Trekking Mt. Sinai
Trip Start
Dec 16, 2004
1
20
21
Trip End
Jan 17, 2005
St. Catherine,
Egypt
Friday, January 14, 2005
pieces to ensure she never rose from the dead again. Thus, the monastery is in her honor. Here, you can also see the supposed burning bush...where God spoke to Moses and told him to lead his people out of Egypt. The bush today is said to be a direct descendant of the original...I guess I'll take their word for it.
After the monastery, we enjoyed a "traditional" bedouin lunch
Me-atop Mt. Sinai
. I have to laugh sometimes b/c nothing is free in this great world of ours of the reach of capitalism. These traditional dinners and lunches are always accompanied with the selling of something and these men and women are dressed in their traditional garb, singing and dancing, and then a cell phone will go off and this ancient old man answers it and starts rapping in Arabic with someone. It's too funny. But it was fun and we got to see some new baby camels, so they were really cute. Originally, we were to climb Mt. Sinai this morning for sunrise. But this meant waking at 2am and nobody was down with that (especially me). So we opted to do the sunset climb yesterday. I really wanted to ride a camel on this trip, so I rode one for about 2/3 of the journey up the mountain. My camel's name was "Camel Jackson", which I thought was pretty funny. It was actually quite a smooth ride in comparison to what I expected. The rest of the journey had to be done on foot and consisted of large stone slabs thrown down to resemble some 720 steps! There was ice and snow towards the top and it was freezing. The view from the top was beautiful, but not an awe-inspiring experience as I expected. Being a very religious site and all....I waited to basked in the sudden glow of sunlight with a choir singing hallelujah in the background and angles playing harps. Well, none of it happened and it was just another mountain in a long line of many mountains to climb and say "oh, how pretty". But honestly, I am not giving
enough respect to the amazing landscape of the Sinai...the mountainous desert was much more than I expected. When I think of 'desert' I picture endless small mounds of sand and camels. Well, the camels I saw plenty of...but the desert was just full of really high mountains. So it was quite beautiful to pass through.
Today we made the 6 hour bus journey back to Cairo...it feels very strange to be back in a big city--a bit of culture shock in all honesty. So I have roughly 2 full days to see Cairo. I have a lot on my agenda and so we'll see how much of it I can get done. I've opted to stay on at the Indiana Hotel as I could get a really decent rate for basically a 3 star hotel rather than trekking to the $1.50 hostel where the guy was a bastard to me last time. Also, I've collected quite a few souvenirs that surely may be stolen in a hostel dorm, including my massive alabaster vases from Luxor. What was I thinking?!
