It has been a while since my last post. Shockingly, I have actually been in a part of the world where Internet is hard to come by.
After Luxor, the group took an overnight train back to Cairo. Beth had had her fill of Egypt and was feeling sick. Being in polluted, noisy Cairo again sealed her decision to leave, so she decided to skip the Sinai and fly back to Denver. I was sad to see her go, but I think she wouldn't have enjoyed the next 24 hours much. Luckily as she left, Kirk joined us in Cairo. Because she vacated a seat on our van, he was able to take it rather than arrange his own transportation to meet up with me later.
We departed Cairo the next morning for the 6 hour drive St. Catherine's monastary and Mt. Sinai. After we left the Nile and crossed under the Suez Canal, the landscape turned rocky, cold, and dry. We arrived at our destination around noon, ate, and began the climb to the summit where Moses was said to have received the ten commandments. Just before dusk we summited. The wind was whipping and cold; the clouds were moving impossibly fast over all the surrounding peaks. Although we had all of our layers on, we were still freezing. Luckily, in true Egyptian fashion, some entreprenuerial types had set up little coffee house shacks near the summit. We ducked in and had the best Nescafe ever with the Bedouins. As we warmed our hands over the coal fire, the man explained how he stays up on the mountain for 20 days at a time, and then stays down fro 20. It was so cold on the summit, the water in my bottle had turned to ice!
The next night was a horror for all on the trip; no one's heat worked in the rooms, and few people slept more than a few winks. When we left the next morning, the group had reached the 'tipping point' for tolerance of lack of comfort. Two hours later, we arrived at our next destination, Sawa Camp. This little rustic camp of straw huts on the beach seemed a perfect place to unwind; however, most of our group decided that they didn't want to risk another cold and sleepless night, so they took off for the nearby Marriott. Four of us stayed and had a marvelous time eating Bedouin food, snorkeling the reef during the day, and playing cards by the fire at night. After two days, the rest of the group returned to Cairo to fly back home, but Kirk and I continued on to Nuweiba where we crossed the Red Sea to the Jordanian port of Aquaba.
We arrived in Petra on Monday and were able to see our first glimpse of Petra by night. At 8:30 pm we started walking on a sandy path with huge boulders all around and cliffs towering in the distance. We would be walking about .6 miles to our destination, and the path was lit only by 1500 candles. The guides asked us not to use flashlights, and although the group was large, we walked in relative silence. As we entered the Siq, huge sandstone cliffs rose up around us. We continued on into the slot canyon; sometmes a ribbon of stars was visible overhead and sometimes the cliffs closed in, obscuring completely any view of the sky. We walked in this manner for nearly 30 minutes until the canyon opened suddenly to the Treasury, a tremendous building carved into the sandstone cliff over 2,000 years ago. Stunned, we sat in the candle strewn plaza and listened to Bedouin musicians as we sipped tea.
We spent the next two days hiking around the slot canyons exploring endless tombs and carvings. They are all equally stunning and tremendous, and one could spend a lifetime exploring the canyons; however, Kirk and I feel that we covered a good amount of ground in two full days.
Tomorrow we will head to the Dana nature preserve and then on to Madaba and the Dead Sea. We will end with early morning flights out of Amman on the 11th.
