Mt. Moses

We made it! Mostly. After an almost two hour delay, we landed at Sharm el-Shiek at 1:00 am. We brokered a deal with a taxi cab driver who assured us that Mt. Sinai (or Mt. Moses as the locals call it) was 2 hours away (not the three hours Reid had thought). In that case, we could make it by 3:00 am and make the three-hour climb before sunrise at 6:00 am. The taxi cab driver agreed to drive us to Mt. Sinai, wait for us to climb it, and then take us on to Nuweiba in exchange for cash instead of our first born child. Score!

We arrived at the base of Mt. Sinai at about 3:30 and started climbing at about 4:00. We were the last ones to start up the mountain and were assured by everyone that we couldn't make it to the top for sunrise. Oh well, we'd come this far. So, we set out in the pitch black alone except for our guide and the camel drivers who insisted that it would be much better to ride up the mountain. We declined and walked on. It was beautiful--the moon was barely a sliver and their were more stars than we had ever seen. About forty-five minutes in, the stars were being chased from the eastern skies by the sun you couldn't yet glimpse beyond the horizon. The advantage of climbing in the dark is that you have no idea how far you have to climb because you can't see more than one foot step ahead of you.

There are 8 rest stops/ tea houses on the way up and we paused for a quick break at each one. Our guide estimated that we could make it to the final tea shop before sunrise and was great at encouraging us at each stop to keep climbing further up. We made it to the last tea shop for sunrise with the tippy-top of Mount Sinai at our backs--it's 750 steps up to the top from where we stopped. And there were about 500 people on the summit. We had the same view and shared it with only our guide, the tea shop worker, and a handful of dozing camel drivers. It was perfect. And beautiful.

We decided not to stick around to tour St. Katherine's monastery and settled for a view from the outside before collecting our taxi driver and heading off to Nuweiba. We arrived at our hotel at 10 am and were graciously allowed to check in to our hotel room. We paid for a buffet breakfast and headed to our room, where we promptly passed out until... 11 pm. Luckily our hotel was still serving dinner and we roused ourselves to eat.