Wait– It’s Been How Many Days Since I Last Posted?
I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve pretty much traveled the whole of Egypt at this point, and now I’m cursing myself for my procrastination and trying to figure out how to put together a nice, succinct posting in the next hour. Let’s see how it goes…
At the time of my last real post (not the short entry about the carcass), I was in the village of St. Katherine’s in the Sinai. There, Matteo and I visited the village’s monastery–which is one of Christianity’s oldest–at the base of Mt. Sinai. The monastery was a pleasant place, with neat gardens tended by resident monks; a chapel filled with early Christian paintings and dozens of simple hanging brass lanterns (which reminded me of the similar interior of a synagogue I visited in Kerala, India), and a corner dedicated to the (unseen) remnants of the Burning Bush; and a museum housing beautifully illustrated texts and gifts from world leaders dating back to the 5th century. I also had an interesting conversation with one of the monks, an older Greek man who had lived at St. Katherine’s for several years, about daily life at the monastery.
At 2AM the following morning, Matteo and I (grumpily) got up from our warm and comfortable sleeping mattresses at a Bedouin camp in the village and headed back to the monastery to tackle Mt. Sinai before sunrise. The trail up the mountain is wide and has a gentle incline (and there are dozens of Bedouin men offering camel rides to the top), so we found ourselves walking with men and women of all ages from around the world along the way. After months of breathing the dust and pollution of Cairo, I was thrilled with the crisp, clean air on the mountain and was dazzled by the amazing stretch of stars across the sky.
At the top, we sat at the edge of the mountain, huddled against strangers to ward off the chill, and waited for the sun to rise, while others crowded into wooden shacks owned by enterprising villagers whose cardboard signs offered exorbitantly priced “Starbucks” coffee and shai. At the first sight of the orange disk, frozen bodies began to cheer and a Korean church group burst into hymns. Finally, we were rewarded for our efforts by a gorgeous landscape of barren, white ragged mountains touched by red, pink, and orange rays, stretching as far as our eyes could see.
Upon returning to the village, we learned that the bus we planned to take to Dahab, our next destination, was indefinitely out of service (really– we’re beyond the simple scam phase), so we hired a taxi for the 3-hour journey. Our Bedouin driver was a nice man, and his reply of “Dahab, inshallah (God willing),” to each police checkpoint inquiry on our destination never ceased to crack me up. (Life, Egyptians wisely note, is never totally under our control, is it?)
Despite all its raves along the tourist trail, Dahab was a disappointment. A small resort town on the edge of the Red Sea catering primarily to budget and independent travelers, it reminded Matteo and I of a sort of Egyptian Las Vegas. (And that’s not a compliment.) The long promenade was lined with kitschy souvenir shops selling the usual lewd T-shirts (think camels in a variety of sex positions) and other overpriced and aesthetically-offensive tourist crap, and the water was bordered by restaurants that looked great with their trendy Bedouin-style cushions and low tables but, as we soon discovered, served terrible food. Apart from the shop owners, there wasn’t an Egyptian in sight; instead, there were lots of Europeans and Russians whose scantily-clad bodies seemed completely scandalous.
But we weren’t in Dahab for the town– we were there to dive at some of the amazing sites off the coast. And, for a day, we did just that. Unfortunately for me, however, I had problems equalizing the air in my ear canals during the beginning of the first of my two scheduled dives. (At one horrible point, it felt like my head was in a vice, but then I heard that reassuring “pop!” of air from my ears and felt fine enough to continue the rest of the dive.) After emerging from the water, it felt like my ears were full of cotton and I decided to sit out the second dive and jealously watched Matteo go back in. The next day, one of my ears was feeling a little sore, so I went to the doctor and discovered that I had injured my middle ear canal and would need four days to heal. And that, sadly, was the end of diving for me. (For now.)
(A side note: during this time, I was also practically crippled from the St. Katherine’s climb. My calves were sore for an entire week– so much so that I climbed stairs with the same posture and care that very old women have when they board a bus. It just wasn’t my week for physical fitness.)
From Dahab, we took a bus to Sharm el-Sheik (another resort town about an hour and a half away) and, after finding it to be more of a tacky strip mall than Dahab, hurried on to the ferry for Hurgada, a town on the western coast of the Red Sea which I will henceforth remember as the place where people load skinned carcasses into unlined trunks. From there, it was a bus to our real destination, Upper Egypt and the temples of Luxor.
Our arrival in Upper Egypt seems like a good place to stop for now. Stories about Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel, and my current destination of Alexandria are coming soon.
Tags: Dahab, Diving, Egypt, RTW 07/08
admin
Leave a Reply