So this year’s travel will be a little shorter than last year’s. But it’ll still be some pretty good stuff. It’ll be my first around-the-world trip, and I’ll see a pretty wide variety of cultures, climates, and activities. Throw in some friends and some friends-of-friends, some good physical adventure, and entirely too much tech gear, and I think it’ll be a pretty great time. Here’s the itinerary:

Stop 1: Tokyo (July 28 – August 1)
I’ve never been to Japan, and it was time to fix that. I’ll be spending 3 days in Tokyo, which is both exciting and a little intimidating. Fortunately I’ll have a local guide for some of that; my friend Sègun “Shuggi” DeSilva has spent quite a bit of time there, and one of his local friends is going to kindly help me out. It should be a blast. And there has been some mention of “wine bars.”

Stop 2: Dubai (August 1 – August 4)
Too good to pass up. By all accounts, Dubai is just crazy. I’m a bit of an architecture geek, so I just have to see the ridiculous buildings (no, I’m not staying in the Burj — rooms started at US$600/night). But there’s other interesting stuff, and it’ll be interesting to contrast this relatively new city with the ancient places I saw in Jordan and Egypt last year.

Stop 3: Abu Dhabi (August 4 – August 7)
Also in UAE, Abu Dhabi gets less press than Dubai, but looks pretty amazing as well. I’m actually not at all sure what I’ll see or do here, but since it’s two hours away from Dubai and a good friend (hi Steve!) spent a lot of time here, I figured I had to see it.

Stop 4: Switzerland (August 8 – August 19)
This stop merits a whole post in itself, which I’ll get to at some point. The short version is that I’ll be climbing the Eiger and Monte Rosa with the Climb For Kids crew. There’ll be some time in Zermatt, and my first experiences with Alpine huts, and my second experience outdoor climbing. But we’ve got great guides and I feel pretty good about it (though I’m sure I’ll be utterly terrified when the time comes).

We’ll also spend time in Grindlewald and Wengen, two of my favorite places in the world. Heck, everyplace in Switzerland is one of my favorite places. There’ll just be a day or so in Geneva at the beginning/end of the climbing trip, but I’ll take advantage of that too. Geneva is one of my favorite places in the world.

Stop 5: Warsaw (August 19 – August 23)
Kind of a random choice here — I needed some place to spend a few days between Switzerland and Valencia, and Warsaw’s been on my radar for a little while. It’s got an interesting (and often depressing) history, and I’m definitely going to track down the Enigma machine at the Polish Military Museum. And hey, a 5 star hotel for US$60/night? After a couple of weeks of climbing and hiking and stuff, I’ll be ready for the luxury.

Stop 6: Valencia (August 23 – August 28)
What better way to end a month of travel than being covered and soaked in tomato? Yep, I’m going to hit La Tomatina, and I’ll do so in the company of Dara and Glyn, two friends I haven’t seen in years. La Tomatina is only an hour and I’m in Valencia for four days, so I’ll also get around and explore the city.

Know someplace cool along my itinerary? Know someone who’d want to get together for a glass of wine? You know how to find me!

We had boarded our sleeper train from Luxor to Cairo around 8:30pm, with an expected arrival in Cairo at 5:45am.  I had taken Ambien in the hopes that it would allow me to sleep on the train, with mixed results that involved lots of tossing and turning and lurching around with the train.  The conductor woke us for breakfast around 5, and the four of us constituted one pretty groggy group.

By 6am or so, we were on the outskirts of Cairo, and more or less waking up.  The train stopped in Giza around 6:15, but it was another hour before we arrived in Cairo, since we were constantly sidetracked for more important trains.  But we finally got to Ramses station, bundled our stuff off the train, and set about finding transportation to our hotel.

Finding a taxi wasn’t a problem, but since we didn’t yet know the city, we had difficulty negotiating a decent price.  The thing to know about Egypt in particular, and Cairo specifically, is that there is really no shame among vendors – if a taxi ride should cost E$10, they are just as likely to quote E$100 as they are to quote E$25 (with few exceptions, they won’t ever open with a reasonable price).  There was simply no way we were going to take the first offer.  So we wasted fifteen minutes or so playing games, asking for prices, walking away, being chased by drivers, and so on.  Eventually we paid E$20 for the five to ten minute ride, which means we probably still got taken.

But we ended up at our hotel, the fairly well-reviewed Osiris, which is a small place in the Bab El-Louk district.  Since we hadn’t managed to make reservations (the hotel doesn’t take online reservations, and the published phone numbers were wrong), we knew it was going to take some luck to get rooms for the four of us.  We ended up with one room with three beds and an extra mattress on the floor, which worked out OK because Luke was going to be up bright and early for his return trip anyway.  So we dropped our stuff and headed out into the city.

And what a mistake that was.  Look, I know Cairo is a big city.  I’ve been to a good number of the big cities in the world, and I get the big city vibe.  But Cairo is… just not pleasant.  Mexico City is probably the best comparison.  We spent four hours or so walking through the market district and through a fair amount of downtown, and the consensus was that this just really isn’t a place to visit recreationally.   Outside of the international hotel district, there just really aren’t many restaurants except McDonalds and KFC, and the whole place has an edginess and vibe of irritation that just make it unpleasant.  Whereas crossing big streets was crazy but basically cheerful in Amman, in Cairo there’s a lot more animosity to the game.   Drivers will pull so far forward that there’s no room to walk, even when they’re just sitting in unmoving traffic.  Small meannesses like that are ubiquitous.

