courtney's bad idea

It's OK. She gave me special dispensation to use said title. It really was a bad idea, but it wasn't the worst possible day. Considering the fact that we've had very little troubles traveling around Egypt, things could've been much much worse today. Still...it was not the best of days.

We started off at 7 a.m. from Shark's Bay, where we had to wake one of the taxi drivers sleeping under blankets on the sandy expanse outside our Bedouin camp. (Not really a camp. I'd give it a solid 3 stars.) We barely had energy to haggle over the price, but finally agreed and he delivered us to the Sharm bus station, where we caught the 7:30 bus to St. Catherine's Monastery.

The alleged three-hour bus ride turned into four with a stop in Dahab (woohoo--nobody bombed us!) and several stops in between for passport checks. Us being the naive Americans we are, left our passports behind not realizing our bus would be boarded roughly every 100 meters for a passport check. After several assertions of "American!" and a few attitude adjustments we both happily delivered to the grumpy soldiers, we finally arrived at St. Catherine's at 11:30.

But wait, there's still a healthy hike to the monastery's gates, where we arrive at 11:50 a.m. to discover that the monastery closes for the day at noon. After some sweet talking we finally get inside for about half an hour. The chapel is beautiful and just behind it is the "descendant" of the burning bush.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in the midst of all this, we'd found out there wasn't a 3 p.m. bus back to Sharm as we'd been told. In fact, the last bus back to Sharm left at 1 p.m. that day, giving us just one hour to peek in at the monastery and catch a glimpse of Mt. Sinai.

So...monastery closed and we scramble as far as we can up the camel's path to Mt. Sinai only to realize that it's behind another mountain blocking our view and that we have only 10 minutes to hike back down to the main road and catch our bus back. So... we didn't see Mt. Sinai but we did see the mountain in front of it. Ugh.

Finally we get back down to the road right at 1 p.m. and see our bus lumbering up to the stop, slow down, I step out to wave to the driver (same one as the morning), he goes over a speed bump and takes off. Dumbfounded, we're standing there as another man at the stop tells us that bus went to Cairo and not Sharm and there are no more buses to Sharm. After several more miscommunications and frustrating attempts, we started walking into town in the hopes of overpaying for a taxi back. Instead, a minibus with two Israeli tourists and a Korean couple stopped for us and gave us a ride into Nuweiba for 25 pounds and from there we arrived just in time for the last bus back to Sharm.

The upshot is we had an unexpected tour of the Sinai desert. It looks like a desert. With some pretty cool canyons in between.

12 hours later and we walked into our hotel. I've never been so happy to see a hotel in my life. I thought we'd be camping on Mt. Sinai for the night and losing a day in Jordan. Courtney thinks this day should be enough to reinstate my faith. I'd be more willing to consider it if the burning bush had actually talked to me.

So now we're back and sadly about to go eat our last meal on the beach (hoping for more of this in Greece!). Tomorrow morning we get back on the bus (boo) to Nuweiba at 9 a.m. and catch the 2:30 p.m. ferry to Aqaba, Jordan and from there will hopefully find a bus that doesn't desert us and instead takes us to Petra, where we'll crash for the night. We're planning a full day in Petra, a second night there and the much-anticipated Jordan Valley Marriott at the Dead Sea as the cherry on top.

It can't come soon enough.