Pt1 - 8: LET MY PEOPLE GO: CLIMBING MT SINAI

 

We stumbled down into the dust and dragged our packs from the belly locker. Ali had just informed us that the next bus to Nuweiba would be leaving in nine months; several of us who planned a life after Sinai found this revelation disturbing. A young American guy complained about missing an appointment with his cousin in Eilat as if it would somehow induce Ali to admit he was joking and promise to lay on a bus for our convenience two days hence. Unfortunately, Ali was one hundred percent serious and drove off in search of a feed. We decided we’d already travelled far enough with Captain Deadeye and there had to be a better way to get to Nuweiba, but we’d worry about that tomorrow. For now the priority was finding somewhere to crash…er, sleep. While we fiddled with our harnesses the little group dispersed into the night and we looked up to find ourselves quite alone.

A place called the Al Fairoz looked like the best bet in the guidebook but the directions were a little vague. The night air was nippy as we hauled on out packs for the first time in anger and set off at a brisk pace past the little tourist village for the hill behind. There seemed to be more life up there than anywhere else we could see. Half way up the slope and already wilting under the weight on our backs we encountered a young man leaning on a lamppost in a circle of dim light. He understood enough English to tell us we were going the wrong way. “Come, I take you,” he offered.

In silence we staggered back past the village and along the road that had brought us into town. There was another clutch of stalls and shops on the right-hand side and here our friend pointed us further down the road and signed by swiping his palms together and arcing away with his left hand that we should take the next turn in that direction.

We lurched off into the darkness, pausing for a breather every few metres. We’d never carried our packs any further than a couple of laps around the lounge room in Bridgetown and it was rapidly becoming apparent that we were kidding ourselves. What we thought was the absolute minimum we could survive with was well beyond the maximum we might reasonably shoulder for any distance, especially over challenging terrain, and so there would need to be a ruthless rationalisation very soon or we’d be taking ruptured hernias home for souvenirs.

As we crested a shallow rise we met the young German couple who’d sat behind us on the bus. They’d already installed themselves in the Al Fairoz and directed us to the office.

The guidebook described the accommodation at the Al Fairoz as “…private doubles with attached toilet and shower…” which made it sound like a three star hotel. We subsequently discovered this to be a misprint. It should have read “…double toilet with attached fire hose.” Room 4 contained four single beds dressed with sheets that might have been left behind by Moses, while the bathroom – and I use the term loosely – turned out to be a concrete stall housing a seatless toilet bowl of dubious provenance and decorated with sinister looking stains, a chipped basin with broken taps and a headless pipe on the wall that delivered just enough freezing water to turn the floor into a shallow swimming pool. It was as cosy as a fridge and in the Awfully Big Adventure Guide to Budget Accommodation rated 2 black holes.

We rugged up, locked our gear in the room and wandered back into town for a feed. We found a little place – restaurant is too grand a word for it – where we partook heartily of hot tomato soup and chicken and rice with pitta bread. The host was friendly and the food was tasty and we returned to the Al Fairoz much refreshed.

It was nearly 11 by the time we let ourselves back into room 4. We wisely decided the day had been long and gruelling enough without setting ourselves to rise at 2am for the ascent to see the sunrise. Sunset tomorrow would do handsomely. We pushed two beds together, zipped the two sleeping bags into one and fortified ourselves with a few slugs of the Cointreau before retiring fully clothed.

 

*

 

We rose late, closed the door on room 4, walked across the dusty compound and turned right down the hill in clear, cool sunshine. Bare stony hills, creased and gouged with purple shadows, reared picturesquely all around the settlement. I deeply inhaled the fresh, earthy fragrances of the desert. We paused for omelettes and sweet tea at the strange little café at the bottom of the hill and mosied on into the CBD. The stalls were disappointing; I’d hoped to find some silver but there was precious little of interest among the tea towels, postcards, and keffiyahs. We crossed to the tourist village to assess our options for getting to Nuweiba and spotted the young American from the bus stop stretched out on a bench at a table on the forecourt.

”No luck with Nuweiba then?” I asked, rousing him from his rest.

He lifted his head from the small pack he was using as a pillow, shielded his eyes from the sun and said, “Hey, how’re you doin’,” just like Sylvester Stallone. He sat up and we sat down. He looked like a young Stallone in his grubby blue jeans and black t-shirt. It turned out he’d gone straight from the bus stop to the top of the mountain and slept there till sunrise; he even behaved like Stallone. This was extreme endurance in my opinion; it can’t have been much above zero in our bed at the Al Fairoz so up there without a teddy bear to cuddle it would have been appreciably less, and he was travelling light with neither sleeping bag nor sturdy jacket for warmth. He had only just arrived back in the village.