To be fair, we did spent a couple of hours at the Cairo Antiquities museum, and it was pretty incredible.  It’s a pretty well known place, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but the short version is that it’s a positively huge museum practically bursting with all forms of displays of ancient Egypt.  From carvings to mummies, from jewelry to papyrus paintings, there are something like 160,000 exhibits.  They’re densely packed, and many of them are unlabeled or labeled with hand-typewritten notes that themselves are probably close to 100 years old.    And there are some pretty nice lilies in the pond out front, too.

The good news is that there’s a new museum being built in the Giza area, scheduled to open in 2015, so you may be able to see all of this great stuff without venturing into downtown Cairo, if you’re patient.   Me, I’d wait. 

We ended the day with some drinks and snacks at the Ramses Hilton, which was decent enough, and then we stopped by – yes – McDonald’s, which offered free WiFi.  What can I say?  Our hotel’s WiFi didn’t work, the Hilton’s wanted us to be a guest and wouldn’t take money, and we hadn’t seen an Internet cafe with WiFi (the provided computers are too scary to use).  So McD’s it was.  For two and a half hours, as Anna scoured the net for an affordable hotel that would get us our of Cairo.  By 10pm, we had a place in Giza, plans to head out early to beat the tourists to the Pyramids, and headaches and terrible music stuck in our heads.

If you’ve been following our trip so far, you know that Anna, Luke, Lars, and I have all enjoyed stuff like hiking through the Sinai and sailing on a felucca a lot more than we’ve enjoyed the more postcard-friendly tourist destinations like temples and ruins.  But we were going to be in Luxor today, and we decided that we just had to do one of the big historical things.  After looking through our more or less trusty guidebook, we settled on Karnak, a 100 acre complex of ruins built over a period of 1,300 years. 

Our guidebook also helpfully informed us that the site opened at 6am and that tourist buses generally start showing up around 9am.  So we set the alarm for bright and early and were up and outside of our hotel right at 6.   We hailed a cab (in Luxor, like the rest of Egypt, you hail a cab by walking down the street; they find you) and negotiated a rate of E$20, or US$4, which we thought seemed fair.

The cab probably made out better than we did, since it was just a kilometer or two away.  But whatever, we wouldn’t have known how to get there.  We were at the site by 6:15, and it was pleasantly deserted.  We bought our tickets and headed in to Karnak, not really sure what to expect.

Well, if you go, expect big.  Very big.   It goes on pretty much forever, and there’s a huge variety of stuff, as ruins go.  There’s a large area with 134 columns in a grid pattern, some huge obelisks, a large pool, big rooms, small rooms, huge facades, statues, lintels, you name it.  Since we were there just after sunrise, the light was incredible, and for the first hour or so we were the only people there.  That’s definitely the way to visit. 

Like every other historical site we visited in Egypt, Karnak did have an indigenous population of “guides”, several of whom we saw sleeping in various ancient rooms and whatnot when we got there.  We were careful not to wake them, but eventually some of them did hear us and got up.  The downside to being the only people there: we were the only targets for baksheeshing.  By this time, I was developing a sixth sense for breaking off from the group at the sight of a “guide”, but it was during one such wander that Luke called me back.   One of the, um, guides was going to show us something cool.

And it was cool.  Karnak is still undergoing massive renovation and reconstruction, and this guy took us through some “no entry” gates into a working room where renovation was underway.  Being an enclosed room, some of the hieroglyphics still had color to them, and it was pretty cool seeing the tools and apparatuses that the people working on restoration were using.  We saw everything from small brushes to pretty beefy looking pneumatic tools.   And the room itself was pretty impressive, too, with very dark granite doorways that were somewhat unique.  I’m sure the whole thing violated a million bureaucratic and safety rules, but it was actually a worthwhile use of baksheesh.  I think we paid E$10 or so for our behind the scenes view.

The incredible thing – one of the incredible things – about the Karnak site is the sheer scale, in both physical size and historical time span.   We walked, and we walked.  And we saw amazing stuff.  And there were still huge fields where pieces of the complex were laid out in neat rows, ranging from small fragments to huge columns, all waiting (presumably) to be sorted, ordered, and re-assembled.   I’m interested to learn more about the reconstruction effort and if there are any plans to be flat out done – the place was pretty amazing as we saw it, and I can only imagine how much imposing it will be when more pieces are put together.

But, even as amazing as it was, we tired of walking around ruins after about two hours, and we started drifting toward the exit.  Which was just as well, because the tourists we arriving and the place was getting busier.  Fine by us; we’d had it to ourselves for a couple of hours and were very happy with what we’d seen.   On the way out, we stopped by the apparently-brand-new visitor center, which had some great pictures of Karnak’s initial discovery and excavation.  It also had a mostly interesting video playing on a brand new A/V setup with the most terribly maladjusted mixer ever.

We wrapped up at Karnak around 9 and walked back into town, since it was early and cool and a relatively short walk.  It was kind of one of those “what now?” moments, since we didn’t have other plans, and our sleeper train to Cairo wouldn’t leave until 8:10pm.   We made made our way back to Snack Time, a local fast food place with the kind of strong branding, clearly thought out menu, and western-style prices that indicated a desire to expand, and parked for a bit to use their free WiFi to check email, update the blog, et cetera.

By noon, we’d had all of the fast food, checked all of the email, and done all of the blogging we could handle.  So we were kind of kicking around for something to do.  Leafing through the guidebook, we found that the Valley of the Kings wasn’t far away, and we decided that we might as well do that.  So we headed over to the local ferry (E$1 per person) to cross the Nile.  While on the ferry, we were solicited by a taxi driver, and when we asked about rates, he offered LE$50 for round trip to Valley of the Kings, including 90 minutes of waiting time while we explored.  That’s about $9, and a surprisingly fair fare.  We could probably have haggled, but we were so used to people opening with demands of at least five times market value that we were taken a bit aback and just agreed.

