February 28th – Mt. Sinai

The day trip for Mt. Sinai left around 8 o'clock in the morning and headed for the famed mountain about 2hours away from Dahab. We were going to visit the St. Katherine's Monastery before it closed at noon and then head up the mountain and hang around until sunset.

We arrived to find a tourist/pilgrim zoo. The standard nighttime sunrise trip ends at St. Katherine's after descent and there were people everywhere. The Monastery is pretty old and aesthetically pleasing, the original structure dating from around 600AD. The interior chapel, though small, glittered with gold in the Eastern Orthodox style. The main attractions, however, left me...skeptical. First the Moses’ well, which they vaguely attribute to the time of Moses and claim that he drew water from it and secondly the Burning Bush. Its true, it is in fact a bush, but I’d be real curious to carbon date it and I'm sure the monastery would never allow it. Never the less, I saw more than one dutiful pilgrim plucking its branches to take home as relics. The monastery is a small complex, and the stop only took about 30 mins.

We then headed up the mountain. The group was diverse and interesting and the simple banter through out the day was enjoyable. I had heard varying reports as to the difficulty of the climb. There are also 2 paths of which we chose the easier to accommodate a couple older members of our group. It turned out to be a pretty easy walk. I can see how in the cold of the night or the heat of a summer day it could be a bit rough, but it was not overly taxing.

The views were also worth the trip alone, regardless of your religious opinion of the location. After only just over 2 hours with frequent stops we arrived at the top, it was still early afternoon around 2 or 2:30PM.

There was an obstacle to our watching the sunset. It was COLD at the top and we had at least 3 hours to wait until the sun would fall. I started by befriending one of the price gauging merchants peddling tea, coffee and candy bars near to the summit. I could only imagine how cold it was waiting for the sunrise on the night trip and I heard rumors of the same merchants charging outrageous rental fees for blankets. I ended up smoking a sheesha with the store owner and hanging out a bit inside the shop. Eventually the rest of the group followed suit and came in for tea at a price I negotiated.

Half the group ended up bailing early and headed down the mountain, determining that sunset wasn't worth braving the cold for another couple of hours. I stayed at the top with the remaining group, all basically the younger men, intent out of stubbornness to see out the plan.

In the end it was actually worth it, not because the sunset was so spectacular, but because it ended up being only the half dozen or so of us at the top when the time came. We had our pictures and enjoyed the silence. We then booked it down the mountain trying to make it to the bottom before losing the last bit of sunlight as we had no flashlights. We made it nearly there before real darkness set and aside from the occasional trip, we made it down with no major incidents and in about 45 mins, which had to some kind of record.

We collected the remainder of the group from the comfort of the coffee shop below and jumped in the van back to Dahab. When we returned to Dahab around 9, I grabbed a quick bite to eat with one of the guys from the trip and then made my way back to the hostel for an early night. Next stop...Cairo.