The 10 Commandments of Sinai Travel

Another weekend, another adventure.

This time, we would travel across one of the most hotly contested waterways in the world, through territory that has been occupied in war after war, only to end up at a wisp of a town known most recently for its triple suicide bombings. We were headed to the Sinai peninsula.

Our group made eight: Me, Sarah, Jacob, Hafsa, Hafsa's two roommates Alyiah and Laura, and two new additions, Kiana and Daniel. Hammad was playing translator to Georgetown's president at our Qatar campus, so he was AWOL for this one.

Dusk on Thursday found us piling into our bus outside the AUC gates. We had made reservations online at a hotel/hostel called the Penguin Palace (the name alone was enough to convince us), which had offered to charter a minibus and avoid the hassle of the East Delta Bus Company. The prices were relatively comparable, but the route went straight to Dahab instead of through Sharm el Sheik, shaving at least 3 hours off our journey. Like everything we've done so far, it was a little sketchy--we'd all seen the "minibuses" that flit around Cairo, with men standing where doors should be and blue LEDs instead of headlights--but the owner of the hotel sounded reliable, and...it was Egypt. Just go.

We met our driver, Waghdi, and surveyed the bus. It was pretty roomy, with enough space for our gear and leg room, and looked very new and clean. Remembering our 10 hour plus trip to Siwa, we were immediately glad that we had gone with the private bus. We piled in, and then Waghdi took off. He then pretty much guaranteed himself a tip when he asked in half Arabic, half English if we had some music to play.

Commandment 1: Always know where thy iPod is, and bring it with thee. Every single one of us busted out our respective iPods, and started discussing whose playlist to use. For some reason, mine decided it was a great day to delete all my playlists...and then freeze. Over. And. Over. Which is too bad, because I had some great stuff to play. (e.g. Jesus Walks by Kanye West...appropriate, no?) We ended up using Sarah's for the bulk of our bus-time around the Sinai. There's something pretty baller about bumpin to "Stuntin Like My Daddy" while rolling through downtown Cairo. My iPod would continue to be fussy throughout the trip, a harbinger of technological woes to come.

We had planned on playing some suras off Hafsa's iPod, and a track with the 10 Commandments on it from Laura's, but somehow that never happened. About two hours into the journey and one rest stop later, we reached the Suez Canal and our first checkpoint.

Quasi-brief historical note: The Suez Canal is a 100 mile long waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, and has been officially open since 1869. While evidence suggests that there was some kind of maritime pathway at its location as early as the 12th Dynasty (approximately 1850 BCE), the canal as we know it was created and repaired in 1858. The British-owned Suez Canal Company received one of those infamous "concessions" from an Egyptian Pasha, and employed native slave labor to do the brunt of the work.

The canal was opened to traffic in 1869 and became an essential trade route for the British Empire. Due to incredible fiscal largess, the viceroy of Egypt was forced to sell all national shares of the canal to the British, leaving France and England in control of the valuable waterway. The canal went through several periods of being "protected" or occupied by British forces until their withdrawal in 1954.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 erupted when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Aswan Dam. As a result, Israel, France and the UK invaded the Sinai, and the resulting week long war left victor Israel in possession of the canal zone. While Israel withdrew by 1957 (a major political victory for Egypt) UN forces continued to occupy the area. Egypt began to remilitarize, and under pressure the UNEF forces evacuated. Soon after, Egypt blocked the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli ships. Throw in some Syrian-backed border skirmishes with Israel and you have yourselves the Six Day War of 1967.

Isreal destroyed almost all of the Egyptian Air Force while it was still on the ground, and managed to occupy the Sinai Peninsula in a few short days. Israel took control of the Suez Canal, and it was closed until 1975. The canal was the major crossing point of Egyptian troops during the 1973 Yom Kippur war into Israel-controlled Sinai. After an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and an expired UN mandate, the Suez Canal came under the control of a multinational force in 1981. In 2006, we drove under it in a minibus. But not after being stopped at our first checkpoint.

Commandment 2: Thou shalt be Canadian. After a pleasant cruising speed of 145 kph, Waghdi slowed to a crawl and turned down our music. As we approached the barricades, he craned his neck back: "Where are you from?" Jacob, sitting closest to him, answered that we were all min Amreeka, from America. "You are from Canada," Waghdi replied, and suddenly we became 8 expats from the great land of hockey and maple leaves. As our driver began an exchange with the armed guard, we all looked at each other. We had heard that there were some issues with Americans traveling through the Sinai (e.g. large groups required a police escort), but we didn't know if we were forbidden or not.

