Mount Sinai and Dahab

After returning to Cairo for a couple of days to wait for my Syrian visa to come through, I took a bus from Cairo to Dahab, on the Gulf of Aqaba coast of the Sinai peninsula, north of Sharm ash Shaykh.

The Pyramids, Cairo, the ruins at Luxor, and Abu Simbel are all interesting. But the nicest place in all Egypt is the Sinai.

Go to Sinai. Climb Mt Sinai in the daytime, and spend the night on the summit. Hang out in Dahab for a week.

The Sinai is pretty bleak. However, it is largely a baksheesh-free zone. And so it seems like you have left Egypt for another country.

U.S. government map of Sinai, Gebel Katherina and Gebel Musa (Mount Sinai) to Dahab.

After a night or two in Dahab, I stored my pack and took a bus to Mount Sinai.

You can see the road running inland from Dahab. We're headed for the area marked with "ruins", "monastery", "building" and "church" in this U.S. government chart. The bus can get you to a small settlement not too far from the monastery. However....

Detail of Gebel Katherina and Gebel Musa (Mount Sinai).

This detail shows some confusing markings.

The peak marked with an elevation of 8,626 feet is the highest point in the Sinai, actually the highest point in all of Egypt. It is correctly labeled as Gebel Katherina, gebel being Arabic for mountain. It is pronounced with a hard "g" as in "goat" in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, with a soft "g" as in "gentle" elsewhere, as in Jordan and Syria. And let's just ignore how Egyptian Arabic pronounces "g" hard despite the name Egypt having a soft "g", lest we wander into confusion over how the Egyptian name for Egypt is actually Misr....

Anyway, the confusing or possibly wrong thing about this chart is that it marks Gebel Katherina as also being Mount Sinai, while that second name is generally applied to the second tallest peak in Egypt, the mountain directly to its north.

Gebel Musa, the traditional Mount Sinai, is the peak not labeled here but shown with a building at its peak.

The square labeled "monastery" is the Monastery of Saint Katherine.

The open circle above the "n" in "monastery" is the village of Al Milga. The inland bus from Dahab runs to Al Milga, but you should be able to get the driver to drop you at that road intersection, halfway between the village and the monastery, saving you a kilometers or two of walking.

The approach described below traces a sort of backwards "S" shape from the monastery — starting toward the southeast toward a ridgeline, making a 180° turn to your right and climbing, then a tighter 180° turn and climbing much more steeply through the final third of the total elevation gain.

The building labeled as being at the peak is a rather small chapel, as you'll see below. But as you'll also see below, there isn't much of anything else in the area, and so even a small chapel stands out as an aviation landmark when it's a light color and isolated on a peak.

Here you see the mountain itself.

It's known locally as Gebel Musa, or the Mountain of Moses. The summit is at 2272m (7455 feet).

This view is from the approach, walking from the village of Al Milga toward the monastery at the mountain's base.

The Monastery of Saint Katherine is at the base of Mount Sinai.

In the past 100 years a number of very significant early documents have been found in its library — for example the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th-century Greek Bible written in 330-350 CE. Its library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. Major texts are in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, and Syriac texts.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament. It originally had about 1,487 pages. It was split up, with pieces going to Russia, England, and Germany. Some pages were lost along the way, just 823 of the original pages are available today. CodexSinaiticus.org lets you access all of its pages available today.

Mount Sinai is behind the monastery and to the right in this picture.

Here I am starting up the winding path to the summit of Mt Sinai.

The sane approach is to take the relatively gentle "camel path", known as Siket El Bashait, and climb the mountain during the day.

Looking back from just a little way up the camel path, you see the Monastery of Saint Katherine back down the valley. The road intersection is further back down that valley, and the village of Al Milga is around the mountain to your left in this view.

Here is the view looking up at the summit of Mt Sinai from the path. A white spot is barely visible just to the left of the highest point. That is the small Greek Orthodox chapel at the summit.

At right you see the view looking north across the Sinai mountains from about half-way up Gebel Musa.

At left you see where the camel path joins the Stairs of Repentance near the summit. It's a 3750-step staircase.

Consider that name very carefully — unless your goal is repentance, the camel path is the preferable route!

Elijah's Spring is a very small spring near the summit. It has a few hardy trees and shrubs, probably the only naturally occuring green plants for a hundred kilometers.

Elijah, whose Hebrew name El-i Jahu means My God is Yahweh, was a prophet in the 9th century BC who appears in the Hebrew and Christian Bible and the Qur'an. He spent time in the wilderness, living in a cave on Mount Horeb. It seems that Mount Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai, the name Mount Horeb is used more often than Mount Sinai in the Bible.

This view of Elijah's Spring is from the Stairs of Repentance from close to the summit.

