Weekend 2: Mount Sinai

As the second weekend rolled around, I decided that I wanted to climb Mount Sinai, the famous biblical one that Moses stood atop when God gave to him the Ten Commandments (or at least where he sat for several days by himself carving stone tablets). My roommate, Daniel, was also interested, so on Thursday night we set out together. The only problem was that Mount Sinai is in Egypt, across hundreds of miles of desert, so we knew that just getting there would be a challenge.

At midnight, we boarded a bus from Tel Aviv headed for Eliat, the southernmost city in Israel. I found myself seated across the aisle from a cute Israeli girl named Tair who was vacationing with friends. We talked for most of the night until we arrived in Eliat at 5AM where she gave me her number and told me to call her up next time I’m in Jerusalem, so perhaps that story will continue another day.

In the meantime, after leaving the bus station and walking for a bit, Daniel and I realized we had no idea where we were. We knew only that Eliat was located right on the Red Sea, and we had resolved to sleep on the beach for a few hours until buses to the border started running. When a taxi drove by, we asked how long it would take to walk to the ocean—he told us about forty minutes. We hopped in and he drove us around the corner and five minutes down the road to a beach. Ok, Sir, that may have taken a ninety-year-old woman forty minutes, but saying that to us was just a straight-up lie. We were tired though and had only agreed to pay him two bucks each, so we didn’t try to argue.

Eliat turned out to be an amazing resort town with beautiful beaches and stately hotels. We walked down to the water in front of one of them and reclined on some lounge chairs, unsure if the attendant would ask us to pay. He didn’t, and we slept for a few hours as the sun rose.

We awoke midmorning and grabbed a quick breakfast before finding a bus to take us twenty minutes to where we would enter Egypt.

The border crossing was a bit like trick-or-treating—a bunch of stations on a long stretch of road, mostly outside, that we had to stop at as we advanced. Many of them were simply guys sitting on the side of the street in plastic lawn chairs that just wanted to see our passports. The whole thing seemed quite unorganized. I had some trouble getting through because one man didn’t know the difference between the English words “single” and “multiple.” You’d think those would be good words to know if you’re employed to check visas. Apparently it’s not mandatory.

We finally emerged, and there we were, in the desert. As Daniel keenly pointed out, you can tell a lot about a country by its border crossing. This site was located a twenty-minute drive from both Israeli Eliat and Egyptian Taba. On the Israeli side, there is bus that comes at regular intervals to transport people to and from the border at a reasonable cost. On the Egyptian side, there is nothing, so you are left at the mercy of taxi drivers who literally make their livings ripping off tourists. We selected one of them and got him down to a semi-decent price to transport us two hours south in an air-conditioned van to the city of Dahab.

When we weren’t asleep, we enjoyed the scenic drive along the coast of the Red Sea that featured bright blue waters contrasted with the beige sand and rock and accentuated by the utter lack of anything green.

We arrived around one and promptly realized our bad timing. All major monotheistic religions do something to annoy outsiders. Christians have Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jews shut down all buses on Saturdays. Muslims—they have the call to prayer. They do this five times a day, which is cool and all, except that the midday one results in ALL restaurants shutting down during prime lunch time in strict Muslim areas. So, it took us at least half an hour of searching and passing closed restaurant after closed restaurant before finding one that was open. I purchased two delicious but suspicious-looking eggplant sandwiches for a cost of eighty cents. Daniel thought it wiser to protect his less-traveled immune system and hold off until we found something cleaner. We eventually did and finally sat down to eat.

Our next task proved much easier: finding a way to get to the mountain. We explored the city for a bit, strolled along the beautiful seashore, followed a pack of wild goats, and ended up at a hotel. We asked about Mount Sinai tours and were told that they ran nightly for an all-inclusive price of one hundred Egyptian pounds. Twenty dollars each to have someone drive us in the middle of the night to a mountain, pay the entrance fee, hire a native guide to take us up, and then drive us all the way back in the morning? Not bad. We told them we’d be back.