That turned out to be a fantastic decision.  Abdul had a good car with air conditioning, had great English and was a friendly and informative guide as we drove, and was just generally a good guy.  It was kind of weird, but welcome.  He dropped us at the Valley of the Kings and we agreed to meet in 90 minutes to return to the ferry.  It was at about this time that I discovered that my trusty Canon SD700 IS, which had survived rafting the Futalefeu and summiting Kilimanjaro, had apparently succumbed to the Egyptian heat and dust, and that the little motor that extends the lens for use wasn’t even making the attempt anymore.  “Lens error, please restart camera,” the display said.  Partial disassembly/reassembly did nothing.  Dead camera.  So expect fewer pictures from here on out (Anna’s camera is working fine, but it’s too large for casual shots).

The Valley of the Kings is a pretty crazy site – something like 60 tombs in a relatively small area, all carved out of the ground in an attempt to evade grave robbers and archaeologists.  Oops.  Some of them are cut out an amazing distance into the earth, like tomb #36, whose associated Pharaoh I forget, which was accessed by first climbing a 50 meter stairway and then descending most of those 50 meters through long angled passages.  It was pretty impressive, though very, very, very hot.  By the time we were in the cartouche-shaped burial chamber, I’d estimate it was 43c / 110F, with maybe 60% humidity.  It was brutal.  And there was another baksheesher there, pointing out the ceiling and floor and stuff in return for expected payment.  Ugh.

We also visited #14, which I believe is Tausert, which was interesting because the first half of it was in very vivid color, but from about halfway on it had been carved but not colored.  More baksheesh here, as the “guide” literally pushed past us to use a weak flashlight to highlight stuff we were already looking at. “Hey, a snake” one of us would say.  “Snake!” the baksheesher would say.

Finally, we visited Ramses IX, which tomb for once I can remember the name but not number.  Another fairly long passage full of detailed and colored hieroglyphics, but this one brought back some memories for me.  I’d been here, in this very tomb, with my father in 1981.  In fact, I’d been yelled at by a guide because he thought I was touching a hieroglyph that I was really just pointing at.  Funny how memories work.  No worries of being yelled at this time, I thought, as there were now glass panels up between visitors and hieroglyphs (probably because of me).

Well, as it turned out, Anna managed to get in trouble here.  The entire Valley of the Kings has a no-photography-in-tombs policy, ostensibly to protect the tombs from accidental flash photography, which is hard on pigment.  The policy is probably as much about misunderstanding the economics of non-scarce goods and thinking that prohibiting photography will increase sales of books and postcards (hint: it won’t; you’re better off having tourists take pictures and return home to get their friends excited about visiting).

But the policy is the policy, and Anna tried to sneak a few pictures without warning the rest of us, who could easily have shielded her and distracted the baksheesher who was shadowing us.  Predictably, he caught her and acted like it was a Big Scary Authority Thing.  They’d have to go to The Office, and so on.  Also predictably, it was just a baksheesh shakedown, and settled for E$20 (US$5).  Maybe the no-pictures policy has a net economic benefit to the unofficial economy of the place, even if there’s a net loss to the site in general.

Anyways, we were ready to head out, and we found our cab driver and got going.  He was an interesting guy to talk to, and we discussed the economic impact of the 1997 terrorist attack at the Hatshesput tomb, which killed around 20 locals and 60 tourists.  Abdul said that it took a year for the local economy to recover, and that many people lost businesses during that time.  Kind of grim all the way around.

We opted to stop by one of the Papyrus shops on our way to the ferry, and either Abdul was the smoothest operator we’d yet met, or the shop was genuinely run by his cousin.  It was a nice shop, and they knew how to sell to westerners.  Free water and cola, an interesting demo of how papyrus is made, clearly posted prices, and still a 10% discount off of posted prices (enough to feel like you don’t need to haggle, not so much that it discredits the original price).  We bought stuff.

And then we headed back to Luxor, where we hung out for a beer or two, since we still had a couple of hours before our train.  Our waiter, too, was an interesting guy, and we ended up talking about politics and culture with him.  Like pretty much everyone else we’d met in Egypt, he wanted to talk about Obama, and he was upset that Obama could only be president for 8 years.    He talked about Mubarak and his perception that the Egyptian government only cared about rich people in cities, and how little attention has been paid to the health care system.  “In Europe or America, if your son needs a doctor and you can’t afford it, the government takes care of it for you”, he said.  We had to gently let him down there.  It was a good conversation and reminded all of us that a lot of the value in these trips is in the cultural exchange.

After a quick dinner, it was time to head to the train station for our overnight train to Cairo.  The train was a few minutes late arriving, and then we were in our sleeper compartments.  They were fairly tiny, but perfectly decent once we juggled our bags and books and whatnot and got the place arranged.   We bedded down and tried to get some sleep before our expected 5:45am arrival in Cairo.

I’m tempted to leave today’s entry with the title, because it feels like there’s not a lot else to say.  So it’ll be a brief post, today.  We woke up on our nice felucca after a mostly good night of sleep, and we headed down the Nile.  The big event today was a stop at the Daraw market, since Lars had expressed excitement about trying camel meat, and Daraw is apparently one of the biggest camel markets in Egypt.  But really, today was all about relaxation and drifting on the Nile.

Note: If you’re reading this on Facebook, you’re not seeing the full size pictures.  Hop over to the original on Tangentry.com if you want to be able to click-to-zoom.  Also note that our Internet connections are infrequent and very slow, so we’re not checking blog or Facebook comments or email at this point.

