DAY 42 A FREE DAY!! There is nothing planned for us today. We decide to sleep in a little and to work on our blog. But it is Friday and most places / shops are closed in the morning. However we find that the silver shop is open and trek down the big hill to shop, we find some really fabulous things. Moonstone and onyx are locally mined in Jordan so we find some really nice things. Each item averages about 20 USD or less. We of course come out of there with a little bag of goodies. We decide to have lunch at the 7 Wonders Pizzeria, the food is really good. Then we hire a taxi to take up back up the hill. It really is a steep and long hill! And it's our ... read more

DAY 40 We depart Aqaba this morning for the Wadi Rum protected area. We change to 4WD after a couple of hours on the bus. The ride was bumpy and no real thrills other than the natural beauty of the area. This area was created in 1998 and it covers 720 square kilometers of desert landscape from this valleys of sand and mountains of stone. Several Bedouin tribes live in and around the protect area earning most of their income from tourism. Our first stop is to view the 7 pillars of Wisdom, then off to Lawrence's spring and to the Lawrence house. Now these are places that Lawrence of Arabia might have been or had been there at least once. So everyone loves Lawrence because he is good for tourism. But the real interest is ... read more

DAY 38 Up this morning to head to St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of the valley to Mount Sinai. St Catherine's Monastery was constructed between 527 and 565 AD. It was built around what was thought to be Moses' Burning Bush which has a chapel built atop of it. It has priceless works of art, including Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons, western oil paintings , fine sacerdotal ornaments, . It also has one of the largest and most important collections of illuminated manuscripts in the world (the Vatican has the largest). The collection has consists of some 4 500 volumes in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac, Georgian and other languages.. St Catherine's has been called the oldest working Christian Monastery and the smallest diocese in the world. St Catherine, whose body was ... read more

DAY 34 Off to Cairo this morning. The trip has officially ended. Rather than take the train, we decided to take a private van for an extra $10 US per head. The van takes us directly to the Hotel Indiana the starting point of our next tour that begins in two days time. Thankfully the weather in Cairo is only about 28c or 80 F. We hope the mild conditions continue. We are staying at the Hotel Indiana on the west bank of the Nile in a quiet area if that is at all possible. Some small embassies are in this area. The hotel is said to be a 3 star but that must have been from the 1940's when the hotel was at it's heyday. Now it is looking good only in dim light. Our ... read more

DAY 27 We are taking a mini van ride for about 8 hours from Luxor to Dakhla in the Egyptian Sahara Desert. The landscape for the most part is that of desert and sand / rock mountains. There are more checkpoints then there are houses out here. There was one village that we stopped to have lunch. Our group leader said there weren't any nice cafes to have lunch so we could have sandwiches. He went and got the lunch. Perhaps we may not have eaten anything if we had seen the preparation and there are so many flies. Anyway, we had eggplant pita and falafel pita. The only choices and quite tasty and no side effects. One of the stops along the way is to a burial site dating back to the roman times. The ... read more