Sporting eight-dollar bathing suits from a local shop, we walked along the water until we found a nice stretch of beach where we spent the afternoon.

Later on we walked around, evading all the men in pickup trucks offering us taxi rides and did a bit of shopping. The Egyptians were kind (maybe just because they wanted our money). When we told them that we were American, they all started talking about how we were going to play them in futbol, and we pretended to care. Around dinner time, we started dodging the remaining hoards of store-owners yelling “welcome!” and telling us to “come in for just one minute!” and found a small restaurant where we enjoyed a delicious meal of meat, rice, and vegetables mixed together in a bowl with lemons and various spices.

Around 10PM, we returned to the hotel and hung out for a bit until our van was ready to leave. I slept the whole way and awoke at 1:30 as the van reached the base of the mountain.

Our guide turned out to be a sixteen-year-old Bedouin boy who led a group of ten of us up the worn trail in a chain of hundreds of other people, all with the same goal in mind: reaching the peak before sunrise. Starry skies overhead and flashlights to the ground, we began the sleep-deprived, three-hour hike up the mountain in darkness. In retrospect, it all seems like a dream.

It was not a dream however, as is evidenced by our having ended up on top of Mount Sinai just as the first light of dawn became visible. We sat on some east-facing rocks and enjoyed the show as the sun rose over the vast expanse of desert mountains surrounding us. The twenty-four hour journey paid off.

We explored the summit in the morning light and hiked down uneventfully. After reaching the bottom around 8AM, we briefly toured Saint Catherine’s Monastery, located right at the foot of the mountain, but were much too tired to appreciate the history or the architecture. All we wanted was some breakfast and a place to sleep, preferably combined.

There was only one small cafe, and the breakfast special was banana and honey pancakes for thirty Egyptian pounds—six US dollars. We knew we were getting ripped off, but we were tired and starving and they did look pretty good. When the guy told us that they had free juice, we decided it was worth it and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. The pancakes were thin but satisfying and the limeade refreshing. We ate quickly and both fell asleep in our chairs.

I awoke some time later and looked over to see Daniel arguing with the man at the counter. I got up as our plates were being cleared. “That’s fifty-five pounds,” the waiter told me.

“Oh actually it’s thirty; the juice was included,” I responded as I reached into my pocket.

“No, it’s fifty-five! You got pancakes and juice!” I walked over to the counter to see Daniel having the same debate with the man we had spoken to earlier.

“You told us the juice was free,” Daniel said to him.

“No, I didn’t say the juice was free. The juice is twenty-five pounds,” he replied, laughing. At that point, we both confirmed that we heard him say there was free juice, not juice for five US dollars. The guy’s friend came over to help out.

“Oh! Maybe you said FRESH juice! Did you say FRESH juice?”

“Ahh yes, I said there was fresh juice! It costs twenty-five pounds.”

Alright first of all, if you mix up the words “free” and “fresh,” you shouldn’t be working in the food service industry. There’s a big difference between them. Second, this guy’s English was too good for that kind of mistake, and even a thick Arabic accent wouldn’t make the two words sound alike. Third, if we had really misheard him, he would have shown a hint of sympathy or embarrassment rather than pure amusement. I walked away without giving him anything. I’d pay five dollars for a large smoothie in a mall in the US, but not for a small limeade in Egypt after being lied to.

We found our driver parked nearby and group reconvening. After the last couple people showed up, we rode back to the hotel in Dahab and slept the whole way.

The next eleven hours we spent getting back home to our apartment: a two-hour taxi back to the border, a tariff-free passage across into Israel (for some reason we paid both an exit fee to Israel and an entrance fee to Egypt on the way over), a short ride and walk to the bus station in Eliat, and, arriving just as a bus north was about to depart, a five-hour return trip to Tel Aviv. We caught an intra-city bus back home to the suburbs and passed out. I slept twelve hours that night.