I woke up with a stiff back and neck from the hotel bed. I think it must have been a rock in its previous 1950’s history. We went down a few floors to grab some breakfast before starting our little adventure. After checking out of our room and taking a few pictures, we made our way to the bus station, which was very oddly situated on the basement floor of a mall. I’ve never seen anything like it. We bought some snacks and bottled waters and a one-way ticket to Mount Sinai, which boarded at 11AM.
We learned that the ride would take 7 long hours and a taxi ride or two before we would actually reach Mt. Sinai. I mentally prepared myself for this ride. My IPOD was sitting on the ship, dead, and I had brought a novel with me that I had to read for class, just in case. This would be a very long ride indeed.
Let me start by telling you a little bit about our bus. It was not a nice one. It was filthy, and reminded me of a city bus one might hop on to go from their home to the movie theater. The seats were not hard, but they were by no means comfortable. It smelled like unwashed feet and body odor and sweat. The seats were all stained with unmentionable things from years and years of use. The air condition did not really work at all, and the heat was very close to being unbearable.
Now, let me tell you about the people on the bus. There were about fifty Eagle Scouts in uniform in the back of the bus who looked American, but did not speak English. Then there were about fifty Army men in the front of the bus in uniform. Then there were the people that had to stand up for 7 straight hours in the aisle because there was literally no elbow room. It was ridiculous. Standing next to me I had an Army man, and an Egyptian civilian who had his nose stuck in an anatomy handbook. The stench was repulsive. The driver was crazy, and kept yelling and screaming to the people standing up in the aisles.
I caught myself falling asleep multiple times from the heat, and one time I woke up and found my head resting on the Army man’s stomach. Can I even begin to describe how embarrassing that was? After sitting on that bus for about 4 hours, the driver pulled off at some random shack with food, and we all piled out in our own little cliques (Army men, Boy scouts, Egyptian civilians, and us). I was so tired of eating junk food, and there was what looked like a sandwich stand where all of the Army men were standing around. I bought myself a “beef” sandwich, which I watched the kid grab me one without gloves, and serve on a metal plate with a few cooked carrots which he also grabbed with his bare hands. I ate the sandwich, which was the worst possible mistake I could have made. Then we all asked for a bathroom, and a little boy about Lacey’s age led us to the back of the building. We walked into this little shack of a bathroom and I grimaced.
We were in the absolute middle of the desert, nothing around anywhere as far as I could see. And I had to pee, of course. So as much as I tried not to look around, I couldn’t help it. The floor was sticky and wet. The sink had hair and other gross things stuck to it. It was dripping off-white water. Then I opened the wooden door to go to the bathroom, and I took a step back. There was no toilet. It was a hole in the ground. There were ants and other bugs crawling around the hole, and the smell was horrendous.
I walked out of that bathroom and back into the open air quicker than I ran to see the pyramids for the first time. I couldn’t pee over a hole. I became the master of holding it.
We drove another 3 hours on the raunchy bus, and after being hit on several times by different soldiers, I made small talk with the ones who spoke English. They were being shipped into the middle of the desert to make sure that no smuggling of people or things was going on where the police were not. They taught me a few words in Arabic, which is a very tricky language to learn, and I laughed with them until they got off of the bus.
Before we knew it, we had reached our destination. We were, once again, standing in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road watching the bus drive away into the heat. A couple from Namibia got off of the bus with us, and were also wanting to climb to the top of Mt. Sinai, so we got into a taxi with them and began to slowly make our way there. The man is actually the Diplomat for the Embassy in Namibia, which I found to be intriguing, and he wanted to bring his wife to the top of Mt. Sinai to be healed from some sickness that she had, which I found even more intriguing.
We passed St. Catherine’s Monastery, which is also pretty famous for the area, and walked up the hill between these beautifully ferocious desert mountains to start the trek. I had to really use the bathroom by that time, and one of the Camel drivers led me to a small wooden shack. I took a deep breath and opened the door. It was like death. There was an actual toilet this time, but seeing as how we were in the middle of the desert, there was no plumbing. There was dried diarrhea all over and down the seat, and even more bugs were flying around and crawling from this toilet. I thought about walking out, and holding it some more, but I doubted the toilets at the top of the mountain were any better than this one. So…. I went. *Shudder*
We ended up taking camels up the mountain because it was getting dark in the valley, and it would become very hard for us to see the trail. I figured riding a camel would be similar to riding a horse, and let me tell you how wrong I was. I did not realize that the person sat on top of the hump. I had always pictured camels having two humps, and the person would sit between them. The camel driver actually picked me up and plopped me on the hump, and I thought this might be a nice, relaxing ride up the mountain. Ha. Hahahahaha.
It took about 2.5 hours to reach most of the way to the top, and during that time, several things happened.
1. My thighs and back and body became sore and sore and sore, because riding a camel is not the same as riding a horse.
2. The Namibian couple kept arguing with the camel drivers and eventually got off their camels and walked back down the mountain. There were several communication issues that were not getting
resolved.
3. My camel was named Abdul, and had a mind of its own. The driver kept whipping it and shouting obscenities to make it slow down, because it was the leader of the pack and never wanted to stop. So Mr. Feisty just kept going and huffing up the hill, not listening to anybody.
4. Liz’s camel snotted all over me. It was so foul.
5. The one camel driver that was near me kept pointing to his mouth, like he was smoking. I thought we were playing charades, because he couldn’t speak a lick of English. So, I guessed “smoking?” and he shook his head, and then I guessed “hungry?” and he shook his head. And then he proceeded to pucker his lips at me, and I yelled out, “Kiss!” and he dropped the reigns to come over to me. I smacked Abdul and for once he listened and began to gallop in a camel-like way. I stopped playing charades and started playing Jockey.
When we finally reached most of the way to the top of Mt. Sinai, it was around 9PM. I got carried off of my camel and into a hut, which they called a “coffee shop”. Three men wearing white robes and turbans were slurping up rice from a metal pan, and there were no other tourists to be seen. We sat down, and they offered us some of their rice, which we declined. One of the men in the turbans who looked like he was in his sixties offered to lead us up the “Stairs of Repentance” because the camels could not take us up there, and that is the only way to get to the top of the mountain.
I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I said goodbye to Abdul, and the man with the turban (Mohammad), led us with a flashlight to the top of Mt. Sinai…
The Stairs of Repentance consists of 750 huge boulder stairs, plus some. These rocks may have been stable, but my goodness, it took every ounce of my being to reach the top without passing out from exhaustion or the collapsing of my lungs. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life hiked anything more difficult, to the point of wheezing and thinking I might just have an asthma attack than this. I was certainly repenting the entire way up. About three quarters of the way to the top, we rented dirty mattress pads and four wool blankets to sleep on.
And finally, finalllllly, we made it to the top. I fell down on my mattress pad and tried to suck in the air, only to realize that there was no air this high up. I ended up wheezing and hacking and chugging my bottle of warm water to try and calm my burning lungs.
It was around 10PM and I could only see the outlines and shadows of the mountain range and valleys that swerved in between. It was beautiful. We each took our mattress pad and blanket and lay on the rock, using the 4th blanket as a pillow for our heads.
I’ve never heard silence like I heard that night. It was glorious. It was deafening. I watched the stars and briefly thought about the fact that my friends and family in America still hadn’t seen the sun set. It was so weird to fathom that I am living in the future and they are living in the past. Even though that wasn’t actually the case, it sure felt that way. I was so at peace it was unreal. I closed my eyes and began to drift off into the kind of bliss that might only be found on top of a mountain with friends…
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