Solace and Adventure

Solitude was good. I spent 2 nights on Gebel Raba, the mountain opposite Mt. Sinai and pretty much its antithesis. As much as Moses Mountain has become a mass tourism circus, full of people, their trash, camels and their droppings, Gebel Raba is nearly virgin. It’s more difficult to access and thus barely anyone goes there. Beyond the many varieties of beautiful plants, the only living things I saw were a few feral donkeys and flocks of wild chicken. I found a huge boulder that functioned as a cave and settled in for the night.  With lots of dead wood lying around there was ample fuel for warmth and cooking. I enjoyed the spot and stuck around for my second night as well. Days were spent sitting, napping, singing, exploring the massif, climbing to its peak and looking down onto the town I’ve called home this year from 500 meters above…  I’m glad I took the time for silence, came back feeling refreshed.

A day back in the office, dealing with malfunctioning computers and miscellaneous busy work, rested my legs before taking off to the desert again with my colleague Dave. We are revamping our products to make them more understandable for potential customers visiting the website. Treks will now be divided into four categories. Relaxation walks, leisure treks, adventure treks and specialty treks. This particular hike was meant to explore the remaining areas of our Adventure Trek section, and what an adventure it was! We covered five days worth of trekking in two, walking camel speed (6km/hr) with 3,200 meters of height gain… without camels.

It started with an ascent of Mt. St. Catherine’s then down the back way, off the high mountain plateau and into Awlad Said Territory. This tribe has very little… few tourists venture here since the Israelis stopped coming and for the past 10 years, as in the whole of Sinai, they’ve had very little water.  Many of their members have been forced to migrate to the cities of El Tur, Sharm and Dahab working in the hotels and service industries there to support their families. Those who have stayed back on their land are surviving by growing opium poppies. When we passed the first small garden with its bright green sprouts and small shack the farmers excitedly welcomed us for a cup of tea. I enjoy tea with opium farmers. These men are rugged, living out in the desert for weeks on end tending their little plots of land which might bring in $2,000 dollars worth of income a year. Our combined Arabic was decent enough to carry on small talk before continuing on our journey. I’d love to spend more time with these men, understand their way of life, their trade and their views on “alternative agriculture”.  We traipsed across the desert all afternoon.  Zoning out, my legs seemingly on auto-pilot, I had time to think, to pray, to wonder, to ponder, to muse, to recall, to calculate and deliberate. Walking does that. About a kilometer from our campsite, I realized I had left my phone on a rock 3 kilometers back. We had taken a quick break there and I took it out to check the time. AARGH! Walking backwards is horrible… I found it, followed the orange peels to the rock I’d left it on. My phone is full of text messages from Jenna, I can’t delete them, in fact it’s time to copy them to my hard-drive again…. it being full though, I had 80 messages to re-read on my way back up to the sandy path. That was nice!

Yesterday was one of those days I won’t soon forget. Dave started the fire to warm up coffee before the sun had actually risen and we packed up and lathered on sunscreen as the first rays shone over the surrounding mountains. We climbed Gebel Abu Shagara in about an hour and a half, had magnificent views of the sun rising over the Gulf of Aqaba and Saudi Arabia on the other side of the yellow glow. Turning 180 degrees, we could also see the Gulf of Suez and the African continent beyond. We continued down to the ruin of Dir-Antush, a monastery at the foot of Gebel Umm Shomar which used to secure the supply and pilgrimage routes between El Tur and the main St. Catherine’s monastery. It’s but a ruin now.  A few photos and we were off again. Coming across another opium garden, we met Mohammed and Ibrahim with whom we shared a few cookies as they boiled up water for tea in an old tin can. Mohammed the older man, was very warm hearted. I enjoyed the fifteen minute break to air out my blistering feet as he told us a bit about his life, the valleys in the area and what we would encounter the rest of the way down this one. I wish we could have stayed longer, but we knew that we had barely begun the day’s march.

Walking, jumping, scrambling through boulders and scaling down the dry waterfalls of Wadi Zeraiqiya  was quite fun albeit a bit precarious. Plant life abounded, but many palms were brown, a few green branches holding on. It must have been stunning when water flowed through there!  The valley eventually opened up into a long sandy stretch, the high mountains looming above and looking very alpine-like. We devoured a lunch of tuna and bread on a boulder in cool shadows before starting the climb around 13:30. Up, up up, climbing to no end and feeling weak we popped peanuts and split a chocolate bar, bits of energy refueling the body… Our water was running low… Still no choice but up up up, not sure what was at the top, or even where the top was. A photo of a 1927 map and Dave’s GPS points were all we had guiding us. We did finally arrive, exhausted, at the top of Wadi el Quein just as the sun was setting. Another beautiful view of the Gulf of Suez would be our last vista of the day. There is something grand about catching a mountaintop sunrise and mountaintop sunset in the same day. Closer to the Gulf now, we could clearly see the shadows of the container ships that supply our so called flat world, all waiting in line for their turn through the canal; Egypt’s second largest source of income after tourism. Economics really didn’t matter at that point though; we were home in Wadi Gibal, the peaks surrounding us now all familiar. After a few “we have conquered” photos, we kept on walking, now high on adrenaline. The last rays of sun and a couple planets rising behind us only added to the beautiful feeling. For the next two hours, we would trek with our headlamps, exhausted (adrenaline fades quickly) from our 12 hr walk, but somehow still marching under a beautiful blanket of stars. It feels so good to push yourself, and I’m glad I have people like Dave around who push me beyond what I believe to be my limits, no way I’d be living these adventures on my own! 

 

 

I’ll miss this place, and my job here. It’s all winding down now. The next few days we’ll put the finishing touches on the products, I’ll finish all the Google Earth mapping, will keep helping the trainees with e-mails (they’re answering real inquiries now) and organizational tasks all the while slowly starting my good-bye rounds.  It’s been such a privilege to discover Sinai, its deserts, mountains and especially its people.  I’ll be back inshaallah for more solace… and adventure.