Last weekend, after a 10 hour bus ride to the desert, I was able to climb Mt. Sinai where Moses received the Torah and the 10 commandments, watch the sunrise in the mountains, snorkel in a coral reef in the middle of an underwater depression left by a meteor in the Red Sea, see the mountains of Saudi Arabia, go on a desert Safari, climb down and explored a canyon, get lost in a resort town, go on a cruise of the Red Sea, and dance!
Dahab was awesome; I've never seen such clear water in my life, let alone all those colorful fish and coral that seemed undisturbed by human treading. Sharm el-Sheikh was a disappointment. Crowded with unmannered and rude Russian tourists along a strip that made me think of a sad, run down version of Las Vegas. When I was out, I didn't see many Egyptians, and I even felt the dreaded Sartrian "gaze" fall upon my when I did see them. I felt like a dumb, drunk, easily-amused rat in a maze with cheese at every corner while the Egyptians looked down from heavens into my maze box where the little tourists where neatly amused by their experience in "Egypt". The whole experienced seemed that synthesized and bogus that it made me uncomfortably smile to myself. I stayed around the hotel and on the Red Sea snorkeling cruise rather than enter the touristic "un-Egypt". I kept asking myself why people would come all the way to Egypt if all they were going to do was stay in this resort town. It could have been any trashy European city. In fact, it might have been safer.
The experience of these last 2 days on our vacation hadn't ruined my thoughts about the trip, however. I was already plenty satisfied.
The most exhilarating aspect of my adventure, however, was climbing Mt. Sinai. We arrived in the dead of night and began walking down a dark, unlit dirt trail. Every few feet was someone asking "You want camel?" And me politely declining. I don't really remember how many camels appeared in my path as I hiked up the mountain, or how many tails smacked my face, or how many times I tripped over their humps throughout the black of night. It was starting to feel like a health and safety hazard, especially after I pull a few girls out of the way of these oncoming meat carts.
The Sinai Peninsula is to the right on the map, the mountain is above Dahab and Sharm el-Sheikh:
Excited and full of red bull, my group went ahead a bit, walking at what I thought was a normal pace. We were stopped at one of the rest stops by a teacher who said we were walking to fast. Actually, he yelled at us in Modern Standard Arabic (imagine Shakespeare raising his voice in a temper tantrum as he calls down fire and brimstone upon you). Brushing it off as he was just being extremely overweight, out of breath, and upset that we were moving faster than him and leaving him with the slow kids, we trudged on, irritated that we had to wait yet again for 40 people and climb as a group. Our defiant march to the top was met with obstacles, mostly my coughing fits and congestion causing me to stop a few times. Farhana, however, grabbed me and told me not to stop. This girl was on a mission to the top and didn't want anyone to slow her down. I complied; you don't want to get in the way of a Muslim who's dream is to pray the dawn prayer at the top of a holy mountain. It's just not good politics.
Everyone was running out of breath except me; thank god for runner's lungs.
On the way up, I took out my glasses and looked up at the sky. Shivers ran down my spine and radiated to my arms. It's been so long since I'd seen a sky so lit up. I tried to capture it with my camera, but realized that what I was seeing would not show up on the lens. I committed the scene to memory. All around me were the shadowy out lines of mountains that went on into infinity; the half moon glowing down on our path as our only beam of light; the constellations of the northern hemisphere twinkling down upon us. They are the same stars that I am used to in Michigan, and for a split second, I felt like I wasn't in the middle of a desert, but that I was in my backyard on my trampoline in the dead of night again, wondering what I am going to do with the rest of my life. I felt at home. I smiled. I even saw the dusty spirals of the Milky Way weaving in and out of bright points of light set against the dramatic navy blue, black, and purple backdrop. I stood frozen, head cocked to the sky, my heart pounding, blood rushing to my tingling extremities. I felt a calming, sagely peace come over me. I hadn't stopped smiling in wonderment.
I was pulled back into my body by rushed the hurried calls of my group wanting to move on. Dawn would soon be approaching.
We finally reached a narrow set of winding, broken, and precariously set of stone stairs, which legend has it were built by Moses himself. Above me, a steady trail of shivering, exhausted, and devout Europeans, drunk Canadians, and loud Russians made their way up the snaking slope. Coupled with the occasional lanterns speckled throughout the line, it was reminiscent of a scene out of The Book of Exodus.
I reached the top, finally exhausted after 4 hours of hiking Moses's path. I looked around: a small, crumbling stone Greek Orthodox chapel in front of me set against a large, sloping rock that ended abruptly at the edge of a 2285 meter drop. Breathtaking. I waded around the sea of people who had already made it. They all looked so weary, their eyes blank with fatigue, huddle around wool blankets being sold by bedouin at the top. 50 degrees was fine with me and saved me 20 Egyptian pounds. thank you Michigan.
We found a place to rest, around the chapel to the right and at the low, foot-high wall that separated us from the rocks so far below and broke out our granola. And waited.
We then moved to the flat slab of rock on the other side of the chapel where we originally came from, our program having already set up camp awaiting the sunrise.
I slowly began to notice the sky lightening from its dark, mysterious hues, moving from indigo to azure, from which it was gently lightened with the softest, white, yellow, and pink tones and tints, all mixing together to announce the coming of the sun and the setting of my stars. As it began to rise out of the mountains in front of me, I was blinded by explosive shots of white-yellow light as it rushed to claim every tired, shadowy space in the valley and and exposing the sepia-soaked granite of the mountain chain.
Just as I could not capture that night's sky with the wonders of digital technology, nor could my pictures that I took do the scene justice. It was absolutely one of the most beautiful scenes that I've seen in my life, not to mention the most spiritual. I never felt closer to my Maker than when I was on top of that mountain, in the Land where it all started some 4,000 years ago in the Egyptian desert...or so the story goes.
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