So, right, before we get to the heavy chilling, let’s talk about the market at Daraw.  Per the driver who took us from Luxor to Aswan, Daraw is one of the biggest camel markets in Egypt, selling camels for both food and as pack and transport animals.   It was only about an hour of sailing from where we’d spent the night to Daraw, and it was still bright and early in the morning, and not too warm.

Upon disembarking at Daraw, we were met by a tiny, motorcycle-based vehicle, called a .  We piled in, six people in all including driver and Ali, our felucca captain, and headed off to the market.  Like most driving we’ve experienced in Egypt, people rely on being alert more than they do on following any particular rules of the road.   As we neared the market, we became just one of many , and the whole thing felt more like being part of a crowd on foot than it did like being in a vehicle; lots of stops and starts, and everyone kind of worming their way forward to fill in any open spaces.

Once we got to the market, Ali led us to a butcher shop where whole carcasses were pretty much just hanging there.  He bought some camel meat and sent it off with our driver to be cooked (presumably not wanting to deal with the full cooking thing on the boat).  We wandered around the market while waiting, and on the whole it was a hugely better experience than the tourist-centric market in Aswan.  Daraw’s was a real market, where locals shopped for food and supplies, and there wasn’t a store in sight selling the otherwise ubiquitous tourist crap.   Being obviously non-native, we stood out a lot more, but that was fine.

Eventually we piled back into the and headed back to the felucca.  Ali dealt with storing food and generally getting ready to sail while the rest of us kicked back, enjoyed the sun, and had a beer (it was 10:30am by this point, after all).   Before too long we cast off from the dock and started the second day of the felucca journey.   The plan was to get relatively close to Edfu, our final destination, so we’d just have a few hours of sailing the next day.

The day passed lazily, with much reading, some swims in the Nile (if you’re going to brave it once, you might as well keep it up), and a few more beers.   We all seem to have acclimated to the heat pretty well, so it’s hard to judge how hot it was, but certainly well over 35c / 100f.   But when it got too warm, a quick dip served to cool off quickly, and the relatively light Egyptian beer kept us hydrated.  As the day wore on, we saw more and more huge Nile cruise ships heading upriver; at one point, we could see more than 20 of them lined up one after another, sometimes side by side, all with the same tourists doing the same itineraries.  Our felucca felt that much better by contrast (even when the considerable wakes from the continuous steam of ships caused us to bob quite a bit for an hour or so).

By late afternoon, it was becoming clear that the wind was not at all cooperating with our plans; we had been on the river for hours and hadn’t made much progress at all.  I think we were actually moving slower than the current, a light upstream breeze slowing us but not providing enough power to tack against.

Eventually, the day ended and we tied up to a dock.  Not knowing landmarks, it’s still hard to estimate where exactly it was, but certainly far short of where we’d planned to be.   Since we had been planning on sailing for only a few hours the next morning, this probably meant we’d have to spend the entire day making our way to Edfu.  But hey, we had no strict itinerary, and we were sailing on the Nile.  That sounded like a fine plan.

So, if you read yesterday’s entry, we just really weren’t that thrilled with Aswan.  On the bright side, that last evening turned out pretty well – we ended up wandering through the market and it was much livelier, and somewhat less annoying, than it had been during the day.  The colors were brighter, the shops were more authentic (locals shopping for groceries, for instance), and there were more people about to distract the most aggressive vendors.

Still, we were ready to head on, and I for one was very much looking forward to getting out of Aswan.  We woke, had breakfast, then headed out to grab some supplementary supplies for the Felucca trip.  Our captain had said he was going to pick up a case of water, food for meals, and beer, but we wanted to have some snacks and back up water.  So we did that stuff and then met our captain in our hotel lobby around 9:30am, piling into his car for the trip to the boat.

The boat was the first of our surprises – it wasn’t the one we had test-sailed across the Nile the day before. It was bigger, and nicer, but not the  same.  Our handy guidebook had warned us about this eventuality, but there wasn’t a lot to do unless we wanted to refuse to go.  And the new boat seemed pretty nice.  So, ok, well take this boat.

And then it became apparent that our putative captain was, in fact, more of a salesperson and trip reseller than anything else.  Hmmf.  Ok, this was kind of warning bells, but again, what are we going to do except cancel the trip and start over, only to probably end up with the same scenario again?

Speaking for myself here, and with the sledgehammer foreshadowing that everything turned out fine and that the felucca trip has been fantastic, it was this kind of needless dishonesty that really turned me off to Aswan.  If our “captain” had flat out told us that he just arranged trips, that he had a great boat and crew for us, but that he wouldn’t be going himself… it would have been fine.  Instead, there was this whole charade of test-sailing and talking about his boat, which boat he knew damned well we wouldn’t be sailing on.  It just seems kind of pointlessly dishonest, if you know what I mean. 

Anyways, our new boat was indeed bigger and better than the one we expected, and it’s pleasantly decorated with a Rastafarian theme, complete with Bob Marley flags (one real, one painted).  The cruising/sleeping area is big enough for ten people, so the four of us are entirely comfortable.  and the captain and steersman are both plenty nice and seem very competent.

This first day, we made about 20km of progress, proceeding from Aswan to just north of Kom Ombo.   During the day, it was plenty hot, and it became apparent to me that there was no way I was going to follow the prudent advice of not swimming in the Nile.  So I swam a bunch, which turned out to be fantastically refreshing (and, as of this writing, about 24 hours later, I have no significant rashes or new limbs to report).  We saw a bunch of great sights, but mostly of the relaxing, non-dramatic type.  We did pass under a modern cable-stayed bridge, and watching other feluccas go under it was an interesting juxtaposition of modern and ancient transport.