We all listened to the conversation passionately, but could only make out a few words. One of them was Kanada. We had just officially lied to the police. What did we do if they asked us for our passports? The guard and our driver went back and forth for awhile in breakneck Arabic, and then slowly the bus rolled forward. We went under the Suez Canal and continued our journey across the peninsula with little regard to speed limits, lane divisions, or headlights.

In Egypt, drivers use their headlights primarily to communicate at night and leave navigation to the equivalent of daytime running lamps. If you see an oncoming car, you flash your lights at them a few times, and they respond in turn. Kind of an, "I see you, do you see me?" type of thing, the daytime equivalent of the ubiquitous horn. While it scared us Americans to see our driver using his lights so cavalierly, it was an absolute must on a road where cars routinely drive on the wrong side of the road to pass or, apparently, just for the view.

Fatigue took us all, some now, some then. But sleep wasn't easy on the bumpy road at such a pace, and the frequency of the checkpoints made sure we didn't get too comfortable. At each checkpoint, our nationality and number changed. First we were 8 from Canada, then 9 from Canada and England, then 8 from England, and then 8 from Canada again. Each time was a bit nerve racking, and each time we made it through.

We rolled into Dahab a little after midnight.

Some of us decided to explore the town, while Laura and Alyiah went straight to sleep. We walked through downtown Dahab, finding most of the stores closed, but the discotheque in the shape of a pirate ship still quite open. DJ "Kentucy" [sic] was spinning some 50 Cent as we passed by. The ubiquitous use of English in Egypt results in some interesting titles and slogans here. Some of the store names were interesting, like "Why Not? Hair Salon" (maybe Britney Spears should have come here) and the pictured "Mosquito Coast" (I took this picture for you and your office, Dad). There were also some poor choices, like Shark Dive Shop, Camel Restaurant and Squid Tours.

I remember noticing Al Capone restaurant on the boardwalk and thinking that it was a pretty funny name for an eatery in Egypt. Only later when I got home and Wikipedia'd the 2006 Dahab attacks did I find out that this was one of the restaurants that was bombed in April of last year. I expected the restaurants to be gone, if not from structural damange then out of superstition, but both remained. The third suicide bomber detonated in the market square outside a store we frequented quite a bit in Dahab, the Ghazala Market. You can read more about that here if you'd like.

Commandment 3: Thou shalt haggle. After some quick food, we all collapsed in our respective hotel rooms with the grand plan of "sleeping in." We all woke up at about the same time, and found ourselves staring at the incredibly blue Red Sea and the hazy cliffs of Saudi Arabia. We decided to grab breakfast at the hotel's affiliated restaurant, where Hafsa revelled in what was perhaps her first real haggling experience.

On principle, I don't like to haggle. I think a vendor should set a fair market price, and if I believe it to be fair, I will accept it. No deals about it. But in Egypt, bartering is a way of life. Shopkeepers will set the price at 10 times what it should be, and it's your job to work it down to something reasonable. Hafsa got our pretty substantial breakfast fare down to 11LE per person. I would later argue my way to one size bigger and 10LE cheaper in a trinket shop; Laura would get her ring resized for free.

Commandment 4: Thou shalt travel by Jeep. We had decided on a day trip to Blue Hole, a world-famous dive spot, and a night trek up Mt Sinai. While none of us had our SCUBA certification, most of us wanted to snorkel at the reef. Our hotel offered to drive us there and back, and rent us snorkeling equipment, for 25LE a person. (Just to make sure you're doing the math, that's about a US$4.75 trip.) We were down.

We had a different driver, this time piled in the back of an old, rusted out Jeep that channeled Siwa. At 6'6", Daniel took the passenger seat; Jacob sat on the floor, while the girls squished onto the benches. Like Ali, our driver delighted in taking the Jeep up and down sidewinding embankments that looked to have been modeled after a motocross track. We passed several other similarly styled Jeeps, all coming from or headed to the same place we were. We sped north along the edge of the Red Sea and marveled at the incredible terrain: an intense, mountainous shoreline to our left and the stunning clarity of the water to our right.

