I Was Wrong

Attention Danger

On the 18 hour drive to Dahab the bus was having problems and kept dying. Every time the bus would die the driver would have to get out and go and manually pump something in the back of the bus and then quickly rev the engine and take off. We were pretty worried for a while that we were going to be broken down in the middle of nowhere, but we eventually made it. Other than the dying bus the ride wasn’t so bad and we arrived in Dahab for a late breakfast and then checked into our rooms.

This is another nice hotel with a pool and a beach along the Red Sea. Across the Red Sea are the cliffs of Saudi Arabia. We spent the afternoon out by the pool having lunch and enjoying the sun. In the early evening we met up with the whole tour group and caught a working bus into town as our hotel is a 15 minute drive from the downtown area. Sam took us on a tour of the very small downtown Dahab showing us ATM’s and various kinds of shops. We had dinner as a group at the fanciest restaurant in Dahab, where the specialty is seafood, something I don’t eat because I am really picky. Everyone who got seafood though had these giant plates that were presented on a giant tinfoil covered platter and looked really fancy.

We headed back to the hotel to get ready for the optional climb of Mount Sinai. Normally this trip isn’t for another day but as tomorrow is New Years Eve and then the following day the monastery is closed so this was the only option available. I’m still sick and the lack of real sleep in a bed is starting to really wear on me. I went to a pharmacy and got some medicine for a cough and some other medicine for a runny nose and two packages of Halls cough drops.

A little less than half of our tour group decided to go the excursion and we boarded the bus at 11pm and started the two hour drive to the base of Mount Sinai. The weather at the bottom of the mountain was freezing and I layered up in all of the clothes that I had, a pair of jeans, a long sleeve shirt and two jackets, known as jumpers in other parts of the world. There were a bunch of Bedouin people around selling Mount Sinai souvenirs and hats and gloves. We had to wait in a line to go through metal detectors before we were allowed on the trail to climb the mountain.

We climbed the mountain as a group and would constantly have to wait for other members of the group to catch up with us. The trails were full of other people from other tour groups also climbing the mountain and Bedoin people selling food and drinks and trying to get people to ride their camels up the mountain. “Camel, camel, you want camel?” No one in my group wanted a camel and so we continued to climb the mountain in the cold and darkness. Near the top we stopped to rest before climbing some 700 “stairs”, basically rocks piled on each other to ascend faster. Then we stopped at a Bedoin building where I bought some ramen noodles and rested out of the wind and cold for a little while. There were blankets and mats available and our tour leader gave those of us that wanted a mat one of them. I grabbed a mat and then followed the group up to the top of the mountain where we would be waiting until the sun came up. My mat was really thin and I found a stack of thicker mats outside being held down by a rock and traded my mat for one of those and then started up the final steps. A Bedouin man came running up the mountain after me and told me I wasn’t allowed to take one of the thicker mats and took it away from me. I went back down the mountain to where I had left my mat, but it was gone. I returned to the shelter where I had been given my mat and told them my mat was gone and asked for a new one, that was thick and they dug around in the back and found me a nice thick mat. By this time my whole tour group had already finished climbing the mountain and was mixed in with hundreds of other people on the top of the mountain. People were grabbing spaces anywhere they could to lay down and sleep until the sun came up. For a while I couldn’t find my group but then I was able to find Janelle, who had luckily saved me a spot next to a couple from London who were in their mid forties. The couple were fighting as I arrived about anything and everything and continued to fight all night and all morning and are still probably fighting at the time of this blog posting. “Scoot over, you are hogging the mat… I’m cold and it is your fault…take a picture of that, no you’re not doing it right…What did you do to the camera? Why did you put your finger on the lens…You have the camera on the wrong mode…No that goes in your bag, I’m not carrying it…”

I put on my sweat pants over my jeans and climbed into my sleeping bag and pulled the flaps over my face to try and get warm. As I laid there I constantly heard people walking around shouting “Mat, Blanket, Mat, Blanket….” After about an hour and a half of laying there the man from the fighting couple started saying in his loudest voice “You are missing the sunrise, if you are sleeping you are missing it”. I removed my sleeping bag hood and looked to see color coming over the horizon. I sat up and watched the sun rise in the distance over the mountains below and spread colors all over everywhere, it was incredibly beautiful. The night before when I was cold and sick and tired I didn’t think there was anything that could possibly be worth how bad I felt but I was wrong, it was all worth it.

After the sun had risen we all gathered our things and started to head back down the mountain. The night before when everyone was coming up the mountain the groups were staggered and there wasn’t a lot of waiting to climb. In the morning however everyone was coming down the mountain at the same time which made for tremendously slow descent. The sun was out in full force and quickly warmed up the day. The sun also made visible the surrounding mountains that were covered in darkness the night before. With all of the people on the trail the climb down ended up taking longer than the climb up did but we had fun taking side trails and trying to quickly jump ahead of other people as they came down the mountain.

At the bottom we ate our breakfast boxes we had brought from the hotel and then went to the nearby monastery to see the burning bush, which is a giant bush behind a wall, which apparently didn’t actually burn because it is still growing.

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