13th & 14th Cairo to Sinai

We were woken at 4am by the porter for breakfast of pastries  and a bread roll. We arrived in Cairo at 5am and headed off to the King hotel. Amazingly there was not much traffic on the road and it only took around 10 minutes unlike when we left and it took us around an hour. We spent the morning in the lobby updating the blog and our photos. The rest of the group headed off to see some of the other sites of Cairo they had not seen. We chatted with Rob and Tina-Louise in Canberra who were just finishing their dinner. We had a nice long chat with Chris, it was great to be able to speak with him. Yadira (pronounced shadera) one of our group from the 8 day tour came down and had lunch with us. She was heading back home to Chicago and left at around 1pm and we checked into our room. We had our group meeting with the new tour leader and met the new people who joined our group. After the meeting we had dinner in the roof top bar, said our goodbyes to those leaving the group and headed off to bed.

14th Another early start, up at 4.30am to set off on our 7 hour bus ride. We drove under the Suez canal, they don't let you go too close to it but we did see a ship that looked like it was sailing through the desert.

We slept on and off throughout the trip and finally made it t0 St Catherine where we were staying for the night. We had lunch and set off to climb mount Sinai. Three of our group decided to walk the 3750 steps of repentance. Most of the rest of us walked the camel trail and then the 750 steps to the top. We had a magnificent view from the top (2285m). We waited at the top to watch the sunset. It started to get cool so we put on our beenies, gloves and warm jackets. There was a Mexican group doing the climb as well and they had a couple of Priests with them. They were setting up to have a mass as we were descending.

We put on our headlamps and descended as it started to get dark. When it was very dark a few of us stopped and turned off our headlights. The stars were absolutely amazing, with no clouds or light the view to the heavens was spectacular. We made it to the bottom at around 8.30pm and headed back to the hotel for our buffet dinner, then off to bed feeling exhausted.