Justin was here two weekends and we wanted to take one of the weekends to get outside of Cairo. We were having a hard time deciding where to go, as the common destinations include the beach and the red sea on the Sinai coast, St. Catherine’s Monastery and Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula and Luxor/Aswan with the Valley of the Kings, ancient Egyptian temples, etc. We were originally leaning towards taking the eight hour train down to Luxor. But we had spent the first weekend seeing Ancient Egyptian sights going to the Pyramids at Giza, Dashur and the Step pyramid complex just a little way from Dashur. We decided that as fascinating as Ancient Egypt is we would rather avoid Luxor (it’s an insane tourist town) and instead take a bus into the Sinai interior to visit The Monastery of St. Catherine and hike Mount Sinai. I bought a bus ticket through the travel office at AUC. They don’t sell return tickets here in Egypt; you buy them once you get there. So, we had a bus ticket leaving at 11am to the St. Katherine! Finding our bus the morning we left was kind of challenging. We were first dropped off at the part of the bus yard where more local buses left. I was looking around at the buses (most had seen their better days) wondering if we should back out. I don’t know if my body would survive eight hours in those things. However, as we asked around (asking meaning me using my extremely limited vocabulary then resorting to pointing to the ticket and saying “where?” in Arabic) we finally realized we were in the wrong yard and needed to go about a block away. So, we walked on the dirt streets (the part of town this bus yard was in cracked me up, it’s a part of town where not many tourists would be invited in, not unsafe but just something the Egyptian government likes to keep from the rose colored views the tourists get) to the bus yard a few blocks away, where the buses looked MUCH more capable of fully completing eight hour journeys. Justin and I didn’t really have any plans to stay anywhere in St. Katherine. A few of my friends from the dorms had been and had just stayed on the top of the mountain. But they had gone on about how freezing it was at the top, and they had hiked up during the day but Justin and I were going to be arriving late in the evening. We brought a flashlight, just in case our only option was to hike up at night. However we decided we would rather find a place to crash for the night, even if it was just in a dorm type atmosphere, then hike up early morning. Justin and I had originally thought we would be on the bus to St. Katherine with other tourists, as this is quite a popular tourist destination, and would be able to ask around to see what other people’s plans were. However, we were only on the bus with four other tourists. Most people get to St. Katherine on organized tours. One of the tourists was French and didn’t speak a lick of English. Two were British men traveling together who really weren’t approachable in the conversation tense, and one of the tourists (she was actually a tour leader working for a British tour company and was going to meet up with a group there) informed us that the bus stop was kind of in the middle of nowhere and not near any places to sleep. And if we didn’t have anyone picking us up we were kind of stranded. Hmmm….great. I spent the rest of the ride with images of Justin and me sleeping on the side of the road shivering and begging the sun to rise occasionally entering my head. (We were without blankets or anything. if we had to sleep at Mount Sinai we were hoping to rent blankets and mats from the Bedouins at the top, as our trusty guide book told us there would be). Our bus stopped pretty much every twenty minutes on the way there either at a rest stop or to pick and drop people off. Justin and I figured out that this bus was the only bus going this exact route, and the locals knew the approximate times it would be coming through so would jump on to get from town to town. Pretty good little system, actually. But…it took FOREVER. Nine hours later we were in the village of St. Katherine. As we stopped at different hotels on the way into town Justin would run out to reception and see if they had any space. All full. A bunch of pilgrim and tourist groups were coming through and would be hiking up for sunrise. Dang. The images of sleeping on the side of the road were becoming more and more realistic. We got to the final stop and were approached by a guy with a taxi willing to drive us to Fox Bedwin Camp. Hmmm…Justin and I checked our trusty guide book and all it had to say about this place was “moth eaten mattresses”. Hmmm. Well, the alternative was camping out anyways and at least this place was known enough to be in the guide book, so we decided to go have a look. The Fox Camp was actually pretty cool. We got a hut to ourselves complete with mats about an inch thick on a wooden platform and blankets. It was very cold so the blankets made me happy. We took it. We went into the main tent where there was a fire and people. Random local people and European backpackers (a few from Czech, one from Belgium), sitting around drinking tea. We soon met Hamdi, the cook for the place. He was a complete character and offered to make us food. Yay! We hadn’t eaten a meal all day. So, we sat by the fire in a “Bedwin” (that’s how the hand painted sign in English spelled it) camp eating soup, vegetables in a sauce, rice and flat bread. Ahh…it tasted so wonderful. Hamdi also introduced us to a type of tea, he called it (pronouncing the H loudly) hhhherbalzzz tea. It was amazing. He showed us their herb garden (out underneath the full moon next to red rock hills…absolutely a beautiful setting). This tea had a few herbs in it I think, but no one knew the names of all of them in English. I should have gotten them written down in Arabic, sigh. Anyways, there was at least Sylvana, which I’ve heard is a type of sage. This tea had absolutely no “tea” in it and was instead purely herbs and sugar. So amazing. I drank three hundred cups of it. At least it felt like it. Hamdi said it was good for the stomach and I had just scarfed a huge meal on a previously empty stomach….my stomach was very confused. After talking to the backpackers and Hamdi we decided to opt out of hiking up for the sunrise like most people do. It would A) require us to get up at 2:30 to begin the 2-3 hour hike before sunrise and B) mean we would be joined by FOUR HUNDRED other people hiking up. Yuck. It sounded like hell. All the tour buses take the people up in the mornings. DOUBLE YUCK. Instead we ended up heading out of camp by about 7 in the morning to explore. As we arrived at the monastery and base of Mount Sinai all the tour buses were loading up and leaving. It was awesome. Good bye tourists! I’m a hypocrite. I think I’m somehow better than most