We sailed from about 11:30am until about 6pm, and ended up on a large beach with other feluccas, most of them carrying native Egyptians, including one large group from Kom Ombo that consisted primarily of lawyers, with a few other professions thrown in.  Luke started talking to them, and the next thing we knew he was holding babies and dancing.  Lars and Anna drifted over and joined while I wrote up some blog entries and fended off a couple of offers to buy marijuana.

It turns out the big group was a regular outing that a bunch of guys make every two weeks or so.  As one of them told me when I eventually joined, “we do this every two weeks… there are standards of behavior we just can’t do at home, and out here we can do whatever we want, except drugs and women.”  Ok, so they weren’t rock stars, but they were having a great time.  Shortly afterwards, they headed back to Kom Ombo, and we had dinner on our felucca.

Eventually we bedded down for the night, plenty warm with only light sleep sacks or blankets.  The slight motion of the boat was very pleasant, though.  It did get kind of cold in the middle of the night, but nothing like we had experienced in Sinai.  Altogether, it was a wonderful and relaxing day, made all the better by contrast with the past few days of stress and hassle. 

Right, so we’d made it from Sharm El-Shiekh to Aswan in only two days of travel, with one weird police/bureaucracy experience.  Aswan itself promised some sights, like the Philae temples, the High Dam, the Temple of the Nobles, and so on. And we even had a car to take us around, which seemed like a smart choice.

Our taxi – a nice air-conditioned minibus – picked us up at the hotel and we headed off to see the four sights we had identified as being priorities.  First up was the unfinished obelisk, which sounded a little lame, but hey, who doesn’t like obelisks?   From the hotel it was only about a 15 minute drive to the site, where we saw some pretty cool stuff and learned about Aswan.

Note: If you’re reading this on Facebook, you’re not seeing the full size pictures.  Hop over to the original on Tangentry.com if you want to be able to click-to-zoom.  Also note that our Internet connections are infrequent and very slow, so we’re not checking blog or Facebook comments or email at this point.

Here’s what you need to know about Aswan: as an obvious foreigner, you rate above cockroaches but below goats on the social pecking order.  You are there to spend money, and any human interaction that seems more cordial or social is just part of some sales pitch or other demand for money.  Balk at anyone’s demands and you’ll be met with the same mixture of irritation and incredulity that a shepherd might display towards a an animal that started doing its own thing.

Anna had mentioned that our guidebook said that the Nile valley was an exercise in tipping, and that anyone who so much as held the door for you would want money.  It seemed like a bit of an exaggeration, but let’s be clear: it’s an understatement.  After paying US$7 or so for entry to the unfinished obelisk park, we were led to a theater to see a digital rip of a VHS copy of a National Geographic special about the obelisk.  And you know what?  It was pretty good.  Lots of interesting info about how obelisks were made, and how they were shipped from quarries near Aswan to their eventual destinations in Karnak and the rest of Egypt.

And, of course, as we let the theatre… there’s the guy who started the movie, standing literally with his hand out, waiting for his tip.  For starting the movie.  Yeah.  This was how Aswan was going to be.

We wandered around the obelisk park and saw some cool stuff, before I got too close to an amateur guide who showed me a well, then led the rest of us around a bit, before demanding his tip (our initial tip of E$10 wasn’t enough, apparently, so he got E$20).  There’s probably more to be said here, but I was a little grumpy, especially when the exit of the park dropped us in a row of very aggressive vendors’ stalls.  Lars succumbed to the promise of a E$2 robe (actual price, once bought: E$100), while Luke, Anna, and I fled for the exits and the safety of our taxi.

From there it was on to the Philae temples, a remarkable bit of ancient Egypt located on an island near Aswan.  When we arrived at the park and paid our US$10 for park entrance, there was a sign indicating “Entry price does not includ boat price”, which we figured was OK because our guidebook said boats to the island cost E$5.  Apparently that’s not true in the low season, because we ended up paying E$25, or US$5, per person for the boat.  Whatever, $15 is no big deal, and I’d have cheerfully paid it to enter the park and ride the boat.  The irritating part, to me, is the constant “oh, yeah, you paid for *that* part, but now you have to pay for *this* part.”  This would be a theme throughout Aswan.

Anyways, we did eventually make it to the island, and the ruins are truly impressive.  The pictures speak for themselves, really.  Or at least the pictures of the ruins do.  They’re huge, imposing, and ancient.  And its hard not to be moved.  Especially by all of the amateur guides who insist on moving you, for a small fee of course.

It was at around this point that my Aswan experience hit its nadir.  After our strange police experience in Hurghada, I was a little skeptical of the integrity of the Egyptian police.  But in Philae, well.  I had the pleasure of having an in-uniform Tourist Police, prominently toting an automatic weapon, take my camera out of my hands and proceed to photo direct me, posing me in several spots before I tired of the game.  Of course, this heavily armed man, now in possession of my camera, wanted a tip for taking my picture.  I paid.  Grumpily.

We wandered around a bit more, but the place was kind of depressing.  It’s an odd experience to see such staggering ancient monuments juxtaposed against such venal and sleazy modern inhabitants.   It’s a constant experience of “wow, look at that!  Oh crap, here comes another ‘guide’… run!”

From Philae, we headed to the High Dam which, like most marvels of engineering, is more impressive conceptually than aesthetically.  It’s a big dam.  A damned big dam, if you’ll forgive me.  With some great views, and with, true to Egyptian form, some utterly irrational security.  Not irrational in the T.S.A. sense of security theater designed to make people feel safer, but irrational in the sense of utterly crazy.  There was a single small hut with an x-ray machine and metal detector, and there was no separation between exit and entrance.  Yeah, you can stand outside with your backpack while your friends go through, then hand them your unscreened backpack and go through yourself.  And that’s how it’s designed to work.  It’s pointless and more than a little insane.