Commandment 5: Thou shalt lie to the authorities when questioned. It was only 6km from Dahab to Blue Hole, but there was yet another checkpoint. As we slowed for it, the driver turned around and asked Kiana that piercing question: "Where are you from?" She told him that we were American, but that was quickly corrected by the group to Canadian. Canadian. We were Canadian. In hushed tones we discussed our back stories. From the front, Daniel proudly proclaimed that he was from Vancouver. "Some crazy shit goes on up there, let me tell you. I'll be from Vancouver."

We stopped, and the driver went through the now familiar motions of telling the guards that we were from Canada. One of the officers leaned in the driver's side window and talked over our driver. He asked Daniel, in Arabic, where he was from. Daniel played dumb. "Do you speak Arabic?" the man asked. No. "Do you speak English?" Yes. For some reason, the guard didn't quite buy it, and came around to the back of the open-air Jeep.

He looked at Sarah: "Where are you from?" After a bit of mumbling about in Arabic, she answered, "Canada." The guard turned his head to me. "And you? Canada?" I nodded. Next to me, Kiana nodded. In Arabic, he asked if we were all from Canada. Everyone nodded with just the right amount of we-do-this-everyday-because-we're-really-from-Canada. The guard stepped back.

"Welcome to Dahab."

Commandment 5: Thou shalt dive the Red Sea. We made it to Blue Hole without injury or incident. Our driver guided us to a Bedouin-run restaurant in a strip of similar operations, all offering dive or snorkel equipment. The beachfront was littered with sunbathers, scuba divers and tourists. After sitting on pillows on the roof for a bit, we were fitted for our masks and flippers, and got in the water.

It wasn't all too cold, and after a few brief moments of panic--I can't swim in flippers, I CANNOT breathe through my mask--we all adjusted to our equipment and set out to explore the reef. Unfortunately, my snorkel was faulty; every second breath would sound like wet rales, and every third breath would find me inhaling a mouth full of salt water. This forced me to come up for legitimate air every 20 seconds or so, which was annoying, but I didn't let it ruin my reef experience. The coral was teeming with life, with lots of parrot fish, clown fish wannabes, butterfly fish and the odd barracuda. I learned why they called it Blue Hole, too: about 15m from the shore the shelf absolutely disappears, and you're left with a seemingly endless reef that plummets into the core of the earth. On my return to shore, I was surprised by a few scuba divers emerging from this gaping maw directly below me.

Commandment 7: Thou shalt not shower. We spent the next hour or so chilling up on the roof in the sun, and after seeing the prices on the menu, decided to drag our salty selves back to Dahab. We returned by the same path we had taken, and in much the same fashion.

We got back to the Penguin Palace a little dirtier and a little bronzer. We had enjoyed the sun, but the intense salt of the Red Sea had started to crust on our hair and faces. But we would continue in our current state: the water that ran through the pipes in the hotel smelled almost as salty, and the shower was simply a spigot in the ceiling of the bathroom and a hint at a drain next to the sink. We would have to wait until we got back to Cairo to get clean.

After finding a place to eat dinner, having them forget Daniel's meal, and going to another restaurant to get him some food, we wandered the shops of downtown Dahab. Most of the girls got henna on our hands, and some people bought some commemorative trinkets. We were slated to leave for Mt Sinai at midnight, so at about 10:30 (a little later than planned), we headed back to the hotel to sleep.

Commandment 8: Thou shalt not sleep. Enter a kitten. The town, like Cairo, was teeming with cats, but very few young ones. As Sarah and I opened our door, a little wisp of a dark tabby slipped in behind us, and proceeded to meow for attention. Sarah named her Checkpoint, in honor of our trip thus far, and she proceeded to hold our attention for the next hour by doing really cute things, like sleeping, jumping, chewing and breathing. Brief flashback:

Kaiser Travel Clinic: "Will you be dealing with or touching any wild or feral animals in Egypt?"
Me: "Oh god, of course not. Why?"
Kasier: "Then you don't have to get the rabies pre-exposure vaccine."

Huh.

But Checkpoint was a good little kitten, and did not scratch or bite one bit, even when provoked by me. Sarah was and still is considering bringing her back to Cairo.

At 11:30, we got up and got dressed for Mt Sinai. Everything we heard had told us that it would be ridiculously cold at the summit, so we wore almost all the layers we could. We piled again into the van, and this time--no idea why--we had a police escort. He wore an olive suit jacket, blue suit pants, a stunted tie, and a sidearm at his hip.

The trip to Mt Sinai from Dahab was two hours, and we spent most of it trying and failing to sleep in awkward positions, or marvelling at the amazing scenery barely visible outside.

