Day 6 – Into the Desert

It’s a short post today – mostly a travel day. Our plan for the day: to leave the hustle-and-bustle of Cairo we had grown accustomed to for the peace and calm of the Sinai desert. As I mentioned in the previous post, it was about an 8-hour bus ride from Cairo to the town of Saint Katreen (St. Katherine). This small town is significant because it is located at the base of Mt. Sinai. There is a monastery – St. Katherine’s Monastery – at the bottom of the mountain that has become a common tourist stop after scaling the mountain. There really aren’t many other places in the world that are so historically significant to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s a common stop for tours in Egypt. But, you’ll hear much more about Mt. Sinai in tomorrow’s post …

The bus ride was actually very pleasant. It was an air-conditioned bus and the roads were very smooth, which was a nice change from the typical Ugandan buses and roads. On the ride, I did a combination of reading, sleeping, listening to music, and looking out the window as we traveled away from civilization and into the middle of nowhere.

We stayed at a place called the Desert Fox Camp. It’s a little Bedouin camp run by, well, Bedouins. The main sitting and eating area is just a bunch of cushions on the ground under a “tent” made of blankets held up by wooden poles. It really was pretty authentic. Maybe not quite as remote as some Bedouin who live in obscure mountain areas, but we were okay with that. After a delicious dinner and some talking around the campfire, we hit the sack, for we knew that the start of our next day was only hours away …