Ramadan comes to town

(K) Sinai.....

Ramadan: one of five of the Islamic pillars of faith. The celebrations started back when I was in Suez. The pillar involves fasting: no consuming anything (including water) or have sex between sunrise and sunset (6-6) everyday for an entire month! Luckily shops and cafes are still open and in the tourist areas, eating in public causes no problems.

I took a bus from Suez to Sharm El Sheikh, which basically went through the Sinai desert and looked rather unexciting, the odd bit of coast looked nice but apart from that... so no biking.

Sharm El Sheikh is a slight tragedy. A beautiful dive and R&R spot of the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula but has been totally overrun by Western (and Russian) orientation tourist resorts and with it comes all the sort of resort stuff that I didn't really have time for. So I got out of there ASAP. However, getting out of there was easier said than done. You see the problem was, as per usual, the bike. This time the number of gears I had available had gone from 28 to 1. I failed to find any sort of mechanic in Sharm so the only option was to just bike. Just go. Bike with the one gear (the lowest gear), up hills (and push when necessary) 100ks to Dahab. So I left early and no surprise, arrived late.

Anyway, Dahab was a great relaxing place. No tour buses; no flash hotels (in the area I was in anyway) and not too many rip-off salesmen. I spent about three days here, went swimming, snorkeling and basically had a great time. There were also plenty of pubs around which made a difference to the mainstream Egyptian places. Any backpacker coming to Sinai... this is the place. I also made a friend who was biking from Germany to Congo and he knew what he was doing so he fixed the bike! So I was back to maximum gearage and then biked to Newiba. Newiba is also a relaxing small place; I only stayed for a night but could have made it several more.

The latest is that I've made it to Jordan. I took a ferry from Port Newiba to Aqaba. A lot of people were going over to do their hajj thing in Mecca and as a result I was the only white guy on the ship. The Egyptian-Jordan border security was all pretty happening. There was plenty of yelling going on and was all pretty amusing. So Jordan, hopefully my bike hangs on before Dan rejoins (think he's somewhere round Cairo doing Cairo things), so we'll have to see.

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