Some quick geography and history: Mt Sinai (also known as Mt Moses) is 2,285 m high, and the summit, of course, is where Moses is said to have received the (real!) 10 Commandments from God. St. Catherine's Monastery, where we began our trek, sits at about 1,200 m. There are two paths to the top: the 3,750 Steps of Penitence, hewed out of the mountain by monks, or the less direct Camel Path. Only the Camel Path is open at night.

We arrived at about 2am, and after a quick purchase of a flashlight, met our guide Mohammad, a skinny, chain smoking young man who would never seem out of breath. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this: dozens of massive tour buses, hundreds if not thousands of tourists milling in the dark, and shouting vendors selling blankets and gloves. I guess I thought we'd be alone up there, climbing in silence and solitude, meditating at the top.

No such luck.

There was another checkpoint, where our bags were searched and our nationality questioned. As someone was digging through Daniel's bag, I heard that infamous question, to which Daniel replied, "Canada." The man looking through mine asked me the same, but in Arabic, to which I just tried to look cute. "Canada?" he asked me. I tried to look bewildered, and then he made up my mind for me: "You are from Canada." I nodded and smiled, and was let through the gates of Mt Sinai, a proud Canadian citizen.

Mohammad set out at a fast clip, and we quickly passed the throngs of foreign voices bellowing in the dark. The path started out at a gentle slope, but continued to climb upwards. There wasn't a flat point on the entire trail, which proved a little challenging for some of our group who hadn't ever hiked before. But they never once complained like I did when I started hiking (sorry Mom and Dad), and we all made it up together.

Commandment 9: Thou shalt not climb Mt Sinai by camel. As we ascended into the dark, we could just barely make out the outlines of the rough and jagged cliffs of the range containing Mt Sinai. It was unlike anything I've seen in the States; while none of the peaks were anywhere as tall as a mountain like Hood, there were thousands of them, all barren and wind-shorn. Although rocky, their lines were smooth, like a pebble worn round by the ocean. All I can say about them is that they looked old.

The stars were brilliant, and many.

And every time I got my night vision, it would be killed by some idiot shining their flashlight in my face. It made deciphering the shadows of the rocky trail difficult. I was hiking half-blind.

Suddenly, a lumbering figure emerged from the night, and whispered at me: You want ride camel? In the shadows off the trail lurked massive camels on their knees, with their owners hissing at every passing hiker. Sometimes the camels would be standing; other times they were being led down the mountain. It was my job to get out of their way, so I had to alternate my eyes from the path to the sky. Only once did a camel bump into me, but I blame that on a mass of Russian tourists who cut me off from the group. But suffice to say, I can't imagine climbing Mt Sinai on the back of a swaying, spitting camel. Not only is it weak, but I'd bet it's ridiculously uncomfortalbe. Almost all the way to the summit I was offered a camel ride, sometimes in English, somtimes in Russian.

Sometimes it could get disorienting. People were pushing past you in some desperate urge to be the first to the top. I'm a big believer in trail ettiquette, and there was absolutely none on the way up Sinai. People littered. People cursed. People grabbed onto your backpack and used your body as an anchor for their imaginary summit push. Our group got separated a few times, but always managed to find each other again.

As we climbed, we looked up. The slow vein of pilgrims with their flashlights pulsed its way across the mountain. It looked as if a swag of rope lights had been draped across the summit.

We stopped once in a small hut on the way up for Mohammad to get some tea, and for us to rest. It was about 5:00am when we reached the "steps." There were 750 of them, ostensibly, but what constituted a step and what didn't was anyone's guess. It was more bouldering than anything else, straight up to the summit. At this point, the trail had backed up, and the going was slow. After about 3 hours of continuous ascent, our legs were getting sore, and the heat that our constant movement had provided started to dissappate. We acutely realized how sweaty we were, and how cold we were going to get.

At about 5:45, we reached the last hut before the summit, where we sat for a bit before our final ascent. The idea was to not spend much time in the cold. The trail, the hut, and the surrounding areas were absolutely clogged with people. People were shouting in every language, selling Snickers bars for outrageous prices to the ravenous travelers. We ate the last of our granola bars, and right before the sunrise, found our places on a rocky outcropping to wait.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.







As soon as the sun rose, we were ready to go back down. Our fingers were numb from camera-necessitated exposure, and we were exhausted. We found Mohammad, and began to take the Stairs of Penitence down to St. Catherines.

