6:15 am. We are riding in a taxi through the Sinai. The road curves ahead through ragged mountains, layered brown red and purple in the sunrise, but I’m looking somewhere else. The steering wheel blocks my view of the odometer, I can only see that the needle is buried somewhere faster than 140 km/ph. Luckilly there aren’t many cars to get in our way at this hour. Meg asks me how to say slow down in Arabic but I don’t respond because … because it’s Egypt. We’d hoped to catch some sleep on this ride but the scenery and the speed foil that plan.

This wasn’t the 1^st taxi ride that caused us to lose sleep. Coming from Mt Sinai to Dahab we shared a car with two Russian lawyers (who prefer hitchhiking). The problem was our driver, Ismael, who had hounded us day and night to ride with him. There is not much of a job market for the Bedouin of the Sinai, and many of the jobs in the tourism industry are taken by people who move from the Nile valley, so they are left to scrape a living as they always have, out of transportation, (appropriate for people who used to be nomadic) only with taxis and trucks rather than camels and donkeys. But apparently while we were climbing the mountain, he wasn’t sleeping either. He ran in at a bakery to get bread (which was then thrown unceremoniously and unbagged into the greasy trunk of the taxi) and our Russian co-rider leaned over to tell us: “I will try to keep talking to him, but he is sleeping.” And in the rearview on the resumed ride we saw that every 10 seconds his eyes closed and his head knodded forward. An odd three way line of questioning and deliriousness ensued with Meg coming up with progressively stranger questions to ask the driver, me translating, him answering, and me translating back. Followed by a pause of silence, another nod of the head and drooping of the eyes, and another despratlely loud and engergized random question. We asked about his family, we asked where he was from. We asked what the hell was that strange pink sac that camels choke out of their mouths and back in with alarming guttural groans. (The answer, thorough mimed depictions of puberty, seems to be that it is a that it is a mating call.) No wonder Egyptian camels have a hard time breeding and many have to be imported from Sudan!

1/07/08 was Coptic Christmas and we left at 2 am that morning to climb mt. Sinai, (moses, burning bush, ten commandments, golden calf worship). 3 ½ hours, 4 “café” stops, 1 hot chocolate, and 750 stairs later we were on top of the mountain watching the sun come up and the mountains slowly unveil themselves of the night. Us and a few hundred tourists. We’d brought up our sleeping bags to ward off the cold and squirmed around like a pair of green and blue giant slugs trying to stay warm and see the main event. We drew many looks teetering between disgust and entertainment. A group of Columbians nearby sang their national anthem. I accidentally interrupted a praying nun, asking her to take our picture (she was very tight lipped and quiet about her praying!) The second that the sun was fully up, the few hundred tourists minus 4 (us and the two Russians) were on their way back down, exhaustion from exhertion, thin air, and lack of sleep made us incredulous as to why people wouldn’t stick around for just a bit longer, but it worked out well since we got the mountaintop to ourselves. It took us 12 hours all in all from when we left out hotel for the climb, utill we came back down, had lunch and clambered into the sleepy taxi.

The 2^nd pyramid at giza had a few parallels to this Mt. Sinai climb. Mainly the feeling of wanting to turnback. Before we left to ascend the mountain we were freezing at our Bedouin camp/hotel, and the prospect of hiking for hours on no sleep or getting half way up the mountain and having numb toes with no way to warm them made us trepidacious at best. Similarly, we entered Khafre’s pyramid light heartedly joking, but as soon as we were doubled over descending to an unknown depth, feeling the air get hotter, thicker more humid, knowing the passage was too packed to allow a quick exit, knowing how many tons of rock were above our heads… there were at least two moments where both Meg and I wanted to turn around. But we went down the shaft and we went up the mountain regardless. At the top of mt Sinai everyone left before us and we had the place to ourselves. After a few minutes In Khafre’s burial chamber we looked around and found that we were between the ebb and flow of the tourist tide, and that for a moment, we had the tomb chamber all to ourselves! We celebrated: