Getting in Touch With God

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We pass loads of checkpoints, perhaps 10 (not sure caused I dozed a little), and these were a lot more thorough than anywhere we have experienced in Egypt. There’s paperwork our guide has to hand each one and he has to state where we are from.

If we were from Israel or United States for example, then we would have to have an armed guard accompany us. But as Australians we are just waved through.

We arrive just before 1:30am and the carpark is choc-o-block full of vans and big tour buses.

Ahmed goes and finds us a guide to get us to the top of the mountain. They are all Bedouin (desert) men wearing traditional dress. I say to Tim that we will be able to get a good photo with our guide, but knowing our luck ours will be the only one wearing jeans and a t-shirt. We just about fall over ourselves laughing when Ahmed comes out with our guide (whose name means Friday, sorry I can’t remember his proper name) and he is wearing jeans and a jumper!

So after getting our backpacks searched and going through the metal detectors we are off and racing - literally, our guide is fairly hoofing it, my knees are already telling me they are not happy!

HIKING THE MOUNTAIN

But the pathway is quite clear, open and just a gentle slope, quite nice and easy I thought. So I asked Ahmed if it is like this all the way, he laughs and says we haven’t even got to the start of the mountain yet - bugga! He tells us that it is about 2.5km and then there is 700 steps. So we actually get to the proper start at 2am. I figure this should be okay, it’s 3.5kms from home to work and I can do that in under half an hour so I figure maybe double that being rocky and then those stairs at the end, I figure we are going to be there well before the 5:45am sunrise….

After walking for about half an hour out of nowhere there is a little rest stop complete with shop selling cold drinks and cups of tea. I ask Ahmed if this is half way, he laughs again (he laughs a lot) and says we have another 2.5 hours of walking yet… It turns out the 2km is ‘as the crow flies’, in reality it’s about 7km!

So we trudge on. Out of nowhere there are dozens of camels and handlers offering people the option of riding a camel to the stairs, the camels don’t go any further than this. We decline the offer and accept the challenge ahead.

Looking ahead all we can see besides the abundance of stars filling the perfectly clear skies, are hundreds of torch lights winding up the mountain in single file, looking behind it’s the same. It looks magical and unfortunately we couldn’t get a photo of it so I hope I’ve described it well enough for your imagination to take over so you can see what we saw….

Friday, our guide, is determined to speed up the mountain and we overtake most of the groups. We stop a few times along the way, it seems he knows everyone who works on the mountain. We pass his nephew with a camel, his uncle has runs one of the rest stops and his brother runs another. He loves a good chat so we probably stop longer than necessary so he can have a chat. While we are walking he plays Arabic music out loud on his phone, so if anyone wanted to quietly contemplate the meaning of life while going up the mountain, it wasn’t going to happen!

Suddenly it gets really windy, cold, sand is blowing everywhere and all our eyes cop a hammering. At the next rest stop we decide to hire a blanket for 20 Egyptian Pounds, because even though it’s the warmest time of year to climb the mountain until the sun comes up apparently its quite cold. There’s a part of us that hopes that this isn’t the case and we’ve just been skimmed out of 20 Pound!

We wait a while in this rest camp inside out of the wind.

Finally we reach the steps, 700 to go and it’s done. This has been a really hard hike and it’s so not over yet. 700 is a lot of steps!!!! I think I hear ‘Oh my God, please how much longer!!!’ in possibly 14 different languages!!!

Finally we are there! We find ourselves a place on the top of the mountain and wait for the sun to rise - and warm us, it is FREEZING, the wind goes right through you and we are so glad we are not doing it in Winter. We are so grateful for our blanket, even wishing we had got 2!

Then it starts, first a hint of colour in the sky, then the sun pokes through. It is an amazing thing to witness and you do feel like you could reach up and touch Heaven. You also get to see the mountains that you have just hiked up. They are all made of enormous boulders which makes all the mountains look like giant bowls of chocolate mousse, sorry best description I could come up with!

Once the sun is up, what goes up, must go down… So it’s a mass migration down the stairs. What took so long going up, we take only 1.5hrs going down, I set a good pace with Friday, you just want it to be over!