We were only a few hundred steps down when the trail flattened out into a small canyon. I was on my own, inbetween two halves of our group. I had been pushed past rather abruptly by a group of tourists who apparently lacked vocal chords. I decided to catch up to the head of the group, which meant I had to pass these people. After a quick "excuse me," I went up on the side of the trail and sped up to circumvent the group. As I was returning to the path, the lead woman sped up and cut me off right as I was hopping back down onto the main trail.

I came down on some large, round scree and basically just ate it. I felt my ankle pop, and then I was on the ground. The woman stopped and looked at me, but I couldn't even speak...I couldn't move my ankle at all. It didn't really hurt so much as it wouldn't move. I immediately started to think of the logistics of a litter carry down the Steps of Pentitence, and promptly freaked out.

My friends caught up to me--they hadn't seen me go down--and immediately set to work. I'm really bad at receiving medical aid (not too bad at giving it, though), but despite my best efforts, Jacob gave me a gram of ibprofen, Kiana took my pack, and I started to get some feeling back in my ankle. Of course, that feeling was pain, but that was better than just immense weakness. After sitting for a bit, I found that it could bear weight, and proceeded to get the heck out of there.

I half-limped, half-jumped down the Stairs of Pentitence. There's a good reason why they're closed at night, as once again the term "stairs" is really just more of a suggestion. Stand on one boulder, step down to the next, jump a little bit, and repeat 3,500 times. The view was amazing, and we came out at the base of St Catherine's. The pain and the exertion had done me in, and as we waited for the monestary to open at 9am, I passed out at the well where Moses met his wife Zipporah for the first time.

When I woke up only 15 minutes later, the mild chest irritation I had brought from Cairo had materialized into a full blown cough, and I had lost my voice. I cut a pretty miserable picture as we made our way to the only entrance. It was clogged with people, and I opted to just sit down rather than mill about with the group.

I did my best to convince myself that I didn't really need to see St Catherine's, and put my head down to sleep through the pain again, but kept getting hasseled by men selling alabaster eggs or books about the monestary. I looked up once more and saw that the crowd around the door was gone, so I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and go in.

Surprisingly, I found my friends pretty quickly, and we looked at the only living relative of the Burning Bush. After this, we found our driver and our security detail (again, why?!) and drove back to Dahab. I slept fitfully, and woke to a swollen ankle.

We got back to the hotel, and decided to go out and get some snacks for the ride back. I was low on cash, and had a pleasant surprise when the ATMs in Dahab rejected my card. Apparently a lightning strike in the US had rendered all Washington Mutual cards out of service for a few hours, but I didn't know this. Of course, visions of my life savings being wiped out flashed through my head. I tried to recall all the places I had used my card--which ones had been more shady than the others? Attempting to put my nervousness aside, I relied on the kindness of others to cover the rest of my hotel bill and buy some candy for the ride home.

Commandment 10: Thou shalt be American. For yet another unknown reason, on this drive home we were American. Our security officer came with us, and at the first checkpoint they asked for all of our passports. The only small hitch came when Jacob's passport didn't have an entry stamp in it. "Shit shit shit shit," he whispered from the back of the bus. "I didn't even think about it." Jacob had two passports: one for general travel, and another he had gotten just to go to Israel. He had, like a few of us, already submitted his main passport for a student visa; unlike the rest of us, he elected to use his secondary visa instead of a photocopy. That one didn't have a stamp or visa on it anywhere, so it looked like Jacob had materialized in Egypt. After some very convoluted conversation in Arabish, we were allowed to continue our drive home.

Again we tried my iPod. Wouldn't even turn on. Distraught about my debit card, I went for my phone to call my father. No reception. Technologly failing me, I tried to sleep. Not much luck there, but some.

We arrived back at the dorms late last night, and after a very, very well met shower, I collapsed into a dreamless sleep and did NOT read any Gertrude Stein, as I find her pretty difficult even when I'm coherent.

Not as exciting as Siwa, perhaps, but equally as beautiful and definitely a unique experience. Being able to say that you've summitted Mt Sinai is a pretty cool thing. Like most things in life, the view is worth the climb.

See my album here.


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Post script: Some friends of ours went to Siwa this weekend and did a lot of the same things we did, including the hot springs and the crazy dune driving.

Except that their Jeep actually did flip. And roll.

Luckily they were all inside, and none of them were hurt, but it's really just convinced us in either the power of intense prayer, damn good luck, or both.

Post post script: Thanks to Hafsa and Sarah for some of the descent pictures.