We bought strong coffees and spent a couple of hours learning that his name was Christopher, he was 23, from Boston and worked in a bar. He’d slipped on to the bus in Suez, which explained why we didn’t recognise him from Abbassiya. He’d been on the road for three months and got seriously pissed on Australia Day with a bunch of antipodeans in Vienna. He showed us some snaps where the red-eye wasn’t all flash induced, gave us his map of the Austrian capital and recommended a few places to see there. I would carry that map for the next 117 days, all the way to Vienna, and never use it.

Despite his claim of last night the appointment in Eilat was not at all pressing and his plan for Nuweiba was to catch the 1pm bus to Dahab, alight at the turn off to Nuweiba and bum a lift from there. Failing that he’d have to share a taxi, though his budget was barely up to it. Once in Nuweiba he would decide whether to continue on to Taba near Eilat on the Israeli border or catch a boat to Aqaba in Jordan. He wanted to visit Petra so he was inclined towards the latter, but events would dictate the agenda. All this was of interest to us because within the next 24 hours we’d be facing the same dilemma and I was keen to piggyback on his research.

Around 12:45, while Tess and I hoed into a lunch of falafel and beans, Christopher wandered over to enquire about the bus for Dahab. He trudged back in short order. “What kind of bus doesn’t come?” he asked as he sat down beside us again.

“An Egyptian one,” I observed helpfully.

Around 1:15 we left Christopher with the offer of a bunk in room 4 if he couldn’t jag a taxi tonight and the promise that tomorrow we would share a car to Nuweiba with him. As we shook hands and Tess and I wandered off towards the Al Fairoz to gird our loins for the assault on Sinai I had a sense we’d cross paths with him again, even if not today.

Back at the AF we organised our day packs with the bottled water and nibblies we’d picked up at the little supermarket in the village, all the woollies we possessed – coats, gloves, beanies, scarves – and my $2.50 plastic torch. At 2:30pm sharp we stepped out for the mountain.

Yea verily, but it was a splendid afternoon for a stroll and we felt empowered by our newly acquired status as Freelance Travellers. Instead of taking a right into the village we veered left and strode jauntily down the paved road on the other side of the hill in the direction of the Monastery of St Catherine. It was no mystery where the town found its building materials; from certain angles the stone houses, many of them slapdash and with an unfinished feel to them, were invisible against the loose rubble and scree of the surrounding slopes.

In thirty minutes we were walking past the monastery at the base of the mountain. Sinai is synonymous with miracles and one of the most striking is that St Catherine’s has escaped destruction for more than fourteen centuries and remains pretty much in original condition. It is built on the site where in Christian mythology god spoke to Moses from the burning bush and called him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. As if the bush wasn’t enough to capture Moses’ attention god also zapped the shepherd’s hand scabrous and turned his staff in to a snake. Seems like such a nice god, doesn’t he? The roots of the bush are said to survive beneath the eponymously named chapel.

The sanctuary was founded on the proud religious traditions of bloodshed, murder and persecution. The position wasn’t so lucky for the architect, who was executed by the Emperor Justinian for not building it on top of the mountain. It is named for a 7^th century martyr who escaped torture on the wheel of knives when it malfunctioned. Catherine’s reprieve was short-lived however, the Romans slit her throat anyway and her body somehow wound up on top of the holy mountain where it was later discovered.

The road became a path running between the low monastery wall on the right and a row of ragtag Bedouin stalls on the left. A solitary monk in a black robe wandered through the rocky garden in the monastery grounds. Camel touts offered their services as we neared the start of the track that would take us to the summit. At 3:20 we began our ascent.

The consensus was about two and a half hours for the climb, so we allowed three. We kept a steady pace as the well-trodden, clearly marked path steepened and began to zigzag through narrow cuttings in the rock. We soon passed a small band of pilgrims led by a venerable Greek Orthodox priest in full regalia and measuring his step with a long staff. If a man of his advanced years can make it all the way to the top then it should be a breeze for me I thought, but there was a long way to go yet and it was already beginning to demand my concentration.

The most persistent hazard in the early stages were the prodigious greeny-yellow camel turds densely littering the track. It took a certain athletic skill to negotiate the minefield, but despite a few rough passages and a scything wind which sprang up from the north as we gained altitude we settled into a smooth, steady rhythm. We rested regularly in the lee of the rocks and gradually applied more layers of clothing from the small wardrobe in our packs.

Traffic was patchy. Occasionally we came across small groups of trekkers but much of the time we could have been alone on the mountain. Bedouin camel byres with stalls tacked on the side selling hot and cold drinks and food appeared with increasing frequency. The earth changed colour from a light sandy brown to a deep red ochre which coated our boots.

The panorama unfolded until we reached the halfway mark, by which time we were well above most of the surrounding features. The high cloud beginning to roll in promised a spectacular sunset. The monastery was speck on the valley floor in the middle of a dry landscape tortured over millennia into fantastic shapes like a vast poppadum overdone in a microwave. There is a raw power in this immense desolation which makes you feel quite irrelevant.

