Monday 26th October
Today was a big long trip into the desert. We got up at 6 for a 7 departure. Getting out of Cairo was about as good as could have been expected. It definitely could have been worse. The road over to Suez was pretty good, and not very exciting scenery. Just before we got to the town of Suez we turned to go through a tunnel under the canal. Disappointingly thisd meant we didn't get to see the canal, which was something I had wanted to see. But what can you do. We did stop at a service station which had a good scale model and we learnt a few interesting facts. The most interesting are that it costs about $250,000 to go through it on average, and Egypt makes over 5 billion from it.
We continued on and got to our first stop of the day, the Wells of Moses. These were not very exciting. They were either polluted or dry. I was more excitied about seeing the convoy of ships coming out of the mouth of the canal.
Then we went onto the next stop, the Pharoh's caves. These are Hot Springs and the caves are amazingly hot. The caves are not very deep, but they get so hot. It was like a sauna. James and myself were the only ones who went the whole way in, you did have to crawl a fair bit. James almost melted. I banged my head at one point, the heat was quite dizzying. We couldn't stay inside for long, but we couldn't come out fast because the shock of coming back into the relative cold (it was only 30 degrees outside) would have been too much.
After that it was a nice picnic on the beach for lunch. Absolutely amazing beach with nobody on it, possibly ever. The whole coast of the Red Sea is just one big long beach. There is so much of it the few hotels on it do not ruin it. Well that would be if they weren't half built. Like much of Cairo, and the country as a whole, most of the hotels along the beach were half built. Personally I think the marketing slogan for the country should be 'Egypt, it will be great when it is finished'. The ruins are great, its a pity some of the more modern buildings look more ruined than the old ones.
After that we continued our journey towards Mt Sinai. We stopped at a convent on the way, these were Greek Orthodox nuns. We weren't really sure what the point of the stop was, but it was another break in the journey. We eventually go to our hotel in St Katherines at the base of Mt Sinai at about 4.30pm. We were getting dinner at 6 because we were going to have to get up at 1.30am to begin our climb! Needless to say it was straight to bed after dinner. But it was quite hard to get asleep at 8, I haven't gone to bed that early in 30 years.
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