It’s hard to believe that we’re already on Day Eleven, and nearly done with the Sinai portion of the trip. Good writing would dictate that I allude to a fantastic ending to the day, and make you read through the whole thing to get to the payoff. But screw that, I’ll just come out and say that I’m typing this from the most adorable little resort on the east coast of the Sinai peninsula, looking out over a very private beach on the Red Sea.
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With that in mind, let’s step back to pretty much midnight this morning, when we were getting going for the Mt. Sinai trip. We were fairly groggy, of course. But we knew we wanted to do this, and got right on the road. The drive there went quickly, and we arrived a little after 1:30am. To our delight, Mt. Sinai was positively a tourist destination… and that meant we could get cold water and Coca-Cola, which we promptly did. It’s a little odd if you think of it as breakfast, so we decided to think of it as a late night snack.
Our driver sat with us for a bit, and helped us find Abdul, a guide who would take us up the steps. At the time, we were unclear on the need for a guide, but we kind of just got set up with Abdul, and since he was going to cost us 85 Egyptian Pounds, or about US$16, we figured we might as well.
Now, there are two ways to ascend the top of Mt. Sinai: the 2.5 mile long path with lots of switchbacks and a gentle, even slope… or the Stairs of Penitence, a much shorter path with about 3500 steps covering the same approximately 3500’ elevation gain. I mean, really, “Stairs of Penitence”? How could we resist that? Most guidebooks recommend climbing the gradual path and then descending the stairs, but we decided to go up the stairs and descend the path. Smartest thing we did all day.
The stairs were a bit rough, especially at first when Abdul was setting a marathon runner’s pace. Once we got him slowed down a bit, we made steady progress and completed the tough climb in about two hours. During this time we saw only a few other people, except when we looked over a precipice and watched the long processions of tourists making their ways up the gradual path.
The first signs of trouble appeared when we were about two thirds of the way up: gift stands, with lots of, well, stuff you’d expect at gift stands. Still, we paid them no mind and continued.
Getting to the end of our two hour climb, Abdul steered us to a particular gift stand. It was only about 3:45am, so we had plenty of time before sunrise. We bought some candy bars and Cokes (LE$10 each, versus LE$1 or less everywhere else we’d been). We also rented a couple of blankets for LE$20 each, more than the cost of buying blankets elsewhere. Well, whatever, they had carried this stuff up to over 6000’, after all. And then we were ready to head up the last bit of the stairs, about 3 minutes or 100 steps, according to Abdul.
Except… Abdul doesn’t let us go. “You must wait here,” he says. Ok, he’s the guide… we’ll wait here. Maybe the path doesn’t open until 4 or something. So we wait. And then other tourists catch up to us, and head on up past us. Um, Abdul? Reluctantly, he bade us on our way, saying he’d be waiting for us in this very spot upon our return. Fair enough.
We did reach the summit pretty quickly, and were among the very first people there. We figured out which way was East (thanks, Timex) and set ourselves up with a choice location on a wall overlooking, well, everything. And we waited. Anna wrapped herself in her sleepsack and a rented blanket and feel asleep. Lars wrapped himself in a blanket and tried not to freeze to death, drenched in sweat from the climb as he was. And Luke and I tried to huddle under clothes and wait for sunrise. It was a little after 4:00am.
By about 4:30am, it was clear that this was not just a tourist destination, but a tourist destination. A bunch of Brazilians showed up, in groups of two or three, with the assembled group loudly cheering each new arrival. Despite the nearly half moon, people walked around with bright headlamps, blinding everyone else and necessitating even more headlamp usage. More and more people showed up and it got louder and louder and more and more crowded.
Around 5:00am it became clear that we would likely be trampled if we stayed sitting in our spot. People were constantly waving flashlights over us, and Anna, sleeping girl that she was, was nearly kicked in the head several times. Luke and I shifted up onto the wall and tried to take up less space while being more territorial about it.
By 5:15am, I had a German tourist literally standing on my toes (I was wearing flops). When I extricated my toes, he happily just stood on my now-vacated shoe instead. The Brazilians were getting rowdier, and the whole assembly was starting to feel like that late walk back to the hotel at the end of an evening on Bourbon Street. Solemnity? Nope. Awe? Nope. It was just a very loud crowd.
Eventually, maybe around 5:30am, Anna and Lars uprighted themselves and joined us on the wall. People continued to crush against us, and my German friend, apparently tired of standing on my shoes, sat on the wall right in front of me. He did solicitously ask if he was blocking my view, at least.
