The excitement began on Thursday night. Freshly infuriated courtesy of my "Political Economy of Development" professor, a Marx-admiring, World Bank-despising (not neo-) Keynsian economist whose arguments are darkly tinged by social justice (not a bad thing necessarily) and historical revisionism rather than facts and statistics (if you cite statistics that are contrary to her argument, the statistics are wrong), I broke my fast for the last night of the first week of Ramadan (AKA the end of my fasting) at 6 PM. With most of my friends vacationing outside of Cairo, I ran errands at my neighborhood AlphaMart (which stocks everything from lawn mowers--wait, who has grass in Cairo?--to kitchen knives). But, at 12:30 AM, rather than settling onto my cot of sorts for a night of restful sleep, I boarded a bus...to Asia.
Yes, my 15 minute excursion to the world's largest continent (see earlier post about Port Said) sparked a persisting yearning for return. However, this time I trekked across the entire Sinai to the town of Dahab, which sits on the coast of the East Sinai on the Gulf of Aquba. Scheduled to be a 9.5 hour bus ride, I took a heavy dose of NyQuil for the sore throat I had conveniently developed earlier that day and tucked myself into my window seat. The next thing I knew, it was almost 9 AM. It was stifling on the bus (we were in a desert after all), and we were stationary. Peering out the window (that is, after peeling off my eye mask and removing my earplugs--I'm sure the majority of the conversation on the bus consisted of harmless jokes regarding the tall white American who didn't quite fit in a bus seat and drooled while he slept WHILE sporting a posh eye mask encased in a navy blue cloth patterned with twinkling stars), I discerned that we weren't moving. And I noticed that I was the only one on the bus. Apparently our bus had broken down approximately 45 minutes before my rousing, and my seatmate didn't feel like informing me that the driver was evacuating the bus.
Ashamedly exiting the bus, duly noting the smoke emanating from its engine, I migrated to the shadeless area where the rest of my bus-mates had camped, and a German student who spoke both impeccable Arabic (I think) and English informed me that we had broken down, etc., graciously omitting any sort of brutish joke about my drug-induced sleep. After mentioning that Dahab was still 1oo+ kilometers away, I grew anxious; would I spend my weekend camping on a seemingly abandoned desert highway while the East Sinai Bus Company sent a replacement bus only after navigating the red tape and Ramadan-warped schedules of the drivers? However, just as some things fall apart, some things are mysteriously glued back together. In the midst of my apprehension, a Dahab-bound bus roared by, pulled off to the side of the road, and absorbed every stranded passenger. And I promptly fell asleep for the remaining time.
Getting off the bus in Dahab, I caught a cab to Bishbishi, the hotel where three other AUC-ians were staying. Cabs in Egypt illustrate the particular character of certain cities: Cairo's cabs are particulate-puffing black and white Peugots from the 1960s that still have meters from a bygone era (cabs in Egypt no longer run on meters; one just shouts their destination at empty cabs, hops in the front seat, and then pays the driver whatever one deem to be the appropriate fare upon exiting the cab), while Port Said's cabs are new blue-and-white Hyundai Accents; Dahab's cabs feature colorful murals painted on the side of bright green pickup trucks which lazily rumble up and down the one road strip of the town.
From there, we brunched. The intriguing thing about Dahab's restaurants are the lack of variety--they all serve the exact same thing in the exact same environment. All serve five breakfasts platters. All serve fresh seafood. All serve bad curry. All are on the beach. All lack chairs, preferring pillows and the occasional couch. All the prices are roughly the same...you get the point. However, none of the food is bad, and you can't really complain about the setting; have a look for yourself.
You can make out Saudi Arabia faintly in the background.
From the restaurant (this particular one was called the Funny Mummy), the four of us (names = Becca, Halley, & Alfred) headed to the Blue Hole, a diving/snorkeling legend across the world--apparently it's second only to the Great Barrier Reef for the viewing of aquatic life due to its distance from civilization and the salinity of the water. A conventional road to the Hole, however, is nonexistent; one must travel either by camel or by ATV. We chose the latter because it's cheaper, and piled into a 1960s-esque Jeep with a Louis Vuitton canvas roof and commenced on the treacherous cross-desert, half-hour expedition, a segment of which I captured on YouTube per Alfred's request.
Unfortunately, my digital camera doesn't have an underwater setting, so you have to take my word (or Google Image's) for the spectacular colors of both the coral and the fish, of which there were hundreds of varieties. You can sort of see the reef in this photo of the surrounding area too.
