quiet in a way that felt almost staged. Picturesque, even. A small, orderly terminal by the sea with a handful of travelers moving through at an unhurried pace. I asked a border guard if she'd been seeing more people than usual, given the circumstances.
About the same as a normal Passover, she told me.
I found that hard to believe, but I was also interested to see if that would hold on the journey ahead. A war raging to the north and east, flights grounded across the country, and yet the crossing into Sinai was operating at holiday-weekend volume. There's something about that fact that says a lot about this country, though I'm still not entirely sure what.
I'd been filming much of the journey. Loose, handheld footage, the kind you shoot when you're half-thinking about putting something together for social media later. Nothing formal. Just documentation.
That instinct would cost me.
I paid an entry fee I hadn't known about. "Another way for the government to take money from you," an Israeli employee told me, as I asked if this had always been a requirement. I then crossed to the Egyptian side. The atmosphere shifted immediately.
A plain-clothed Egyptian guard spotted my camera. I was pulled aside before I'd even cleared the security scanner. What followed was a tense, drawn-out exchange with multiple officials, none of whom spoke English or Hebrew. We communicated through Google Translate, passing a phone back and forth, typing out sentences and watching them render into Arabic or English with varying degrees of accuracy.
The gist was clear enough: the camera was a problem. They could seize it, or I could send it back to Israel. Those were my options.
Then it got worse. They learned I was a journalist, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees. Did I have permits? Who authorized me to enter Egypt? Was I here to report? The questions came fast, typed into Google Translate with an urgency that the app's speed couldn't quite convey.
I was unwillingly pulled to a small office while this played out. Grotty is the word that comes to mind. Dimly lit, barely air-conditioned, with torn posters from various ministries tacked to the walls. The posters displayed official instructions on proper procedures for this and that, which struck me as darkly funny given that nothing about my experience so far had resembled any kind of procedure at all.
After much arguing and back-and-forth, a third option materialized: I could have the camera sent ahead to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport. The cost for this luxury would be 12,000 Egyptian pounds (roughly NIS 700). Whether the camera would actually arrive was, it seemed to me, an open question. But the alternative was losing it entirely, so I paid.
They let me go.
I emerged into a very long, slow-moving line packed with Israelis. Families, couples, and solo travelers all funnel toward the Egyptian side of the gate. Among them were several religious families, visibly Orthodox, who seemed strikingly out of place for what awaited on the other side.
And what awaited on the other side was chaos.
But before that, another fee. I had no dollars; I had already paid for the uncertainty of getting my camera back. I was given a horrible rate for the remaining shekels I had on me, but I paid anyway. Again, I was allowed to go.
Beyond the gate, a badly paved road was crammed bumper-to-bumper with minibusses that looked more like oversized cars. Drivers were yelling, jockeying for position, honking. A few drivers even told me they were my driver. They weren't. The pavement, such as it was, had surrendered to potholes and dust long ago. If someone had told me I'd stepped through a portal into a crowded transit hub somewhere in rural India, I might have believed them.
I eventually found my pre-booked transportation and settled in for the roughly three-hour ride to Sharm el-Sheikh.
When I arrived at the airport, my first order of business was the camera. I found an airline representative who confirmed that, against what I'd quietly assumed, the camera had indeed made it to the airport. It was somewhere in the other terminal.
What followed was a small odyssey of its own, going from person to person, counter to counter, until I was eventually taken under the wing of one particular airline representative who seemed eager to help. Too eager, as it turned out. Rather than processing my baggage fees through official channels, he pocketed the money himself. A personal commission for the service of reuniting me with my own equipment.
I paid. Again.
Somewhere between the Negev and Sharm el-Sheikh, the nature of my anxiety had undergone a complete transformation. The morning had begun with the low hum of existential dread, the kind that comes from driving through open desert during a war, watching empty sky and wondering what might appear in it.
Cluster munitions, ballistic missiles, and the mathematics of interception probability. The fears were large and abstract and tied to things entirely beyond my control.
By evening, that dread had been replaced by something smaller, pettier, and somehow just as exhausting: the constant, grinding calculation of who would want money from me next, who might briefly detain me, and what new fee or shakedown awaited around each corner.
It is a strange thing, trading one kind of stress for another like that. But as I sat in the departure terminal with my camera back in my bag and my wallet considerably lighter, I realized that this is what leaving a war zone actually looks like for most people.
Not dramatic helicopter evacuations or last-flight-out Hollywood moments. Just a series of border offices, torn posters, Google Translate arguments, and palms that need greasing, all strung together on a road that technically leads to safety, even if it doesn't feel like it until you're airborne.
My flight was called. I picked up my bag, checked that the camera was still inside it, and walked to the gate.