A final word and some advice if you’re planning on doing the climb, these were things we saw other people maybe didn’t consider…
1. Wear appropriate shoes - you’re climbing a mountain, a rocky, sandy slippery mountain - this is not the time to wear your cute little ballet flats, high heels or thongs
2. Wear appropriate clothes - again your climbing a mountain, you are not going shopping at Dolche & Gabana, so the cute white dress and cotton scarf is not really going to help you cope with the cold, the wind or the sand
3. Wear layers - even in summer it’s cold at the top until the sun pokes out
4. Hire the blanket - you might feel silly carrying it up, but everyone else will look at you with envy at the top while you are warm and they are, well, not. If you’re on your own it might even lead to the start of a new ‘friendship’
5. Don’t sit too long at the bottom of the stairs before the final climb. There are a lot of people all wanting to be in the same place. You don’t want to climb that far to miss actually seeing what you came for
6. Bring a torch - remember it’s night and a mountain, no streetlights here
7. Wear long shorts and bring a t-shirt for the monastery visit


We get down at 7:30am and the Monastery doesn’t start breakfast until 8am, so we kill time feeding the dozens of resident cats left over McDonalds chicken nuggets. I have lots of friends while I have food on offer!

Breakfast is very basic, just salad, rolls and hot tea or coffee.

ST KATHERINES

We wait for 9am when St Katherines Monastery opens to the public. Unfortunately everyone there are all waiting for the same thing so it’s a bit of a queue and then we get told to cover our legs and shoulders, fortunately we have our shorts with zip off pants on, so we just attach our legs, put jumpers on and we’re in!

The church itself is quite something else. It has the most amazing candelabras hanging from the ceiling and the original pictures on the walls are beautiful. There are timber seats along each side facing in for the monks to sit.

There is a monk watching over everyone, making sure they behave, don’t take photos, be quiet etc. He’s maybe 60 plus years with long grey hair tied in a ponytail. He’s wearing the traditional long black robe with a black short sleeve safari style jacket over the top (perhaps that bit is not so traditional). He doesn’t look like the kindly monk that you would imagine helping you through your dark times….

THE STORY OF THE MONASTORY as told by our guide….

This was built around 400AD and is now resident to only about 20 Greek monks. Brief history…

St Katherine was a believer in Christianity. The ruler of the day disapproved of this and sent 50 Philosophers to convince her otherwise. But she ended up convincing them of her beliefs, so all the Philosophers were killed. Next in was his wife and her aids, but again Katherine was able to convince them of her beliefs, so they were all killed. Cheery tale so far?

Katherine was sentenced to the stretching wheel (which is now at the monastery, this literally tears the limbs off, it can take days to die), but she touched it and it broke… So she was beheaded and her body was left up the mountain. The monks found her body, buried her at the monastery and named it after her. There are 2 coffins that we saw, one had her head and the other her body.

NOW THE MOUNTAINS STORY also as told by our guide…

This is the mountain where God spoke to Moses. Moses went up the mountain, God spoke to him, then he went down. He went back up the mountain, was told to wait so he then spent 40 days and 40 nights there (I hope it wasn’t in winter and he had a blanket). Then he saw at the bottom of the mountain a burning bush. He went to this bush and this is where God gave him the 10 Commandments.

There is still a part of this bush preserved inside the church in the monastery that we could see, we could also see where the original bush was.

WE JUST CAN’T WIN WITH CARS!!

So off we head to a small town called Dahab for lunch and a look around.

Unfortunately our van has other ideas. It dies on us in the middle of the desert! Fortunately with all the security stops, we are only about 100 mtres from a police stop (this is after Tim and the guide tried push starting for about 50 mtres). So we sit in the car while he looks over it. It’s about 45 degrees outside and remember we’re in the desert, a place not known for it’s cooling breeze, so it’s getting damn hot in our tin can. Ahmed gets the police and convinces them to try and jump start the car.

Meanwhile I decide to kill time by comparing the effects on the multitudes of flies that have invaded our van of Aeroguard on my left side and an African insect repellant a hotel gave us on my right side. Good olod Aussie Aeroguard won out!

The come over and with Egyptian jumper leads (there are no clamps on the ends, just some bare wire that they touch each battery with) and eventually the car sparks into life. We drive to Dahab not running too well and with no air conditioning. We tell Ahmed that if the car will make it back to Sharm El Sheikh we would rather just go back there. We were tired, hot and not wanting to muck about waiting for a replacement car to come from Sharm (memories of Uganda still fresh…).

Ahmed manages to get a replacement car in Dahab and it’s back off to Sharm El Sheikh. We get back about 3:30pm and have a wander along the beach, some pool time, icecream and then collapse - looking forward to a big day of diving tomorrow…

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