Here we are with our trusty ATV in one of our many "family portraits" of the week.
After our mouths could not tolerate any further exposure to the supersaturated saline solution that is the Red Sea, we persuaded the Jeep driver to take us to the beach for the sunset. Or at least close to one. Here are some more pictures!
Alfred's took this picture. He clearly used to be on Maxim's payroll.
After exhausting ourselves by looking at the sunset, we walked up and down the shore of the Gulf, scrupulously examining the identical menus of the thirty-some identical restaurants. Each restaurant employs a tout, usually their best Italian/Russian/English/Greek/Japanese speaker (that's sort of the order in which the tourists come according to Zissou, a shopkeeper I met the following day), who drastically lowers the prices to entice backpackers, divers, and gullible AUC students into their particular establishment. We ended up at "Chill Time" or something like that (because they gave us free appetizers, salads, and dessert), where we promptly decided to eat the very creatures at which we had spent the afternoon gazing. Our three-tiered platter was replete with white snapper (is that similar to red snapper?) and calamari and overflowing with grilled vegetables. Have a look:
The night digressed into visiting the bars, which had the cheapest Stella I've seen in Egypt (6 LE for a pint, or about $1).
The next day (until 11 PM) consisted of eating, beaching, eating, shopping, eating, reading, eating, drinking coffee, eating, drinking beer, and eating. Rather than nonsensically expounding on my eating habits, I'll just post some more pictures.
Rema was a young Bedouin girl with great English who successfully sold us woven bracelets. But only after she talked with us during breakfast for 20 minutes.
The shore.
Lounging at the restaurant we camped at for approximately nine hours (that's not an exaggeration).
However, at 11 PM, we boarded a conversion van bound for St. Catherine's, a village in the middle of the Sinai. Our purpose: to ascend Mount Sinai (of Moses & Ten Commandments fame) in the middle of the night to reach its 2285-meter summit for sunrise. Enlisting a Bedouin guide, we began our trek at about 1:30 AM. By 2:00 AM, the batteries in my flashlight (purchased the day prior at AlphaMart) had expired. Left with only one flashlight, we were forced to take the path slowly, to carefully scour the upcoming square feet of ground before each step (okay, I'll turn it down a notch). By 4 AM, we were finishing the last of the 738 steps that complete the ascent, where Alfred and I promptly celebrated by purchasing Starbucks Coffee.
So we didn't actually have Starbucks (I've yet to see one here in Egypt, though apparently CityStars, the largest mall in the world, has one), but we did have hibiscus tea, since it was about 45 F at the summit.
The ascent was entirely worth the little trouble it presented; the sunrise was a religious experience of sorts.
The reading of the Ten Commandments at sunrise.
The religious experience at the top was completed by a group of South Asian pilgrims who sang for the entirety of their camel-bound ascent and proceeded to cry and wail as the sun illuminated the mountain. Yes, it was captured on YouTube.
The descent from the mountain was much brisker; it was via the Stairs of Repentance, a sole monk's life project of etching almost 4000 stairs into the side of the mountain, and it was during daylight. Which means two things: jellied legs by the time we were at the base of the mountain and MORE PICTURES.
The quintessential family picture.
The Coptic monastery of St. Catherine's at the base of Mt. Sinai.
Alfred snagged this picture of a teenage Bedouin guide.
Alfred posing with our guide, who has climbed Mt. Sinai for about 362 days a year for the past thirty years. While smoking three packs of cigarettes per day.
Becca & I ate Speed for breakfast to catch our third wind after a night without sleep (and instead a hike up a 7000-some foot mountain in the middle of a desert).
Even more pictures from the adventure are available here.
And, apart from a luxurious six-hour ride back to Cairo in a conversion van (during which all of us slept) that included a trip under the Suez Canal, was the weekend, summarized mostly in pictures since I am exhausted after two long days of classes (and playing catch-up from skipping a day of class on Sunday).
But what, oh faithful reader(s), do you have to look forward to in the next few days? Well, I have a couple "When in Egypt..." posts in the works, but, more importantly, I've taken an internship with a super-NGO here in Cairo. What NGO? What does it do? What is my tenor-voiced, well-powdered, Meryl Streep's character in The Devil Wears Prada-esque boss like? I'll post tomorrow, inshallah.
2 comments:
That was amazing--love the "family" pics! What a mountaintop experience!
MOM
This is the best blog. Ever.
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