other tourists. But those tour bus groups just take over places. Yuck. We had the place to ourselves and at one point the parking lot was completely empty and we sat and talked with a guy selling food for about an hour. A fun guy. I was able to practice my Arabic. Yes! The monastery only opens for an hour on Fridays and Sundays so we were able to get in, but just for a short while. It really was amazing. It was originally built in the 600’s, and after years of getting attacked they eventually fortified it to the point where it now looks like a fortress, surrounded by tall walls. The inside shows adding on at different periods over the years. It’s a Greek Orthodox monastery and it is said that most of the monks are Greek. There are only about 20 of them living in there now. We saw the descendent of Moses’ burning bush, as they say. Climbing Mount Sinai was actually more of a challenge than I expected. I had heard of all these hundreds of people doing it so I kind of expected a trail. We ended up ascending about 2500 feet from the Monastery, to an elevation of 7500 feet. The hike ended with uneven stairs cut into rock that went on forever. Holy Cow that was a cardio workout. Sadly, as Justin and I slowly crawled up the stairs, this spry 70 year old guy bounced right past us. Ugh. I hate when older folks are in better shape than me. Sigh. But we talked to him later at the top and it sounds like he’s been quite the hiker his entire life, been to sights all over the world… The views the entire way up were breathtaking (I posted some pictures of them) and the top was amazing. It was freezing on the top, and it was afternoon so I’m so very glad we didn’t try to stay there overnight. There were, in fact, “Bedouins” (the term Bedouin is used so loosely here, true Bedouins are hard to find and these are most likely villagers) selling mats and blankets up top. The top was filled with a mix of people. A small group of Nigerian Pilgrims were up there. As well as a group of Americans (I was so happy to hear the American accent again!) but they were kind of strange. I shouldn’t judge but they were up there on a religious trip…I think they were Christian but they were singing these hymns and dancing to them in the style of TaiChi…we were also joined by South Asian Muslim guys, all around about 20 or 30 years old…they were coming up as we were going down. We watched the sun lower while the different groups sang and prayed. I can’t imagine what the sunrises are like. Hamdi said people are weird and “think the sun rises just for them, they dance and sing”… 400 people doing that? We stayed for most of the sunset, but as we had forgotten our flashlight I really didn’t want to be doing the steps in the dark, so we headed back down before the sun quite dipped below the horizon. We made it down the steepest parts of the hike before it got really dark. We had been planning on the full moon to help us down but the dang thing didn’t rise until a few hours after sun set. So we did the very last bits in the pitch dark dotted by random fires of the “Bedouin” living on the mountain, very slowly sliding our feet forward and feeling out way around the rocks. There are two buses leaving St. Katherine for Cairo, 6am via Suez and 1pm. We opted to take the 6am so we would have another evening in Cairo before Justin left. We sat on a spot in the road where Hamdi told us the bus left from. But the bus didn’t come. Pretty soon some guys in a minibus pulled up and said “no bus broke.” Hmmm. We caught a ride on the back of a guy’s pickup truck into town. The roads were entirely empty this early in the morning. And all the tour buses were picking people up at Mount Sinai after the sunrise. At the bus stop we ran into Mr. Spry 70 year old British guy and the Belgium guy from our “Bedwin” camp who had also planned on taking the 6am bus. A man with a minibus taxi said he was going to Suez, but only to Suez. But we should be able to find a connection in Suez. All four of us decided to do it. As we drove along in the minibus we came upon men waiting on the side of the road for the bus, that they didn’t know was broken. By the time we left Feiran Oasis (just about 20 minutes outside of St. Katherine) we had men sitting on other men’s laps they were crammed in so tight. I, the only woman in the car, was squished up against the window with Justin serving as my buffer against everyone else. It was quite an interesting ride as our driver was very aggressive. I’ve grown used to Egyptian driving, but this guy took it to a whole new level. I just closed my eyes to fall asleep thinking of the headline “17 die in bus meant to hold 10…” Along the way we passed our big bus, which was indeed broken with the driver standing behind the engine staring at the puddles of liquid gathering underneath the bus. Water, oil? I don’t know. Haha. So many of us were trying to get to Cairo that the driver called a friend of his to meet us, and this guy’s mini bus was going to Cairo. We just got out at Suez and immediately got back on another person’s microbus. All in all, we made it back to Cairo in six hours, 2-3 hours faster than the big bus. The last leg of getting home was the most confusing of all. Our driver said that he would be dropping us off at Ramsis metro station. Well, Ramsis metro is really close to Zamalek. So Justin and I just decided to take a cab home. It was an absolutely crazy bus/metro terminal. More insane than most parts of Cairo, and all the more so after the peace of St. Katherine and Mount Sinai. We finally got in a cab, who seemed excited by the prospect of Zamalek and five minutes after leaving the terminal I understood why. I had no idea where we were. I pride myself on usually at least having a rough idea of where I am in Cairo. It’s important to me. But I had no idea. I finally figured out we weren’t where I thought we were. (haha) I had seen signs at the metro station saying New El Marg, which I know to be the end of one of the lines. But somehow my brain had gone squishy from the long rides and I didn’t put it together that we were indeed at THAT metro station. We were at the very northern edge of Cairo, very far from Zamalek. The guy had told us we were going to Ramses, which now I think is what that part of town north of Cairo is called. And when he said metro station he meant that we would be near a metro station so we’d have a way into town. Not at the metro station named Ramses. *sigh* I love these miscommunications. We should have taken the metro from New El Marg because the cab ride cost us. Oh well. The cab driver was a nice enough guy and eventually we made it into Cairo, then Zamalek. What we paid him for the cab fare was probably more than he made in a day.... I got to see the northern parts of Cairo, at least! Haha. Here concludes the very long edition of Justin and Cara’s trip to Mount Sinai.