We left at 1:30 Friday afternoon for our excursion to Mount Sinai. It had been a crazy week making plans; a number of us were going for sure but a couple people were on the fence about it until very late in the game. The major issue was transportation. The drive is six hours, and that is a long way on a public bus. Besides, the public buses have a history with security issues, so we decided to pony up the extra cash and get a private 15-passenger van. Not knowing the exact number of people made figuring costs a little more difficult, but in the end seven of us decided to go. Paying for the extra seats wasn't too bad since it gave us all plenty of room to stretch out for the ride.We made it out of Cairo pretty quickly and before we knew it we were driving south along the western coast of the Sinai Peninsula. The sun was setting the whole way, and we had excellent views as the sun slowly sank behind the mountains on the opposite side of the Suez Canal. The haze from blown sand and pollution made it easy to look directly at the sun and we all took some great pictures.
We all slept (or tried to) for most of the ride. I gave up once it got dark and stared out the window and the mountainous terrain bathed in moonlight. We would need our sleep, because the plan was to arrive at the Monastery of St. Katherine at the base of the mountain around 9:00 pm, make the 2 to 2.5 hour climb up the Stairs of Repentance, and camp out until sunrise. Just as we reached the southern tip of the peninsula, we turned inland and headed north for the monastery. Along the way we had past several checkpoints. At each one our drivers would speak Arabic to guards, and all I could make out was saba' imreeky taaliba, from which I gathered that they were being asked to identify their passengers and probably what our business was, to which they would respond "seven American students," among other things. At the last couple checkpoints we had to produce our passports. The official would leaf through them, hand them back, and send us on our way.
The final checkpoint was also the ticket office for St. Katherine's. One of us had a student visa, so we were able to get tickets for the resident Egyptian rate. These tickets were for entering the monastery. Climbing the mountain is technically free, but the guides expect and deserve a tip. Our drivers dropped us off in the parking lot for the monastery and we collaborated in Arabic to establish a pickup time for the next morning. We fully intended to take the shorter, but much more difficult, Stairs of Repentance to the top of the mountain, as opposed to the longer but easier camel path. I don't think the anyone's decision to take the Stairs was ever based on making good time. Firstly, we were all excited by the challenge. I also think we felt that the trip itself would have more personal meaning if we took the most difficult path possible.
Taking the Stairs, however, was a problem. You are technically not allowed to take them at night. After much laborous insistence (and remember: these guys don't speak English and we don't speak Arabic well enough to express the slightest of abstract ideas), the officials at the base let us take the stairs. While they sent for a guide, Mark and I began to play with our cameras. The sunset was followed by one of the brightest moons I have seen. We both slowed our shutter speeds way down and opened our aperatures to see if we could capture these beautifully moon-lit landscapes. We both achieved amazing results. Mark has a brand-new Canon digital camera, one step below an SLR I believe. He was able to get some incredibly shots. They nearly reflected what we were actually seeing. I have a Minolta that is at least 4 years old. Its old enough that along with its 10x optical zoom (impressive), it also advertises its 3.2 mega pixels (not so impressive anymore). Despite this, my pictures turned out much better than I expected.
Our guide finally arrived around sometime between 10 and 11pm. He seemed a little groggy and we learned not too much later that he had just made the hike up the Stairs the night before and that his knee was bothering him. We felt bad for him and offered him our water and Advil, but he declined. He joked a little and handled it all well considering he had not gotten much rest. The hike up was amazing. As mentioned earlier, the moon was bright and clear, and we were able to make the entire climb by moonlight. Coming back down the next morning, we decided that in addition to being beautiful at night, it was also a good thing that we made the hike in the relative darkness of the moonlight because that way we couldn't see the challenge we had ahead of us. The Stairs of Repentance are so named for a reason. For the majority of the hike, espeically at the beginning, they are really only stairs in the loosest possible sense of the word. For the most part, its just a number of flat (relatively), narrow, stone footspaces, one right after the other. During the ascent, they often curved in such ways that getting on all-fours was necessary, and getting from one step to the next required some precarious foot and handwork. No one complained about this though, since we expected there to be at least some climbing involved. If not, then I think we all would have been a little disppointed. All told, the official count on the number of steps is 3,750. They are so uneven in places that it is hard to understand how they arrived at this number, but I'll just let it be.
