Mount Sinai and Dahab

After returning to Cairo for a couple of days to wait for my Syrian visa to come through, I took a bus from Cairo to Dahab, on the Gulf of Aqaba coast of the Sinai peninsula.

The Pyramids, Cairo, the ruins at Luxor, and Abu Simbel are all interesting. But the nicest place in all Egypt is the Sinai.

Go to Sinai. Climb Mt Sinai in the daytime, and spend the night on the summit. Hang out in Dahab for a week.

The Sinai is pretty bleak. However, it is largely a baksheesh-free zone. And so it seems like you have left Egypt for another country.

After a night or two in Dahab, I stored my pack and took a bus to Mount Sinai. Here you see the mountain itself.

It's known locally as Gebel Musa, or the Mountain of Moses. The summit is at 2272m (7455 feet).

There is public bus service to the village of Al Milga, then it's just a few miles to the monastery at the mountain's base.

The Monastery of Saint Katherine is at the base of Mount Sinai. In the past 100 years a number of very significant early documents have been found in its library — for example the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century Greek Bible written in 330-350 CE. Its library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. Major texts are in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, and Syriac texts. Mount Sinai is behind and to the right in this picture.

Starting up the winding path to the summit of Mt Sinai. The sane approach is to take the relatively gentle "camel path", known as Siket El Bashait, and climb the mountain during the day.

Looking back to the Monastery of Saint Katherine from just a little way up the camel path.

Looking up at the summit of Mt Sinai from the path. A white spot is barely visible just to the left of the highest point, it's the small Greek Orthodox chapel at the summit.

Looking across the Sinai mountains from about half-way up.

Joining the Stairs of Repentance near the summit. It's a 3750-step staircase. Consider that name very carefully — unless your goal is repentance, the camel path is the preferable route!

Elijah's Spring, a very small spring near the summit. Probably the only naturally green plants for a hundred kilometers.

Finally, at the summit!

Here you can see one of the lean-to tea huts run by some Bedouins at the summit.

A view to the north from the summit in the afternoon.

Facilities are limited, these are the pit toilets that appear to date back to the era of Moses.

I brought some water, some juice, and something to eat. And then I rented some heavy wool blankets from the Bedouin tea hut. It's hot in the day, but pretty cold at night. Desert, mountain, all that stuff.

Only three of us had the good sense to climb the mountain during the afternoon and stay the night on the summit. It's a spectacular place to spend the night — more stars than you can imagine, and the Hale-Bopp comet was very prominent when I spent the night.

About 0430 you're rudely awakened by a mob that has done a fast forced march up the Stairs of Repentance during the night. They arrive just in time to see sunrise and then march back down again. Here we are hiking back down with said mob.

Then it was back to Dahab for a couple of days that turned into a week and a half.

Lots of places to stay for next to nothing, all sorts of places to hang out. Here it's a clear day and you can see all the way across the Gulf of Aqaba to the Magic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I met a guy who did maintenance work at a Canadian-run hospital over in Saudi Arabia. He described it as like a medium-security penal colony. Walled in, in the middle of the desert, you could only leave the compound with special permission (that you generally couldn't get). Once every six months he had a chance to leave briefly. And bizarrely he really liked it and was looking forward to signing up for another year.

He had a couple of interesting stories about Saudi Arabia. One is that there is good money in being a distributor of Nyquil cold medicine and Aqua-Velva aftershave. Since you can get drunk drinking them and they're legal to possess in Saudi Arabia, they go for a lot of money. When you go down to the beach in the morning, you find empty Nyquil and Aqua-Velva bottles everywhere.

And speaking of empty bottles on the beach, wealthy Saudi families like to "take part" in cleanup programs. What they do — send their Bangladeshi indentured servants down to the beach or the roadside to clean up the real trash. Then they plant a few pre-selected clean empty items. Then the family sweeps up in their air-conditioned luxury cars, jumps out and picks up the few pieces of planted "trash" in a few seconds, and jumps back into the cars.

There's great diving right around there, and even better at the Blue Hole just a little way up the coast.

The Gulf of Aqaba, the body of water between the eastern coast of the Sinai and Saudi Arabia, is deep and it drops off quickly close to shore.

It's a part of the Great Rift Valley running through East Africa, up the center of the Red Sea, north through the Gulf of Aqaba and on to end in the rift valley containing the Dead Sea.

It's very rich in coral and fish.

The Muhamed Aly Camp was very nice, it's right by where the Bedouin pickup truck rides from the bus stations in town stop. 5 EL (US$ 1.50) for a basic hut or 10 EL (US$ 3) for a nicer one. All of them within a stone's throw of the waterline. Great food in all the waterfront places.

Plenty of places to hang out, Dahab has a great atmosphere.

If you're going to travel in an Arabic-speaking country, learn how to read Arabic numerals!

Interested in using any of my pictures? I have high-resolution versions of all of these. Contact me if you are interested in using any. The answer is generally "yes" as long as I get credit and a copy of the result.

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