egypt details...

Some people have been asking about Egypt, so I’ll give a little more info about all the fun experiences I had…

I won’t lie, I was pretty depressed in December! I just saw the departure of many wonderful American friends shortly after Thanksgiving, and I was feeling their absence, and the impending reality of a very windy and cold winter was all the more saddening… So getting away to a more southern, sunny, and warm locale was the goal. One of my friends was also a willing companion for a travel, and thanks to a generous donation from generous and loving people, the possibility of Egypt was soon a reality… Why Egypt, per se, you may ask?? Well, there is this “little” problem that all my Belarussian friends have with obtaining visas…. And Egypt is one of the few countries that does not present this big obstacle…

I generally am not a huge fan of beaches. I would prefer hiking or more active sight-seeing. But this trip afforded the best of both worlds for me. Vegging beachside and touring. We went to Sharm-El-Sheikh, which is on the shore of the Red Sea, on the east side that faces Saudia Arabia. It is a famous snorkeling spot for all the fish and corals. I had the opportunity to snorkel in about 3 or 4 different locations, and the variety of corals and fish I saw was simply spectacular. But after a few days of lounging on the beach, suntanning and what-not, we took the first of three excursions to Mt. Sinai. We took a bus about 2 hours to the mountain base, and arrived around 1:30am. We began hiking in this pitch blackness, having only flashlights and the breathtaking starlit sky above as our guides. We would stop for breaks every 30-60 minutes, and finally arrived near the summit around 5am. We had to wait until 6am for the sun to rise, and we enjoyed the spectacular view. Hiking up Mt. Sinai gave me a lot of opportunity to think about Moses and what it must have been like for him and the Israelites in this wilderness of Egypt… It is a wilderness that is simultaneously breaktaking and frightening… frightening because you have to wonder, what did they eat? How did they manage wandering in such a place for so many years?? It is secluded, barren, rocky, dry, dusty. It is lonely. After the hike up, we took a rocky stair climb down to the base again, and visited the monastery where supposedly THE Burning Bush has been transplanted and thriving since Biblical times. Who knows. But the monastery was the oldest Orthodox monastery in the world. I think. It was quite lovely.

The second excursion we enjoyed was to Cairo. Cairo is a city of 21 million people. Pretty amazing. It is huge, hazy, old, dirty. You can see people driving cars, riding bicycles, riding horses, or driving carts pulled by donkeys in the city streets. On the street where their President lives there are hordes of military personnel on guard at all times. They tended to stand at attention in clusters of three. In Cairo, we visited the over 100 year old Egyptian Museum. The highlight for me was seeing up close and in person all the gold, jewelry, and ornate coffins (sarcophaguses?) that were excavated from King Tut’s tomb. I had seen pictures and read so much in elementary and middle school about King Tut, and then suddenly, the things I had only seen in books from childhood were within sight, only a foot away behind glass. Everything was truly impressive. After the museum, we sampled scents of perfumes made locally. Then we headed to a papyrus museum and learned how they made papyrus paper. Of course, we also drove out to Giza and enjoyed time walking around, taking in, and photographing the pyramids and the sphinx. And yes, they are massive. They were as large as I expected them to be, and were not a disappointment. The amazing thing is to see the Bedouins dwelling in a complete desert on the other side of the pyramids. On the one side, a big growing city of Giza, and on the opposite side, nothing but desert wilderness and camels and their Bedouin owners…

The third excursion we went on was an off-roading adventure through the desert of the Sinai peninsula. We went north, stopped in the middle of nowhere – literally it seemed – to have tea with some of the Bedouin desert dwellers. They were constantly trying to sell you something and the children would look for an easy handout from the tourists. Our off-roading eventually led us to the shores of the Red Sea again, where we enjoyed lunch in a Beduoin hut on the beach, snorkeled in the beautiful waters, and then continued on our way by camel. Yes, for nearly an hour, I rode a tall, slow moving camel (and no, I never spotted a spitting camel…), ambling among the water’s shore within sight of Saudia Arabia, and navigating through small rocky overpasses. The camel ride gave me a lot of time to photograph some awesome views of sea and sky and local kids helping us lead our camels along on our way. After an hour, I also realized that riding camels can be a very uncomfortable experience and my realization was enforced all the more when large bruises showed up on my legs from the uncomfortable “saddle” I had to sit on for the entire ride. Eventually, we got back into jeeps and headed to the city of Dahab. There we snorkeled in the one of the more famous spots, the Blue Hole. It was a spot where the corals were the height of two story buildings at least, and surrounded you on all sides, leaving you a pillar of water in the middle to swim in while soaking in the beauty and peacefulness of the marine world.

Of course, our trip could not have been complete without many interesting Egyptian men eager to befriend foreign women. Every Egyptian man I talked to was simply shocked I was American. I would speak half Russian, half English with them, because most people I was in contact with spoke Russian and not English. My tour guide up Mt. Sinai heard me speaking English all of a sudden, and asked me, where did I learn to have such good English? I said, you know, I lived in the States for 24 years… He was shocked. Did I study there? What did I do there? And I replied, well, you know, I’m an American citizen… I was born there and lived there nearly my whole life… (hahaha.) It was a funny little joke.