A tragedy that takes place on familiar turf is somehow more genuine and intimate than the run-of-the-mill disasters that we hear about every day. So it was for me when I heard of the bombing on Sunday of a tourist bus that killed four people on the Egyptian side of the Taba border crossing linking Israel and Egypt.

I first visited Sinai in 1980, when I traveled by bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo. In those days, before there was a tunnel under the Suez Canal, passengers had to board a simple, motorized raft to make the short passage across the Canal. There was a bar, a smoke-filled room with a scratchy, sandy floor next to the landing whose assorted local patrons still bring to mind the bar in the original "Star Wars" movie. In other words, foreign and exotic, with a hint of menace and adventure.

As a young freelance journalist, I was no stranger to Sinai. In those days, it offered a cheap beach vacation and the ever-present possibility of romance with the odd Dane or Swede in search of a winter tan. I used to set up camp under the palm trees that then graced the empty, windswept beaches of Nueba, 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) from the Taba border, where those unfortunate South Korean tourists met their end. There were none of the hotels and bungalows that followed in the wake of Egypt’s sovereign return to the peninsula after Israel’s evacuation in 1980. A local Bedouin family from the Tarabin tribe maintained the rudimentary huts and operated an unadorned collection of formica tables, serving Fanta and hummus.

Some 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Nueba lies Sharm el-Sheikh, where the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba meet. Moshe Dayan once famously declared that Israel’s presence there was more important than peace with Egypt, a declaration he had the good sense to overlook after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1976. When I visited for the first time as a college student soon thereafter, I had the then-spectacular Na’ama Bay all to myself, except for a nearby Israeli field school that sat on a precipice opposite. Today there are more than 30,000 hotel and condo units in and around Sharm. The tiny encampment has become a city of 35,000, all but obliterating the isolated beauty of the place as I experienced it so many years ago.