Finally, at the summit!

This is the small Greek Orthodox chapel at the summit. In the far distance the view is toward the west, toward the western coast of Sinai.

Below, just in front of the chapel, you see the rough roof of one of the lean-to tea huts run by some Bedouins at the summit.

At right you see the view to the north from the summit in the afternoon.

Facilities are limited, these are the pit toilets that appear to date back to the era of Moses.

Gebel Katherina is just out of view to the right, and further away than the peaks seen here.

I brought some water, some juice, and something to eat. And then I rented some heavy wool blankets from the Bedouin tea hut. It's hot in the day, but pretty cold at night. Desert, mountain, all that stuff.

Only three of us had the good sense to climb the mountain during the afternoon and stay the night on the summit. It's a spectacular place to spend the night — more stars than you can imagine, and the Hale-Bopp comet was very prominent when I spent the night.

About 0430 you're rudely awakened by a mob that has done a fast forced march up the Stairs of Repentance during the night. They arrive just in time to see sunrise and then march back down again. Here we are hiking back down with said mob.

Then it was back to Dahab for a couple of days that turned into a week and a half.

Lots of places to stay for next to nothing, all sorts of places to hang out. Here it's a clear day and you can see all the way across the Gulf of Aqaba to the Magic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I met a guy who did maintenance work at a Canadian-run hospital over in Saudi Arabia. He described it as like a medium-security penal colony. Walled in, in the middle of the desert, you could only leave the compound with special permission (that you generally couldn't get). Once every six months he had a chance to leave briefly. And bizarrely he really liked it and was looking forward to signing up for another year.

He had a couple of interesting stories about Saudi Arabia. One is that there is good money in being a distributor of Nyquil cold medicine and Aqua-Velva aftershave. Since you can get drunk drinking them and they're legal to possess in Saudi Arabia, they go for a lot of money. When you go down to the beach in the morning, you find empty Nyquil and Aqua-Velva bottles everywhere.

And speaking of empty bottles on the beach, wealthy Saudi families like to "take part" in cleanup programs. What they do — send their Bangladeshi indentured servants down to the beach or the roadside to clean up the real trash. Then they plant a few pre-selected clean empty items. Then the family sweeps up in their air-conditioned luxury cars, jumps out and picks up the few pieces of planted "trash" in a few seconds, and jumps back into the cars.

There's great diving right around there, and even better at the Blue Hole just a little way up the coast.

The Gulf of Aqaba, the body of water between the eastern coast of the Sinai and Saudi Arabia, is deep and it drops off quickly close to shore.

It's a part of the Great Rift Valley running through East Africa, up the center of the Red Sea, north through the Gulf of Aqaba and on to end in the rift valley containing the Dead Sea.

The Red Sea is famous for its wealth of coral and fish.

The Muhamed Aly Camp was very nice, it's right by where the Bedouin pickup truck rides from the bus stations in town stop. 5 EL (US$ 1.50) for a basic hut or 10 EL (US$ 3) for a nicer one. All of them within a stone's throw of the waterline. Great food in all the waterfront places.

There are plenty of places to hang out. Dahab has a great atmosphere.

If you're going to travel in an Arabic-speaking country, learn how to read Arabic numerals!

Really these are Hindu numerals, as adopted and used by the Persians and Arabic speaking people. This was when Europe, to the extent it used numbers at all, used Roman numerals.

Hindu mathematicians had developed positional numeral systems — the concept of the ones digit, the tens digit, the hundreds digit, and so on. They had also developed the concept of a numeral to indicate zero. Roman numerals had none of that, making them useless for calculation and cumbersome for simple record keeping.

The Arab mathematicians picked up the numeral system from India in the early 800s. The writing system was slightly changed — the Hindu or Devangari digits 0-9 were:
० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९
and the eastern Arabic numerals are:
٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩

About 825 AD the Persian mathematician Muhamman ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (Muhammad, the father of Jafar, son of Musa, the Khwarizmian) wrote a work titled On Calculation with Hindu Numerals. This is the same al-Khwarizmi whose name is the basis for the word algorithm.

Al-Khwarizmi was called that because he was from the Khwarizm region south of the Aral Sea, near Khiva, along the Amu Darya river between today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

In 1145 the Englishman Robert of Ketton translated al-Khwarizmi's treatise on algebra (yet another Arabic word) in Latin, opening it with "Dexit Algorithmi ..." or "Algorithmi says ...", leading to today's word "algorithm".

In the early 1200s Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, had learned about Hindu-Arabic numerals in North Africa and introduced them to Europe.

Interested in using any of my pictures? I have high-resolution versions of all of these. Contact me if you are interested in using any. The answer is generally "yes" as long as I get credit and a copy of the result.

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