Mount Sinai

Above St Catherine's Monastery

My birthday present to myself was a good dose of food-poisoning, from eating unwisely the night before. We both spent my birthday eve and day spurting from both ends - not such a great birthday, but that's ok. Birthdays can be delayed ... and we felt well enough (just - Grant regretted it for a while) to go the next day across to the Sinai Peninsula, to visit St Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai. It's an 8 hour bus trip, and that was quite an experience. It is supposed to be a "luxury" bus, but it wasn't. You've probably heard all the stories about disgusting toilets at roadside stops, and everyone gawking at the foreigners, and there was all that, but also the driver thought is was funny to bark instructions in Arabic only whenever we stopped, giving no indication of how long the stop would be, then gunning the bus and starting to move along the road if anyone was unlucky enough not to be finished in the loo. I managed to hold it in for most of the journey ...

Sunrise from the summit of Mount Sinai

Anyway, we finally arrived and stayed at the very comfortable guest house associated with the monastery. St Catherine's is the oldest continuously used monastery in the world, dating from the 6th century, but a church has been there at the site of the Burning Bush since AD320. It has many very precious old documents and icons, including a gospel written in the 5th century. Only a relatively small part of the monastery itself is open to the public, but it's still a major pilgrimage site because the area is sacred to all three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And of course it is the start of the trail up to Mount Sinai, which is where Moses received the Ten Commandments. The thing to do is to get up really early and climb to the summit (a climb of around 1200m, up to a height of 2200m or so), to view the sunrise over the desert "badlands" of Sinai.

Freezing cold at the summit

Grant wasn't up to it at all as his stomach has recovered slower than mine, and I was just going to go up during the day, but I woke at 2.30am to the sound of many feet plodding past, so thought it was meant to be ... so off I went up the mountain. You can take a camel to a couple of hundred metres from the summit if you're feeling lazy, (me? what do YOU think?) so the path was a highway full of people and camels. Although it was pitch dark there were lights all the way up of people's headlamps, and there are about 10 tea houses from start to finish (including one just below the summit), with the prices getting higher with each step. At the summit it was absolutely freezing cold with a biting wind and sprinkles of snow on the ground, so I had all my Europe warm gear, but still hired a blanket at the top to huddle in while the sun got around to rising. It was like the Tower of Babel at the top, with probably 200 people squashed into quite a small area, all blathering in various languages, many riotously praising God with loud prayers and song. It was lucky that the loudest group was from Nigeria, so the wonderful rythmns of Africa drowned everyone else out! Finally the sun rose to a hushed awe (it really was very beautiful indeed), and within 10 minutes the summit was virtually deserted! I stayed on a while to see the landscapes around (it is incredibly gnarly country, all bare rock in bulbous or sawtooth ridges for as far as you can see). Of course I also had to wait for the crowd to thin to get the geocache on the top of the mountain!!! Despite all the hokey and Egyptian-style commercialism, I found it a really fabulous experience and I could really imagine Moses up there all those thousands of years ago.

There's always room for a backgammon book

We decided to splash out and get a minivan back to Cairo, all for us, so it took 6 hours instead of 8. The driver, Kareem, was a great guy, and had a range of methods to smooth his way through the numerous police checkpoints. Sometimes cigarettes were the way, other times he put on some intellectual-looking glasses, other times he just smooth-talked, but one time nothing worked and we had to have our bags searched (the police are ULTRA vigilant at the moment after the Alexandria bombing). The last hour and a half back to Cairo was like being in the wild west, only the Cairo traffic version - terrifying! But we made it! The road rules in Egypt warrant a blog all for themselves ...

A ship on the Suez Canal as we go through the tunnel