Anyways, big dam, nice engineering, not a lot to look at.  Some amusing signs, like “Aswan Dams Authority”, which is good for at least a few juvenile chuckles.  And then it was back into the taxi for the very very short ride to another site, a collection of ancient temples relocated to higher ground when the dam was built in the early 60’s. 

Here, we had the good fortune of being the only tourists on the island, and the amateur guide who would demand tips was nicely asleep in an alcove when we arrived.  We wandered a bit and had a fairly good ancient temple experience before Anna and I carelessly woke the guide who insisted on taking us up some stairs to the roof of the temple.  Again, something worth seeing and that we would have paid for as part of our entrance, but the whole guide/beggar/scammer dynamic was getting old.

And then, thankfully, it was back to the hotel.  We were all a bit exhausted after the morning of taxis and monuments and paying E$5 for every interaction.  We got back to the hotel around 1pm and decided that we’d had enough of Aswan’s torustic charms.  Plus Anna wasn’t feeling well.  So Luke and Lars and I headed out for lunch and to cruise around the shops while Anna rested. 

We guys hit a fairly limited “restaurant” (menu: hookahs, coffee, mangos), and then kept on until we found a tasty kabob place for a proper lunch.  Probably my best kabob so far, and there really have been several good ones.  And the whole atmosphere of having waiters come over to take our order without expecting to be paid was really very nice.  We headed back through the shops on the way home and experienced more Aswanian hospitality, which basically consists of very aggressive shopkeepers, very aggressive taxi drivers (no, we are walking two blocks, we do not need a taxi no matter how cheap), and very aggressive Felucca captains.

Wait, Felucca captains?  We needed a Felucca.   Despite having been trained to wave people off and say “la” (“no”) until they gave up, we actually talked to a putative Felucca captain on the street and decided to give him a shot.  To make an already-too-long story short, we negotiated a price and had him and his buddy give us a ride across the Nile in his boat so we could see that he did, in fact, know what he was doing.  And, perhaps surprisingly, he did.  So we made arrangements for a ride from Aswan to Edfu for the next two days.

When we headed back to the hotel, we decided to do the cheesy Western thing, just as Anna and I had done in Amman: we’d hit the Movenpick, a Swiss hotel with a truly obnoxious control tower / restaurant that dominates the western view from Aswan, and spend too much money for familiar Western drinks, air conditioning, and peace from the constant demands from vendors.  The drinks were expensive, by Egyptian standards, but the view was gorgeous and the respite was much needed.  We ended the day by heading back to the hotel by way of a very tasty kabob place in the souk, and then called it an early night, looking forward to tomorrow when we’d get away from Aswan, which we none of us really liked, despite the incredible historic and cultural value.

Day Twelve starts with us waking at Abu Hamza, our unexpectedly nice beachfront hotel-of-sorts on the Red Sea.  As nice as the place was, it did still suffer from what seems to be Egypt’s complete domination by flies.  We were sleeping inside our small room, but as soon as the sun came up, the flies became unbearable.  Anna and I both pulled our sleep sacks over our heads in an attempt to escape, but I ended up being far too warm and getting up earlier than I would have liked.  Still, we were on the beach, and had the promise of heading to Dahab, where we’d likely be able to do laundry and, more importantly, get a beer.

The night before, Friej had told us our plans, in his usual somewhat opaque way.  It was clear that we needed to make it about 4km to a nearby village, and then about 15km to a small diving town, and then about 5km to Dahab itself.  It seemed clear that we’d take a truck for the first leg, and there was some confusion about whether we were riding camels or taking another truck for the second leg, and then a truck sounded likely for the final leg.  Whatever, we were ready to go.  So after a quick breakfast of the fantastically tasty but increasingly monotonous Bedouin bread, cheese, and the treat (for everyone but me) of eggs, we packed up, through our stuff in the back of a pickup, and climbed in.

The first part went great; we got to the small village quickly.  We hopped out of the truck, and Friej had a camel handy.  Ok, I thought, we’re riding camels.  Anna and Lars had found them a bit painful previously, but they’d be fine for such a short trip.  We loaded up our packs on the animal Friej had, and started walking with him to our rides.

Except, well, our rides didn’t exist.  It turns out we were walking the second leg.  Not a big deal, but I would have taken water with me, worn different shoes, and so on.  The communication snafu here was typical of the one recurring issue we had in an otherwise fantastically organized trip: we never felt like we knew what was going on, and we had the suspicion that Friej didn’t either, and that he didn’t like to tell us that plans had changed or were uncertain.  So, anyways, we walked.

The coastline we cruised down was absolutely stunning.  I don’t know about you, but when I think of Egypt, I think of desert, pyramids, the Nile, and so on.  There’s just something kind of surreal about being in Egypt, walking along a coastline with a Bedouin guide, a camel as a pack animal, and yet looking out across the Red Sea to the coastline of Saudi Arabia, about 25km away and very visible.

On our walk, we passed numerous buildings, ranging from ramshackle shelters to fairly modern and luxurious looking.  It seemed odd, since the coast was utterly deserted.  However, Friej said that starting around noon, hundreds, or even thousands, of tourists would arrive in the area by camel for snorkeling.  Still very much in our desert mindset — we hadn’t seen anyone but each other and a few Bedouins for the past week — other than on Mt. Sinai, we hadn’t seen anyone but each other and a few Bedouins in the past week — we were just as happy to not be in the middle of thronging tourists.

