An account of part of the Newman Pilgrimage in 2007, From Egypt to the Promised Land — crossing the Sinai Desert, visiting St Katharine's Monastery and climbing Mount Sinai.
I wrote the following for a different audience, hence it is an accurate if sanitised account of part of the Newman Pilgrimage in 2007 From Egypt to the Promised Land.
We had explored Cairo and our aim for the next day was to cross the Sinai Desert, view the famous icons at St Katharine's Monastery, climb Mount Sinai (7,700 feet) and watch dawn break from the summit – using our imagination of Moses receiving the ten commandments.
We left Cairo early and stopped for lunch near the Suez Canal, then turned south beside the Gulf of Suez. It was a hot day and in spite of time pressures the temptation of the sea and sandy beaches became too strong: we stopped for an impromptu paddle. The scenery changed abruptly when we turned inland to a sandy desert with dried-up river beds and occasional scattered oases along the valley. In one of these dried-up river beds the coach developed a puncture. Fortunately there was an oasis nearby and even a rudimentary garage! We all dismounted from the coach and scattered across the small oasis, much to the consternation of our armed guard who had escorted us throughout Egypt.
Eventually the tyre was repaired and rather late in the day we set out for our final destination, St Katharine's Monastery in the middle of the Sinai Desert. It was getting dark when we reached St Katharine's and we were obviously not welcome.
We were able to see the Well of Jesse and the "burning bush" but to our eternal disappointment, and much grumbling, we were not allowed in the church to view the icons. Still, we had seen inside this fortress-like building which has provided a sanctuary from the surrounding desert for over a thousand years.
We were not expecting very high standards from our hotel, after all it was hundreds of miles from anywhere, but my wife's description of a "run-down holiday camp" says it all. After a meal I went straight to bed and slept until a wakeup call at about midnight, because ten of us had signed up to climb Mount Sinai. There were only ten from our party but there were many more from other groups.
A group of Bedouin came to offer their camels, at a price, for the trek up the mountain but something else caught my immediate attention. It turned out to be a metal detector gateway, the sort you would expect to see at an airport – not on a remote mountainside, several hundred miles from civilization! We all dutifully filed through this gateway, but the Bedouin and their camels seemed exempt. (I have often wondered how you would get a camel through a metal-detecting gateway; it could be a similar problem to getting a camel through the eye of a needle!)
The path up the mountain was boulder-strewn but well-marked, and I soon learned, the hard way, that camels have right of way. The Bedouin provided impromptu coffee stalls, one almost on the summit itself. Gradually the light improved and somewhere on the eastern horizon we could see signs of dawn. It was a disappointing sunrise, but we had accomplished what we set out to do. In daylight, and going downhill, the path was so much easier and I seemed to be down in no time.
A late start
On arrival at the Monastery I found our tour guide waiting impatiently. He had plans for an early start but some of the slower members of our party had other ideas. Eventually I persuaded our driver to return to the hotel so that some of us could, at least, have a shower and some breakfast. When the last of our party had been rounded up we were ready to start our trek across the last part of the Sinai Desert. We could have spent all day on this journey. We did not see any other traffic apart from a few camel trains and the scenery was stunning. Red sandstone cliffs rose above sandy desert as far as the eye could see and there was not a human habitation in sight.
All too soon, we arrived at Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aquaba for our departure by catamaran for the next stage of our journey to Jordan, Petra and Mount Nebo.
There was no need for the hurry: our guide had confused the time of our ferry and we had to wait many hours in a disgusting shed for our catamaran. So much had gone wrong in Egypt that I said "this the end of Newman Pilgrimages". Fortunately I was proved wrong!