22nd April. St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

Hi, 2 blogs & 4 photos today.

After 22 hours of being held up in the customs compound we finally drove out after 12 noon this afternoon. The fax didn’t come through but after showing the bloke the original letter from the AAA he thought that would do. That and a fair bit of baksheesh saw us through. It was frustrating and expensive. Another $300 worth of fees. But then on filling up with diesel the first station I came to and paying out AU$8 for 55 litres it starts to even up.
Sinai is barren, very barren and lacking most of the spectacular scenery we saw in Jordan. The mountainous country surprised me though, I for some reason thought it was pretty flat. We are staying at the Fox Camping site at the town of St Catherine. It’s bliss after the hassles of the last 24 hours and is another of those places where you meet a weird array of people: two Germans, who walked two donkeys from Germany, took them 8 years; Kelvin, an Englishman whose gone native, he’s been in the Sinai 6 years; a young American studying Arabic in Cairo. We have two camels being quite affectionate behind the van. The Germans were heading to Jerusalem but the Israeli authorities wouldn’t let them in.
The monastery is Greek Orthodox, first built in the 3rd century AD and the oldest monastery continuously inhabited by monks. The setting is spectacular with Mt Sinai alongside and Mt Catherine with its tiny chapel on its summit, behind. We walked up to it this afternoon but will return when it is open tomorrow.
23rd
We learnt a lesson today: don’t think by going early to an attraction you will avoid the rush. The monastery is only open 9-12 each day. We thought we would be able to see it and be on the Cairo road by 10.00. Visitors have to enter the monastery through a 800mm door. Outside that door was a crowd of at least 300. Not organized into a long row but just a mob. The door opened at 9.20 by which time there were 400 and all surged forward in a horrible mass, quite unregulated. To stumble would have been tempting fate. We made it, saw the supposed Burning Bush where overcome pilgrims were touching, praying and kissing the wall, the Church of the Transfiguration was beautiful and quite moving. We then had to leave by the same door but by this time the crowd had been organized into a line and we could squeeze past each other. Leaving the site we counted 37 buses filled with tourists coming to the monastery.
I think this is going to happen in most countries we will be travelling through with maybe the exception of Sudan and Ethiopia – there will be package tourists most places we go. Nothing wrong with that, everybody has the right to travel however they wish, but the image of going places a little out of the way is getting to be non existent.
And on to Cairo. Good road not much traffic. We travelled along the Gulf of Suez for a fair way then went in a tunnel under the Suez Canal. Strange to see a ship sailing by in what looks like sand dunes.
Traffic was building up as we approached Cairo. The erratic fast driving of the locals was becoming obvious. It came to a head when we took the Ring Road around the city. Phew! They are quite mad and travel very fast. It took us a further 2 hours until we found the hotel we had been told allowed camping, they don’t, the last hour following a taxi as we would never have found it on our own. I would put the drivers here on a par with driving in the worst of the Indian cities: they don’t have the animal life on the roads which you find in India but they do travel much faster and every bit as mad.
We have decided to stay in the hotel for 2 nights while organizing the visa then head out of town for the weekend.