We also walked through a spot that I’m going to render as Lehlaba in English.  Friej noted it, and said that no matter how calm the day elsewhere, the wind and waves in this particular spot were always very, very strong.  And, sure enough, the wind and waves here were very, very strong.

And then, after n hour and a half or so of walking, we arrived in the promised dive town.  No, not like a dive bar.  Think Scuba.  This small town seemed to be entirely given over to divers, and there were plenty of them walking around in wet suits, carrying air tanks, and so on.  And there, on the road ahead of us, was the trusty Range Rover that had taken us out of the desert and to the coast.

We got a picture with Friej before we all, Friej included, piled in to the vehicle for the short ride to Dahab.  As we came into town, you would have thought that we had never seen civilization before.  And Dahab is not Manhattan, either.  But we peered out at all of the people and cars and, speaking for myself at least, felt a bit weird about the transition.

Once in the center of town, we stopped to let Friej head out, with arrangements to see him at Desert Diver around 4, when we would stop by to settle up.  And then we continued on to Crazy Camel Camp, the hotel where we’d spend the night.  Under normal circumstances, I think I’d probably say that it was a very cheap hotel and, while perfectly livable, far from luxurious.  But these weren’t normal circumstances: we’d just spent a week in the desert, with no restroom facilities to speak of, and certainly no shower.  And now we had private rooms, with bathrooms and showers and electricity and mattresses and everything.  It felt like the Four Seasons.

After much needed and positively ecstatic showers, we headed out into town to grab lunch and, more importantly, a beer.  Along the way we stopped at Desert Divers and got to meet some of the people we’d worked with to set up the trip.  They tempted us with the possibility of getting out rock climbing in the evening, but we (wisely) decided that we were more likely to want to sit in a restaurant and eat and drink.

And that’s what we did for a couple of hours.  We settled on a place called Yella, since it had alcohol (not everyplace does) and a great beachfront location.  That first beer was truly wonderful.  As was the pizza, the chicken wings, the garlic bread (pizza sans sauce, basically), the calamari (or so I’m told), the shish kabob, and the second and third beers.  As turned out to be commonplace in Dahab, there was also a terribly cute kitty who hung out with us and paid for her meal with sheer adorability.

After lunch, we dropped off some laundry at a local place, then arranged for massages and, for me, a shave.  The massages weren’t great, but were very affordable, and I think it’s good to get the muscles moved around a bit after such a long week of exertion.  My shave was… painful.  By this point I was verging between deep scruff and a full beard, and I knew I didn’t want to do it myself with disposable razors (my shaving kit is still trying to make its way from Aqaba to catch up with us).   Shaving that much beard always hurts, but this was a bit over the top since he started with threading, the process of ripping out individual hairs by twirling two threads on them.   Having that done across the entire perimeter of beard, plus eyebrows and ears, was painful enough that I was sweating profusely and about to beg for mercy when he switched to the straight razor.  From there it was all good.

It was at about this time that Anna found an entry in our Egyptian guide book that was relevant to the scorpion attack of a few days earlier. The entry informed us that, while the sting of black scorpions was no worse than that of a wasp, anyone stung by the paler scorpions should ice the area and seek medical attention immediately. We’re pretty sure that’s a pale one there.  So Lars’ up close experience with desert wildlife is taking on whole new levels of danger and bravery.  Or something like that.

Moving on, we grabbed some electronics and headed back to Yella, which in addition to its previous charms also had WiFi.  So we had more food and drink, I updated the blog, and we generally chilled and talked for a while.  Until sometime in the evening when we got talking to a couple sitting next to us and shared that it was Anna’s birthday.  About a half hour later, the lights in the restaurant went out, some jarring recordings of gongs played, and about four minutes of utter birthday mayhem ensued.  There was dancing, clapping, loud music, a huge dessert, much stammering and shock from Anna, and an elephant.  Ok, not an elephant.  But there might as well have been.  It was surreal and shocking and hilarious.

We wound down the evening and headed back to the hotel around 11, well fed and watered, and got ready for Day Thirteen, which day would see us make the ferry crossing from Sharm El-Sheikh to Hurghada to begin the Nile portion of the trip.

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.  

Note: If you’re reading this on Facebook, you’re not seeing the full size pictures.  Hop over to the original on http://tangentry.com if you want to be able to click-to-zoom.  Also note that our Internet connections are infrequent and very slow, so we’re not checking blog or Facebook comments or email at this point.

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.

If you read Day 9, you know that our heroes (that’s us) are bedded down near a small Bedouin camp in Sinai desert, just south of Jebel El-Tih, and that Lars has just survived a vicious surprise attack by a scorpion.  Well, I’m happy to report that the rest of the night passed uneventfully and that Lars (and the rest of us) woke without further vermin assault.  However, we did have the carcass of the scorpion that accosted Lars, and the Bedouins were… kind of quiet about it.

Even better, we woke to the sight of a Range Rover (the Defender model, for those interested in these things) that would take us away from Jebel El-Tih and towards Mt. Sinai, the next major stop on our journey.  This was welcome news, as we’d been expecting to ride in the back of  the Toyota pickup that had carried us around Sinai a few days before.  The Range Rover meant protection from sun, which meant short sleeves, which meant a new shirt, for me at least.  Plus actual padded seats and seatbelts and everything.

The day passed in a series of visits to Bedouin houses more or less between our starting point and the St. Catherine area.  The first two were a bit awkward – we’d arrive, be graciously offered tea, and then sit idly, wondering if we were here for 5 minutes or 3 hours, while our guide chatted with our hosts.  At some point, Friej would jump up, say “ready?” and go get in the car, leaving us scrambling to put our stuff together and get going.

