When we arrived at Cairo airport, we were fairly surprised to find
that there was someone there to meet us. We were quickly introduced
to his friend, Mr Ramadan who, for a fee, could take us to the hotel
we had booked. By some co-incidence, he also had a tourism business
called Ginger Tours and was quite prepared to tell us what he thought
the itinerary should be. On the way to the hotel, we got our first
glimpse of the pyramids.
We stayed in the Hotel Meridien Pyramids for our first couple of
nights. Part of the attraction was the
view of the pyramids which we got
from the window of our room. The hotel was very nice. I think a lot
of it was business class and had it's own bureau de change and quite
a large swimming pool complex. There were at least 2 restaurants and
the entrance hall had water flowing down a marble panel behind the
stairs. They even had a scanner on the door. I don't think we would
do well to get too used to it!
We had two days before we officially met up with the tour, and
decided to accept part of the suggestions of our self appointed guide
for the first of these. The first place we went was
Saqarra where pyramids were older and less
well preserved than Giza. We did go down into the chamber of a
pyramid - bent over for about 50ft. We also went into Mereruka's
mastaba, but without a camera pass. That was a shame as the wall art
was better preserved. On the way from there, our guide had us lay in
a roadside sarcophagus for a photo
session.
We went to a papyrus museum, where we had a demonstration of
making papyrus (and bought a small one) and a bazaar (read tourist
shop) where we came out quite quickly as everything was overpriced
and most of it was too big to carry anyway. I think our guide had
fairly high hopes and was on some sort of commission. We decided not
to go to what was described as a "carpet school".
The next thing we did was to rent camels to go round the
pyramids at Giza. These are the ones we could
see from the hotel. Our camels were called Mickey Mouse and Michael
Jackson. Camel riding really gives the inside of the thighs a
pounding and I felt as though I could barely walk afterwards. Sarah
did a little better I think. However, the views which we couldn't
have got without them were worth it. In the evening, we went to a
light show at the pyramids. It included lasers displaying on the
sides of the pyramids where the chambers were and a talk about some
events in history. Our guide wanted us to do a buffet on a boat on
the Nile instead and had some plans for the next day but we paid him
off that evening.
The next day we wrote some post cards by the pool and then got a
taxi to the hotel where we would meet the rest of the group for our
tour. Apart from the taxi driver not knowing the way, we had an
uneventful afternoon. The taxi driver started off offering to take us
to the museum and other places but the more times he had to ask the
way, the less he asked us if we wanted his services further.
That evening, we met Oscar, our group leader and ended up having
beers with two brothers from Australia, Rodney and Adrian who would
be on the tour with us.
The next morning, we loaded the bus and started off. There were twelve of us plus Oscar. In addition to Sarah and myself and Rodney and Adrian, there was Carol and Peter (English, brother and sister and retired) Steve and Angela, Mike and Mel and Megan (Australian) and Glen from New Zealand. It was a relief to have someone who knew what sums to pay as tips, when to pay them and to whom, since I think we got rather taken to the cleaners before we joined the group. Before we left Cairo, we stopped at a memorial built after one of the wars against Israel in the 70s. Underneath the skeletal pyramid, was a memorial to President Nasser (I think) and another to the unknown soldier. There was a military parade going on around it, with people wearing several styles of uniform but they seemed quite happy for us to go right into the middle of it.
We also drove through some areas of Cairo which we hadn't seen before including some areas which were clearly residential but looked half finished. We later found out that there is a tradition of leaving the houses ready to continue the next floor up, both for the next generation to live there and also because the tax on an unfinished house was less!
On our journey between Cairo and Sinai, we crossed the Suez Canal, but by means of a tunnel and our only real sight of it was a couple of distant ships. We did stop at an inhabited oasis as we started entering the more mountainous region. Some people there came to see us but a handful of children really appeared to treat us as an event. We only stayed long enough to stretch our legs and take a photo and as we continued, more of the scenery looked like this.
The hostel we stayed at that evening was like a series of stone bungalows with an entrance hall and a dining hall. The food was very good and was served as a buffet. We stopped at a shop quite close by which did a fine trade in torches - we had been warned that the starlight was often not enough to see the path easily as we went.
We got up at about half past one in the morning for a 2 o clock start. It was supposed to take us about 3 hours to walk up the Mount Sinai, but despite the camels (air conditioned taxi) walking back and forth across the track and the occasional pause to get our breath and look at the stars and the line of torches snaking out below us around the mountain path, we arrived at the top with 30-40 minutes to spare. We had been warned to bring several warm layers as the night could be quite cold. As we progressed, we warmed up quite a lot, but when we were at the top, waiting for the sun to rise, we were glad of it. It was worth every step. The photos of the dawn breaking really don't do justice to the grand spectacle of it and it is a really moving experience. We also succumbed to the advice generally given to photographers and took some with the sun behind us. Once the sun was high enough to really see clearly, the crowds were quite impressive as well. There must have been several hundred people who had made the walk with us. There was also a church up there. It was locked and I don't know what occasions it is used for worship. The path we went up was made less then 20 years before our visit.
Most of the group walked down the original path to St Catherine's Monastery (near where we had left the coach at the start of the walk). This is on the site of the burning bush that Moses encounters near the start of the Book of Exodus in the Bible and was dedicated to this before the martyrdom or St Catherine on the wheel. It is a working monastery and apparently famed for the library and the large number of relics held there. It is a fortified monastery - and that was before they knew the tourists were coming. We got a brief look inside, but got caught up in a coach party of Italians and had little time to really appreciate it before we left.
We drove from there to Nuweiba, where we had lunch before taking the boat to Jordan. It was a 'place that Oscar knew of' - though how he found out he never said. We saw a menu and were then told that there was just lamb (which was tough) or chicken. We did encounter an aspect of customer service that I was quite impressed by. Some of us wanted orange juice - only available in freshly squeezed - and the proprietor of the place, on finding that he did not have enough oranges to squeeze, nipped across the street and bought some.
The boat (a hydrofoil) could have sailed any time between one and three in the afternoon. In the event, it went at three and was an entirely comfortable ride.