Our guide led us to the prime sleeping spot: an approximately 8x20 foot roof of a mud hut built for pilrimaging monks. He we set up camp and watched as the clouds slowly melted away and the sky opened up to thousands of stars. We braced ourselves for a cold windy night. Not many of us slept much, but it didn't matter. When first light hit four hours later at 5:30 am we were all wide awake to take in the gorgeous sunrise. I'm not sure that words can really describe spending the night on Mount Sinai and then watching the sunrise over the valley below, so I'm not going to try. All I can say is that it was beautiful and was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
However, detracting from any amount of spiritual reflectiveness one might try to experience was the amount of tourists. Our schedule for climbing the mountain seemd to be fairly unique, at least for this night. We were literally the only people on the mountain during our climb, and we had the summimt all to ourselves until first light. But starting around 4:30, we began to the intermittant cheering of groups as the summited the mountain. Most of the tourists on this day had decided to stay most of the night at St. Katherines and then time their ascent to coincide with sunirse, rather than get there early and spend the night on the top of the mountain. These groups stayed out of sight until sunrise began. Then things got a little strange. Our group filled up most of the roof we were sleeping on. Once sunrise began, two people peeked over the ladder that led to our roof. We expected them to head back down once they saw that it was pretty much entirely occupied, but instead they went and sat down on the three feet of space left between the last of our row of pads and the edge of the roof. Now the only space left was the three feet of space running horizontally between the long edge of the roof our row of feet. Shortly there after, another couple of people poked their heads over the ladder and looked around. They decided to sit down right in front of us, in front of us being between us and the sunrise. And the people just kept coming, not just on our roof, but throughout the entire top of the mountain. There had to be at least 70. I was not going to stand for having people show up late and then sit right in front of me. We had been expecting, and for 15 minutes were able to, lie in our sleeping bags and watch the sunrise. This couldn't exactly be done with people sitting in front of you and jockeying for camera angles. Being where I was, I did not want to come off as selfish or cause a scene, so I just climbed on top of a rock. Mark followed, and the rest of us decided that it was finally time to stand up and just go with it. The people who joined us on the roof turned out to be Swedes, and we thought they were pretty nice once we got over the fact that they were there in the first place. We got them to sing the Swedish birthday song to Sara, which was very entertaining.
The hike down was interesting enough. It was great to see by daylight all the places we had passed in the night. But whereas on the way up we were the only people climbing the mountain, we were a group of 7 among hundreds of people all trying to descend at the same time down the same narrow stairs. We saw one women walking down the stairs in heels and were slightly apalled. And this wasn't even the worst case of a poorly-dressed foreigner. Many Europeans (the offending parties seemd to mostly be Eastern European) were dressed inappropriately. One girl was stopped at the entrance to the monestary because she was wearing a miniskirt. Once we finished the hike, we toured the limited areas of the monestary that tourists were allowed to see.
We met up with our drivers and returned to Cairo. The ride back mostly involved sleeping, but we did make a pit stop at the Red Sea. We were trying to get to a hot spring listed in one of our guide books. We found it, but it was inside a tiny cave and was crowded with old men. Instead, we dipped our feet in the water at the nearby beach and ran in the sand for a little while. We also had a memorable break at a rest stop just at the edge of the Sinai, before we crossed back into the main part of Egypt. Here at the rest stop lives a stray kitten which we named Dirty Kitty. We enjoyed feeding and petting her, and teased the girls in our group who us for playing with a most likely diseased animal.
On our return we showered and then went donwtown for kosharie, shisha, coffee, tea, and taola (backgammon), and then headed back to the dorm. All but one of my classes for Sunday were cancelled, and in the one class I had the professor was showing movie. I slept a good night's sleep, showed up for the movie, did some homework in the libarary, and went to bed. Monday is off for the Prophet's birthday. We were planning on going to Dahsur, which we missed on our original trip to Saqqara, but I think that many of us will just sleep in and do homework.
Feel free to let me know about any typos you find by commenting. And feel free to comment about other things, too.
Additional Photos:
3 comments:
Hi Paul,
Hurry up and post your pictures of the amazing moon and sunrise on Mt. Sinai!
I felt your dismay over the people crowding in front of your group on the roof. You are all so adventurous; I envy Sara for having such a memorable 21st birthday.
Thanks for sharing.
Sandy Shaw
thanks mrs. shaw. I updated the post a little bit too. I was rushing to finish it last night.
Awesome! I would have liked to read more about your reflections concerning the religious significane of the site. Your comment to me about the types of souvenirs would be interesting to read about too.
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