Anyways, by 5:45am, the sky was dramatically colored and sunrise was imminent. The crowd was still very loud. And then… sunrise. And actually a pretty nice one, with a somewhat odd shape and dramatic dark orange colors. And, of course, the crowd cheered wildly, like God had just completed a tricky pass on fourth and three. It came off as kind of tacky and self-congratulatory rather than earnest and appreciative.
And then the sun was up, and the crowd cheered again, and we all started to disperse. My group headed down the first set of stairs with everyone else until we reached our arranged meeting with Abdul. Mind you, when we left him there were maybe six people there, all more or less standing still. Now there were hundreds of people flowing through the same spot. We looked where we’d last seen him, we looked around a bit, and then we decided to give up and head down on our own, figuring it couldn’t be that difficult.
Not only were we right, we were once again actually smart. It turns out that most of the 500 or so people who joined us for sunrise decided to follow the guidebook recommendations, and having come up the gradual ramp, they went down the stairs. We had the ramp almost entirely to ourselves, and we made quick work of it, descending in just over an hour.
Along the way, we passed lots fo souvenir stands and children selling the inexplicably ubiquitous stone eggs that we’d been seeing everywhere. Stone eggs? Mt. Sinai? I still don’t get the connection, but maybe I’m just missing something.
Once back down to ground level, we walked past the St. Catherine Monastery, but since it was still before 7:30am and the Monastery’s museum and public spaces didn’t open until 9am, we decided to be content with the view from outside and to get on with our day. As i turned out, we had the uncharacteristically good luck of having having our driver pull in to the parking lot just at the moment we were ready for him. We piled our stuff in the Range Rover and headed out.
As we were leaving St. Catherine, we stopped to get gas. During the gas stop, guess who called our driver? Yep, Abdul. Apparently they’re buddies, and Abdul was somewhere between angry and apologetic that we hadn’t found him, and of course he wanted his money. Well, we did agree to pay him, and even if he wasn’t the best guide and was clearly making money on the side by steering us to a particular gift shop and then telling us we couldn’t leave, well, a deal’s a deal. What’s more, he said we owed him 40 pounds, which seemed fair, since we had gone up but not down with him.
Sure, 40 pounds it is, and we gave said amount to the driver, who got back on the phone with Abdul. There was a brief shouting match there, and the driver handed the phone back to me. Now Abdul 55 pounds that he wanted. Grrr, well, OK, the difference was all of US$3, and I wanted to be done. So, we shuffled money again and gave the driver 55 pounds. Now he was upset and got back on the phone with Abdul. The word “baksheesh” occurred numerous times, which was not entirely encouraging. After that conversation, the driver insisted that we actually owed Abdul the full 85 pounds.
Here’s where our party’s consensus broke down a bit. Luke, always sensitive to fairness, was opposed to paying. Me, being the one drafted to have these conversations with the driver and Abdul, I just wanted to be done, and the entire LE$85 came to less than US$17, and I would cheerfully have paid twice that to not have to deal with this crap. Not the most stand-up-for-oneself position, perhaps, but that’s where I’m coming from. So we paid the full amount. Whatever.
On the whole, the Mt. Sinai experience was fairly disappointing. The actual stair climb was a blast, and very rewarding. The view of the sunrise was pretty spectacular, but if there was any spiritual aura, it was drowned out by the obnoxious tourists and the overall tourist trap atmosphere of the place. And the whole experience with Abdul left kind of a sour taste, since it felt more typical of Tijuana than a religiously and historically significant landmark.
And now we loop back to the beginning and the unexpected treat teased in the title. We got back to the house were we had slept oh-so-briefly, and we pretty much just got going from there. Our next stop was another Bedouin household, where we stayed only briefly for tea before Friej promised us a beach before the midday sun. So we hopped back in the Range Rover, this time for a 50km drive that was largely offroad, and good fun.
Around noon, then, on the same day we had seen the sunrise from Mt. Sinai, we ended up at Abu Hamza, an adorable resort on the Red Sea. About 15 thatched huts, a communal dining area, spectacular views, and good snorkeling. And, best of all, it is actual, real water, and huge amounts of it at that. After the week or so of slogging through the desert, it feels pretty fantastic.
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That’s exactly how I felt at Stonehenge. I was expecting it to be a spiritual experience but that was crushed when I realized that the tour bus drives on an asphalt road about 4′ from the heel stone. Total letdown.