Mt Sinai

This last weekend I adventured to Mt Sinai and St Katherine’s Monastery with Adam, Adam, Erin, Meghan, Carrie, Tim, & Chris (mostly AUdc kids). It was an amazing trip, but I have a lot I want to write about – so get comfortable! Sorry its taken me so long to write anything interesting, but school is getting a little busy - I can't believe they actually want study abroad students to study!!

We got bus tickets through the AUC travel office for 45LE each – about $8 – and planned on getting a room in the monastery to sleep for a few hours before climbing the mountain in time to watch the sunrise on Saturday morning. However, after various cell phone connection problems & lack of minutes etc, when we finally got through there were no rooms left. The obvious decision for cash-strapped young travelers? Sleep on the mountain!!

We packed backpacks of all the warm clothes we brought to the desert, charged our digital cameras, & carried our blankets onto the metro as we had heard this was the easiest way to get to the bus station. Unfortunately we ended up wandering around frustratingly close to the bus station before we were led by various kind Egyptian men to the right place. The bus ride was wholly uneventful, lots and lots of sleeping and wishing we could stop to pee and mild excitement over passport checks. Most of us had turned our passports in to the AUC visa office so we can get our residence visas ASAP. Instead, we all had copies of our passports & our AUC IDs. Some people hadn’t copied their tourist visa, & the passport-checkers were less than pleased. Regardless, we managed to arrive safely about 7 hours later.

The bus actually drops you off in a small town about 3km from the monastery. As soon as we got off a random guy started asking us if we needed to go back to Cairo the next day, & even though we have learned to be super skeptical of anyone talking to us (so often it means they want to sell us something we don’t want) we told him we did need a way back, & he promised to drive us the next day for 50LE each. This seemed totally reasonable price, especially since friends who went the weekend before paid 120 each to come back. We all felt quite pleased with ourselves & tried to walk to the monastery. There was some heated debate about which direction the monastery was, & after about 30mins of general confusion we set off in the right direction. We ended up being picked up by our driver for the next day & taken the last 10mins of the walk. Hes a nice guy.

After dinner at the monastery (pasta with tomato sauce … weird!) we sat and chatted until the rest of our party arrived, at which point we planned to head up the trail. Meghan Adam & Carrie had some issues getting past the tourism police at the entrance to the monastery – they were told they could not enter without a guide. They thought this was very odd, but since they really had no choice they had a random 16year old boy with them when they finally met up with us. We debated for awhile, & since no one else we knew had a guide, we sent the kid on his way. At the bottom of the trail, we had our own encounter with the ever-present tourism police, where (surprise surprise!) we were told we needed a guide b/c it was dark and we could get lost. They completely ignored the fact that there were at least 100 mostly elderly Russian Orthodox pilgrims making their way up the trail ahead of us armed with intense headlamps. Getting lost seemed highly unlikely. They wouldn’t take no for an answer though so we ended up with Amin, our guide, and because we’re incapable Americans we got a tourism policeman too. How lucky we were!

So began the hike. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had been portrayed, but it wasn’t too bad. Mainly it was just awkward b/c most of us were carrying huge blankets in our arms in addition to backpacks full of snuggly fuzzy clothes. Erin decided to take a camel b/c she tore her ACL awhile ago & so understandably hiking in the dark makes her nervous. The catch is that at the top there are 750 'stairs' (stairs is a loose term for piles of rock of varying degrees of flatness and stability) that the camels can't make it up. So we met Erin at the bottom of the stairs and started the final ascent. By this point it was 2am and we were pretty tired, so it was slow going. Also, the hundreds of elderly pilgrims tended to have a particularly hard time with the stairs (i can't imagine why!) which made things a little slow. About halfway up, Erin decided to stay where she was b/c she was very concerned about her knee, & so Bahran, the tourism policeman, stayed with her. We reluctantly carried on without her to the top. All the way up there were these little 'coffee shops' that sold tea coffee water chocolate etc for ridiculous (Egyptian) prices, but they had the most glorious tea, so we stopped more than once to enjoy it.

When we finally reached the top of Mt Sinai, almost every surface was packed with people - people sitting, talking, praying, sleeping, singing. Definitely not the quiet mountain-top experience I had been hoping for, but it was interesting nonetheless. There is even a tiny church perched on the summit. At this point it was 3am, & so we found a pretty flat place to lay out our blankets. By 3:30am we were all huddled into a pile of blankets and backpacks and clothes and people in an effort to be both warm and comfortable. In the end I dont think any of us really got any sleep, & we woke up around 4 or 4:30 to see dawn breaking. We huddled precariously on the edge of a rock facing the east and waited. Of course I was the one on the end, closest to falling off, so that was fun. Thankfully everyone, particularly Chris, was quite concerned that I actually would fall, so they did their best to scoot over & make reassuring comments about being able to grab my leg if I started falling. That made me feel much better. (ha.ha.ha.)

The sunrise was just breathtaking. I might have said this when I described hte sunrise over the Red Sea, but I'm pretty sure I'm addicted. I have yet to see anything that is so reliably awe-inspiring as watching the sky and the world around you go from pitch black (and in this case, filled with incredible stars) to shades of gray and blue and eventually to have everything burst forth in brilliant color. If you havent watched a sunrise recently, I suggest you do so, because its truly amazing.

The trip down the mountain was pretty uneventful, we happily met up with Erin at the bottom of the stairs & all decided to take the Stairs of Redemption back down to the monastery. It quite literally cut straight down the side of the mountain, and concentrating on not missteping and falling head over heels all the way down while having had little sleep and no breakfast was no small task. I sort of befriended these two Russian women who were helping each other down these crazy stairs. One of them walked with a cane normally, so how she managed these stairs that young spritely (and waaay out of shape) Ashley was having trouble with is a mystery. They were really nice, we sort of talked at each other in strange combinations of Russian (them) & Arabic/English (me). The one thing I understood, more through mime, was that they too were scared I would fall dwon the mountain! Apparently I look unstable or something....

Upon arriving at the monastery I have never been so happy to see a bathroom, flat ground, and some chairs. We all just pretty much collapsed for an hour and bought overpriced snacks from the monastery's coffee shop. meghan carrie adam & i eventually got up the energy to go look around the monastery itself, which was neat. i wasnt overly impressed, but the main mosaic over the alter that the church is famous for is being restored, so that was disappointing. it was quite pretty though, & if nothing else its just amazing to look at everything and know that most of it was made quite literally centuries ago.

By then it was time to get picked up by our crazy driver friend, and so 12 of us piled into a 13person van and we began the trek home to Cairo. We just slept and played ridiculous "who's your soulmate based on as much random criteria as possible" games. my soulmate, by the way, is either my Arabic teacher from AU or my RA from last year. Clearly, this is some high tech science we're dealing with! The driver decided we should stop at the Red Sea near the Suez Canal for some reason. Although no one else looked particularly impressed, and even though its only a sea, not my beloved ocean, large expanses of salt water make me very happy.

Thats pretty much it! We got back to Cairo safely about 7 hours later and I had the most refreshing shower and collapsed into bed for a good 12-14 hours! A week later I am finally fully recovered ... Hopefully sometime this weekend I'll have time to write about the crazy soccer game I went to on Monday night, the soccer team I think I have some how joined (eek!) as well as what its like to be in a Muslim country for Ramadan. Hope everyone is doing well with your own respective adventures!