it's an intriguing aspect of human nature that we seek out the high places of the world. we live generally live low, near water if possible, or something else useful otherwise, but in our cities we build up and when in the wilderness we go high. it's joyous to be able to stand somewhere and see for miles around, but it seems to be more than that somehow... as if the higher people go the closer they feel to something divine. something else i've noticed over the years is that for some reason i'm still yet to fathom; if out see a lonely cluster of rocks somewhere out in the wilderness someone will have come through there and made a stack. i've seen it in the red nothing-ness of Australia, i saw it walking through northern Scotland, out bush in Thailand and in the middle of fucking nowhere south of Aswan in the crisp light of a desert dawn. now i'm seeing it on the way back to Dahab from Mt Sinai. 3, 4, sometimes 5 or 6 flattish rocks piled one atop another for no obvious reason.
Dahab's a sleepy little shithole (compared to other beach resorts i've been to out in the world it's ratty, dirty with uncomfortable rocky beaches, but compared to the rest of Egypt, Louise and i both agree it's a jewel) on the Gulf of Aqaba. the Red Sea forks at the bottom of Sinai - a triangular landmass connecting Egypt to the Middle East with the Gulf of Suez on the west and Aqaba on the east. from a maximum elevation of 2285m, the broken-tooth mountains of sun-baked granite meet the sea and continue to drop down to around a 1000m depth on either side. Dahab sits around half-way down the east coast staring across the deep blue waters at Saudi Arabia. it's a happy little holiday destination, restaurants on the rocky beach, dive and surf shops and peddlers selling trinkets and tshirts. after Aswan and Luxor the touts seem relaxed and easy-going. walking down the main road i hear the occasional call of "My shop is here!" my shop is in Australia, mate. yours is real nice though... and "You want lunch? Fresh seafood!" fresh when? last week? and so on. there's less of them walking in front of you or trying to drag you bodily in to look at plastic statues, and for this i'm incredibly grateful.
we're staying in the Oricana Hotel, comfortable, clean, a pool in the courtyard and a 10 minute walk to the beach down the market street. i've been looking forward to Dahab in part because i know i'll be spending 5 nights in the same place for once and so the first thing i do is empty my backpack and take stock of my washing situation. i've been doing my washing a bit here and a bit there in the shower when i've had the chance. it's not great and my clothes aren't the cleanest but it's keeping me in fresh underwear and making sure my shirts don't get TOO manky. we eat on the beach for most of our meals. the restaurants have their kitchen across the footpath in the real buildings. seating is on the sand and enclosed by semi-permanent walls that block the wind, and windows that let you look out over the surfers and snorkelers. it's nice here. the tourists are relaxed and are smoking shisha while enjoying the security of knowing that we can actually sit here undisturbed for a while without having to worry about when we'll be whisked off to our next exotic location. we've been REALLY getting into the shisha - tobacco flavoured with fruit pulp and smoked out of a large ornate bong. currently my favourite flavour is apple/mint, but strawberry's growing on me and grape was also quite good. whenever we have an hour or so to spare someone will call out "It's shisha time!" in a bad american accent, a reminder of the four yanks who didn't join us in Dahab. they'd have fucking loved it here. there's shisha EVERYWHERE.
i'd love to be chilling out for hours on the beach, but i have to get a couple of hours of sleep in the early evening if i can. this is the last of the Sleep Deprivation part of the tour. tonight is something kinda special. after an hour or so of nap Louise and i are up and loading up into a bus at 11PM for a 2 hour drive. we manage to get a little more sleep on the ride, squeezed into the second-to-last seats on the bus with no leg-room to speak of. Kim's laid out on the back seat, Derek lying on the floor and when were stopped for a passport-check by the Tourism Police and had to wake him up we could all hear and sympathise with his plaintive, shattered "Whyyyyyyy?"
there's excitement running through the tourists as we form up in the monastery of St Catherine, tempered by an air of "what the fuck have we got ourselves in for?" what the fuck we've got ourselves in for is a climb up Egypt's tallest and most famous mountain at 1 in the fucking morning. our bedouin guide Souphi takes us up the Holy Valley, then the switchback paths, then the 772 Steps. 8km of walking, a kilometre or so of it being Up. it takes 3 hours and 6 rest-breaks. nothing i can say can adequately describe what it's like. it's dark, but you can see the rocks in your path by the starlight when the Canadian behind doesn't blind you with his headlamp. it's quiet and still but for your own labored breathing and shuffling footsteps. the mountain looms ahead like a shadow on an inkblot and it's tiring. you're sweating from the exertion, otherwise it's freezing cold with the wind cutting through your clothes like bayonets. it's properly tiring. no-conversation-because-i-need-that-breath-to-live tiring. finally at the top we stop and buy expensive tea from one of the 6 cafes (i call them cafes. what they are is huts built on a flat piece of rock, thin wooden walls covered in rugs and blankets with benches inside, running a roaring trade in selling drinks to exhausted pilgrims) while we wait for the stragglers to show up. 30 Egyptian Pounds rents me a thin mattress and a blanket that smells faintly of donkeys and dust and we find shelter in the lee of the church so that we can sleep under the stars in the still and silence of the top of a mountain in the middle of a weathered, battered range in the middle of a desert and the arse-end of nowhere. when the bedouin boys stop trying to sell blankets to people already sleeping UNDER blankets it's so serene that i pass out watching shooting stars and satellites before i can really start to enjoy it.