However, the third such stop at a Bedouin house was a lot more fun.  Luke and I had been attempting to play games of Mancala at the other stops, with increasing confidence.   At this stop, everything kind of clicked.  The people were interested in the game we were playing, an adorable little girl started following Anna around (adorably), and Lars broke out his contact juggling ball, which was a big hit.  Our hosts also showed us another game to play with stones in the sand, and despite the insurmountable-as-ever language barrier, we really seemed to connect with our hosts.

This visit, too, eventually wrapped up.  The host gifted Lars a ring that fits suspiciously well (copper, we think, since it’s turning his finger green), and Lars gifted the contact juggling ball in return.  There were plenty of smiles and happy goodbyes.

From there, we hit another Bedouin family or two, without the same level of connection.  Around 5:30pm, we ended up at a small cluster of Bedouin houses near St. Catherine (by near”, I mean about an hour away, which passes for near in the Sinai).  We thought we were just heading in for tea, dinner, and some rest before getting up bright and early to climb Mt. Sinai.  To our  surprise, after we sat our un-sunscreened, un-prepared selves down, Friej had other plans: he sent us off to climb a sand dune.  Well, we figured, he is the guide.  So we climbed and frolicked a bit.

Eventually we headed back in, and we had some tea around 8:00pm.   I retired around 8:00pm, opting to eat when we got up to get ready for Mt. Sinai.  I set my alarm for 12:15am, figuring I’d get four hours of sleep.  The others… well, I was tired, and I’m not even sure I noticed.

Around 11:30pm, and in the middle of the oddest dream about alternately watching, performing, and driving in some kind of bizarre aerials / theatre show, Friej woke me and I more or less staggered over to eat something before heading out.  The plan was to get on the road around 12:30am, for arrival at St. Catherine Monastery around 1:30am.  But that’s getting into Day 11.

When we left off, we were settling down to sleep on Monday night, near the edge of the Jebel El-Tih plateau we’d been hiking for a few days.  Well, Monday night was… interesting.  It was very, very windy, all night. And cold.  Cold and windy.  And cold.  Anna and I huddled under blankets, behind  a windbreak made of our bags.  It worked more or less OK, in that we were only moderately cold and winded.  Luke and Lars weren’t so lucky and didn’t have windbreaks, and each only had one blanket.  They didn’t quiet freeze to death, though Lars woke and announced that he had moved from a “burrito” blanket technique to a “malformed croissant” technique, which announcement cast further doubt on the toll the sun was taking.

After more or less warming up, we headed down the south side of Jebel El-Tih, and much to our surprise, our guide Fraij pointed out a bunch of fossils as we descended.  Not just any fossils, either: we’re talking clams, sea urchins, and various other shells that are clear signs of sea life.  Apparently that part of the Sinai was once a sea floor.  We walked slowly and collected entirely too many shells, eventually deciding that clams in particular were too common to be worth bothering with.

For lunch, we stopped at the lone tree in the valley south of Jebel El-Tih.  Two unfortunate things here: the tree seemed to be located in the local graveyard, which is a bit creepy, and the tree provided approximately very little shade.   We roasted.  Conversation was limited to short phrases like “hot” and “too hot,” a welcome break from the previous night’s “cold” and “too cold.”

We did eventually move on from the tree, hiking about 40 minutes completely exposed to the Sinai sun around 2pm.  That was be far the hottest bit of hiking so far, but it was pretty much necessary since the tree was turning out to be useless as shade (and shades from the graveyard were both unpresent and unwelcome anyway).

Once we settled in near the Bedouin camp we’d spend the night at, we rested a bit and then headed off on a side hike in the nearby sandstone.  We saw a local well, which Luke bravely used to fill his water bottle (with chlorine tablets, of course), and generally had some fun bouldering around the sandstone.  And then we found… a slot canyon!

The canyon varied between maybe 2 and 8 feet wide, with walls ranging between 10 and 25 feet.  It was a bit of a trick getting into the thing, with Lars and Anna opting for the more or less guaranteed choice of going to the bottom and walking up, Luke walking towards the head until he found a spot to descend, and me splitting the difference and down climbing a side canyon.

We all met up and headed as deep into the canyon as we could go without, as Anna put it, “getting down on the sand on your stomach and wriggling forward like a snake, with arms at your sides, under a gigantic boulder towards what looks like light.”  Oddly, that didn’t sound all that appealing.  And we did explore quite a bit of the canyon.

The day ended with an exclamation point: as we were all bedded down, and after Luke and I had turned off our lights, Lars and Anna were still reading.  As I drifted toward sleep, I (and probably a good deal of the Sinai desert) was woken by Lars’ shriek of “holy shit!”  That’ll wake you up.  “There’s a giant scorpion like three inches from my head!”

To his credit, and ameliorating the somewhat girlish pitch of the original shriek, Lars was already going at the thing with a shoe by the time the rest of us processed what was going on.   Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! (or something like that) and he’d killed the evil thing.

Now, you might think that that was the end of it.  Foul creature appears, a high pitched exclamation, and foul creature dispatched.  Well, sure, for that particular foul creature.  But put yourself in our place: do you just roll over and go to sleep?  Was that the only scorpion in the area?

At least, that’s what I was thinking, and I have to assume that everyone else was doing the same.  For my part, I was exhausted, Lars was presumably nearer to the scorpion nest, and Anna was still up reading and (I figured) might never sleep again.  So I rolled over and went to sleep.  With blankets tightly wrapped around me, and maybe the tiniest of trepidation.