Will I Ever Return to Mount Sinai?

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Our strangest hotel stay was at Morganland Village near Mt. Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery. It was nestled in a stunning setting surrounded by peaks of the Sinai range. A swimming pool dominates the middle of the complex and the hundreds of low rise rooms encircling it. Inside and around the main building there is a bevy of Bedouin vendors selling photos, tee shirts and hiking sticks with little flashlights for night climbs. But because travellers come typically for one night, enough time for a visit to the monastery and maybe Mt. Sinai, there is no personality to the place. Two of the three nights we stayed there, we were the only guests in the cavernous, echoey dining room. Just us and three obsequious waiters. It unnerved us just a little.

Judy was nervous about the prospect of a 7504 foot climb up a steep trail that would begin at one in the morning with a Bedouin guide whom we had not met or had recommended. It would not only be a physical challenge going up, but our descent the following morning meant walking in the heat – deprived of sleep.

We might not have gone had we not met a young family in the hotel lobby who had just returned from the climb. Not only did the parents and two young children do the hike, they loved it and insisted that we do it. So off we went, leaving the hotel at one in the morning.

Our guide a twenty-one year old Bedouin man named Mohamed became our best and most trusted friend for the next twelve hours.

The trail was pitch black except for our lighted walking sticks. It was well-worn, gravelly and ten feet wide. There had been fifteen or twenty pilgrims gathered at the monastery walls ready to climb as Moses had those hundreds of years ago. Most of them were young travellers who had journeyed the two hundred and forty kilometres by bus from Sharm El-Sheikh on the Red Sea. Either they had forty years on us or we had forty years on them but, whichever way you looked at it,clearly we were in separate elements.

For the next four and a half hours I slowly made my way up the path, following Judy, carrying a day pack with water, food and jackets for the cold of the summit. It is a serious climb, over 7500 feet in elevation. I felt my heart rate elevate within five minutes of the start and slow down during breaks. I thought of tough canoe trips I had been on when I had to count on every ounce of my physical and mental stamina, running at twenty below zero and feeling my chest expand with every breath, and that familiar feeling of being alive came right back. I was living in the here and the now under the Sinai night sky filled with billions of stars. The sky’s endless blanket studded with blinking, darting and shimmering lights forced us to stand still from time to time struggling to understand what we were witnessing – to recognize that Moses himself might have stood right here, catching his breath, astonished at what he beheld.

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Graham Howard is a former teacher and lawyer who now writes, tutors and runs as much as possible.
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