Petra to Dahab

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Day 31 (Sat 24th Feb):
I got up at the un-holiday-like hour of 6.15 and took a bus south to Aqaba with the intention of catching the 10.00 ferry across the Gulf of Aqaba to Nuweiba in Egypt. At the port though I was told that the ferry would not run due to a rough sea. In fact the weather was perfectly calm but they insisted that it was the reason; I think it was really an excuse to cover up the real problem.
I waited around in Aquaba for the whole day hoping to get on the next scheduled ferry which was at midnight. This didn't run either though, and so I slept the night at the port, firstly on a bench outside where dozens of waiting egyptians had also chosen to sleep, and then, when the breeze became cold, inside on the floor.

Days 32 & 33 (Sun-Mon 25-26th Feb):
The new hope everyone at Aqaba port was holding on to was that a ferry would run at 10am, the same time as the original ferry we had intended to take the day before. This did not happen, and we continued biding our time until we were finally allowed onto our ferry at 3pm. The waiting was not over yet though as the ferry did not move for hours. We eventually set sail at 10pm, a full 36 hours after the ferry for which I had got up especially early!
I spent my time on the ferry with three lads I had met whilst waiting, all middle-eastern. Fayez, an egyptian lad, was the only one who spoke english, and we talked a lot. He was an architecture student, was very artistic and talked in incredibly abstract, metaphysical ways. For example, he spoke of the world being composed of non-physical concentric rings which continually and simultaneously explode and implode, and are infinitely small and infinitely big at the same time, because size is, like everything, only a concept and not 'real'. It was hard to grapple with his way of thinking, but it was a good brain-stretching exercise, and I may meet up with him again in Cairo where he lives.
We tried to sleep on the sofas in the air-conditioned first-class lounge, which no-one elso seemed to have noticed was empty, but the slumber was repeatedly interrupted by the sounds of drills and angle-grinders somewhere close by. When we were awoken to disembark at 1am we saw that the ship's kitchen, which was in the next room and in which our last meal had been cooked, had been completely deconstructed, with stainless-steel cookers and cabinets chucked outside in the hallway, and internal walls and parts of the floor gone altogether. It seemed very much against the odds that in addition to the ferry being so delayed, and in a night's sleep which was only three hours long, someone should decide to destroy a kitchen in the middle of the night right next to us!

Stepping off the ferry into the customs area of Nuweiba was my first experience of Egyptian organisation. It was about 2am and the scene before me was what looked like a ramshackle assortment of old warehouses surrounding a very poorly lit square yard full of men manouvering huge stacks of luggage on wooden carts, kicking up dust everywhere.
In poor light, and with a lack of signs, I found my way around several of these neglected buildings in order to change currency and buy my visa before entering the largest warehouse which was marked 'Arrivals'
Having passed my bag through an x-ray machine I then faced a long waist-height table which ran centrally along the whole length of the rectangular building, with a small gap at the end. This table was the final barrier between me and Egypt.
Amidst the intense bustle of hordes of egyptians trying to force their bags onto this table to be checked, I had two officials telling me opposite things about whether I needed to queue too. Having successfully got one to overrule the other I got past the table and at 4am I was officially in Egypt! I found a bench to sleep on until 6am and then caught the first bus to Dahab, a small town an hour or so south on the Sinai coast.

In Dahab I found a hotel which called itself a 'garden village' and was a selection of one storey single rooms arranged around a more-or-less central sitting area which surrounded a walled pit at its centre built to accomodate a fire in the evenings.
I had a much needed sleep in the afternoon and then in the evening I went with a few others by minibus to climb Mount Sinai by night; I reasoned that as my sleep pattern was already out of synch, it would be the right night to do it. We left the 'hotel' at 11pm and arrived at Saint Catherine's Monastery, which lies at the foot of the mountain, at about 1.30am. We had a Bedouin guide called Saba who, with numerous stops at coffee houses on the way up, led the way to the top in time to see the sun rise, giving us a spectacular view of the mountain range which had been invisible to us during our dark ascent.

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