that serenity's broken an hour and twenty minutes later when the fucking Colombians put music on and start singing. Mike and i wake bolt upright, thinking i'm being attacked. Louise was awake a little while before us and gave us a nudge, the false-dawn brightening the horizon and i desperately want kill every fucking christian in sight. one minute we have peace and quiet and beauty, the next it's hymns greeting the sun in Spanish and an extremely angry Australian who's about ready to start throwing them off the side. it takes me a couple of minutes to pull myself together and start bouncing around the rocks taking photos of everything in sight. finally the Colombians decide to Shut The Fuck Up and stop ruining it for the rest of us, and it's still and quiet again, the sun rolling its way up the sky and the crew sitting around enjoying the warmth as it slowly seeps through our clothes and sleeping bags. it takes a while, but we eventually get Kim and Derek out of their sleeping bags and make a move for Down.
down is much quicker than up. seeing some of the steps we'd climbed, Louise and i were starting to wonder how we'd gotten up in the dark without falling. Mt Sinai doesn't sit alone - it's in a vast range and view of the valleys in the cool shadow of early morning takes your breath away... which is ok because i don't need so much of it going down. 3 hours up becomes 1 hour down and we reconvene in the cafe at the monastery (recognisable as a cafe this time) while i sip on a coffee that i need like oxygen. St Catherine's is an Orthodox (Coptic or Greek i'm not so sure. it's covered in Cyrillic but i'm not familiar enough with Coptics to be able to tell the difference easily) monastery built around (what they claim to be) the fabled burning bush from the biblical story of Moses (i've seen it and touched it. it wasn't burning and surprisingly neither did i. i kinda worry about spontaneously combusting when i walk into churches. it's paranoid i know, but still). the top of Mt Sinai is where he supposedly went later to retrieve the 10 Commandments. with that sort of religious kudos you expect pilgrims, but luckily most of them don't really want to be getting there at 8AM and the Colombians have burned up their energy singing and fucked off into the distance. while this doesn't quite mean that we have the place to ourselves, it IS less packed than it could be.
we have a bit of a look around the monastery when they open the doors. it was rebuilt as a fort in the 5th century after being sacked by angry Romans, but while the stones still stand it's been modernised inside... to a degree. running water and plumbing aren't so shithot in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere, but you make do. it seems a peaceful way to spend a life you'd waste anyway - nestled away in a deep valley, the rock walls stretching overhead past narrow turrets and thick defences, a chapel that's seen the love of 1600 years of monks, all of who's bones are stored in a small gated alcove - 6-odd cubic metres of skulls plus more of what look like femurs mouldering and gathering dust in the cool of the basement.
i passed out almost the moment i curled up on the bus. there were two tour groups on the bus and when we'd got on the night before they had first-on advantage and spread out, squashing the GoBus mob into the uncomfortable seats in the rear. being used to a quicker pace than them (thankyou Soobie) our crew dived in and made ourselves comfortable early, massively pissing off the stroppy older couple who proceeded to complain about being stuck in the same seats they'd been happy to let us get squeezed into. we couldn't help but laugh with evil satisfaction, our group bonding against a common enemy.
2 hours of sleep doesn't sound like much, but it lasted me through the day and on into the night. how Louise stayed out dancing until 3:30AM i have no idea. i was gone and in bed 2 hours beforehand. somehow we pushed through the day, the hour on the mountain and the 2 on the bus leaving me refreshed and grooving, the hard knife-edge of fatigue in view, but holding off from opening a vein. we met up with the rest of the tour group in back in Dahab and organised to have a group dinner, then head off to The Treehouse - Dahab's hippest night spot - for drinks and frivolity. it was good, it was fun, Louise and i played the Arab boys at pool and she danced around while i ran out of steam. these sorts of places are more her thing than mine anyway and Wally was there to make sure everyone got back to the hotel safely (he gets paid for this shit - i don't).
today's been my first really peaceful, relaxing day in weeks. slept in until 9, met people in the foyer of the hotel, loaded up into a couple of jeeps and headed off-road to one of Dahab's best and most accessible snorkeling spots called the Blue Hole. picture this: the mountain greets the water in a long, sheltered, 300 metre arc wide enough to leave 40-odd metres of flat rocky sand in between. curve it in a semi-circular bay and line the shore with 2-storey restaurants. now look in the water and see the reef stretching 5 or 10 metres out to sea as a strip of light blue-green which ends abruptly in a semi-circular gap of the deepest blue. that's the Blue Hole - nominal mid-tide depth of 1 metre dropping almost straight down to 110 metres, a vertical reef falling into depths that have your brain dribbling out your ear, full of fish and incredible for floating above with some flippers and a mask. we swim until we get too cold (deep water is seriously cold) then laze around drinking cold Hibiscus Tea while we work on our tans on the top deck of the restaurant we're using as a base of operations. it's lovely - off the beaten track enough that we need a jeep to get out there, busy enough to be interesting, quiet enough that you don't notice. Louise and i head back out into the water for a bit just before food, but mostly i'm happy to lie around and work on my tan which i manage to do without getting burned. a few of the guys have started to peel after days without shirts on although they're getting results, i must admit.
i'm really liking Dahab. after a week of bouncing around Egypt like a bunny on meth this is exactly what i needed. gentle walks, no rush, very little hassle from the shopkeepers (some of them have big signs up advertising the fact, then go to great lengths to convince you that they won't hassle you. the irony is not lost of me) and plenty of good food to be had. i'm recharging and i'm loving it, although my reserves are gone - lost along with the last of my beer-gut. i need to get into something fatty and horrible when i get back to London so i can put on a little more padding. i'm running out of steam far too quickly for my taste.
either way, i'll have to enjoy the quiet while it lasts - tomorrow's going to be an awesome, but tiring day.
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