Sinai Mountains and Saint Catherine's Monastery

The Penguin hotel in Dahab offered a return minibus transfer to the St. Catherine's monastery for LE75 per person. The price level was more or less the same at all tour agency and taking a taxi for the return trip would have been significantly more expensive so I was happy to book the tour at my hotel.

We left Dahab early in the morning since the monastery is only open from 9 to 12am and actually closed in the afternoons. After an interesting drive through the Sinai desert and mountains - interrupted only by a couple of military checkpoint controls - we arrived at the monastery at around 10am.

Despite the early hour a large number of tourists were already there. They in turn had attracted a high number of hawkers lining either side of the path to the monastery. Once we had successfully made our way there (that is without buying anything) we walked through a narrow passageway which led through the massive fortifications and into the narrow monastery courtyard.

The Saint Catherine's Monastery is an UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the oldest continuously functioning Christian monasteries. It was founded in the mid-6th century at the supposed spot of the burning bush (which is still there today ... but it looks rather like a tree to me).

Mohammed was granted political asylum here before he became a prophet. As a result, he gave his protection to the monastery. A certain Napoleon Bonaparte did the same 1,200 years later. To date the monastery has never been attacked. As a result the monastery library was preserved and now contains the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, second only to the Vatican library. Besides paintings and mosaics the monastery houses a collection of more than 2,000 icons, some of them 1,500 years old. A small selection of the latter can be seen in a small museum inside the monastery (LE25) whilst the the library is not open to the public. It was interesting to see people with different religious backgrounds sightseeing side by side. The monastery is sacred to three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

It didn't take too long to visit everything since only a small part of the monastery is open to the public. Beside the above mentioned museum we visited the church, the Moses well and the 'burning bush' before leaving the monastery and climbing a nearby slope. From there we enjoyed the postcard view of the whole monastery.

The biggest part of our group decided to spend the afternoon climbing Mount Sinai to see the sunset. However, since the weather was deteriorating I decided against that. Rather than waiting for minibus in the evening three of us negotiated a deal for a taxi straight back to Dahab. Our taxi driver Achmed was hard to bargain with but finally we agreed on some LE50 per person.

We arrived back in Dahab in time for the sunset which illuminated the Saudi-Arabian mountains on the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba. The Sinai mountains however were covered in unusual thick grey clouds so we were content with our decision not to climb Mt Sinai - due to the low clouds we wouldn't have seen a thing. Although we missed the famous sunset from the summit of Mt Sinai it was an interesting day trip.

My other Egypt blogs
Diving in Dahab
Egyptian pyramids - Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur
Cairo
From Abu Simbel to Aswan, Kom Ombo and Edfu
The ancient temples of Luxor and Karnak
Tombs, temples and a hot air balloon

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