I prefer to imagine it was the thinning atmosphere that caused us to huff and puff the higher we climbed but the naked truth is we were beginning to struggle by the three-quarter post, which lay in the shadow of an imposing rock wall which stood implacable between us and the summit. As we fortified ourselves for this final stage with chocolate and water the Greek Orthodox patriarch breezed by with his little brood of pilgrims in tow and disappeared over the next crest in the path. Whatever he was on we needed some.

Threading our way carefully between steaming camel pats we followed the trail along the base of the wall till we came to a narrow cleft in the rock. We forged through it into the teeth of a bitterly cold gale that stretched our facial skin, exposing our gums and instantly freezing our dentures. I fancy we must have looked like the walking dead. The narrow passage funnelled the wind into a howling maelstrom; it felt and sounded like being inside a jet engine and I thought it was Judgement Day. I silently repented my dissolute ways and begged forgiveness for being expelled from Sunday school when I was eight, though I could take comfort from the fact I was Junior Bible Quiz champ two years running before getting the boot. Being a godless soul I didn’t think anything of the sort of course, but it sure seemed like the end of days for a while there.

After what must have been about ten minutes we stumbled out onto a flat protected area among low rocks. Two small chapels conformed to the guidebook’s description of Elijah’s Hollow; if he arrived here via the wind tunnel it’s no wonder he heard voices. Behind us rose the vertical Steps of Repentance, hewn into the rock and twisting away into invisibility. Legend has it a single monk constructed the 3000 stairs as an act of contrition, but it was clear to us as we mounted them for the final push to the top they’d really been devised by the Marquis de Sade.

Uneven and crumbling, the steps were downright treacherous and required a biblical endurance to tackle them. I’m sure it was just an oxygen deficiency that brought on the dizzy spells and hallucinations, but as I hacked ever upward I began to formulate my own theory about why this place is so rife with stories of miracles, visions and celestial voices. It had nothing at all to do with my besieged brain trying to blot out the pain from my protesting legs. We staggered, lurched and clawed our way skyward for the next half hour or so, at one stage making way for the smiling Greek Orthodox patriarch as he led his people nimbly back to earth. Had I not been otherwise occupied in conserving my failing energies I’d have cheerfully elbowed him over the edge.

At 5:15 we paused to take stock. We’d reckoned on a 6:30 sunset but the long shadows seeping rapidly into the burnished orange landscape suggested it would be much sooner. We simply had to go harder. We’d just set off again when the Germans from the bus came down. “Only another half hour,” they chortled and swept on by. I didn’t let anyone see me cry.

They’d been having a little German joke with us because just 15 minutes later we hauled ourselves frothing at the mouth and mumbling incoherently up the last few steps to the summit. We sat there laughing at each other’s purple noses poking out of our woollies like a pair of drunken Himalayan mountaineers.

The views would have taken our breath away had the altitude, exhaustion and bitter cold not beaten them to it. It says a lot for my state of mind that I imagined myself a dust mite standing on a zit and scanning a surface of bruised skin. With barely minutes to go before it sank behind the hills of the central Sinai a dense cloud obscured enough of the sun to render the rounded peaks in charcoal. Their flanks captured the spears of light escaping through fissures in the cloud and gave the land an inflamed look that contrasted starkly with the icy air.

Feeling as though we’d conquered Everest we squatted on the bare rock in front of the chapel and watched the sun descend. It was 5:45 and we’d gained the top with just enough time to compose ourselves for the spectacle.

It was too chilly to sit still for long. I took my gloves off to open the can of tuna we’d brought with us for dinner and fumbled the job badly when my fingers went numb. Tess managed to spread the contents on the bread rolls and as we wolfed them down in the gathering darkness we suddenly realised we’d had the sunset entirely to ourselves.

We made our way round the rocks to the other side of the chapel and found a handful of people admiring the view to the east. It was dramatic; there was just enough pastel pink light to tell that we stood virtually on top of the rugged rock wall we’d seen from the three-quarter post and the uninterrupted vista gave out over the barren valleys far below.

There was a Bedouin stall here and the young man had water boiling on a spirit stove. We bought scalding coffee in Styrofoam cups and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate and took shelter in his lean-to. The spirit stove wasn’t much of a space heater so the Bedouin huddled beside it wrapped in a thin blanket and kept the pot simmering. I asked him what time he went down the mountain.

“I am here all night,” he said glumly. “I am here for the dawn when many people come.” Surely he didn’t live up here? “I am from the village. Tomorrow someone will come up and I will go down.” The observation that not too many people could claim the privilege of running a refreshment stall on top of one of the world’s most sacred mountains didn’t seem to make him feel any better.

In a performance worthy of Mr Bean I managed to take off my jeans, slip on my long johns and get the jeans back on without removing my coat. It didn’t concern my Bedouin host that I fell all over the place in the process and almost incinerated us when I bumped the spirit stove. Indeed he was politeness itself.

The wind dropped appreciably, reducing the chill factor to a balmy minus 30. The other folks were overnighting for the dawn, brave souls, so at 6:20 I fired up the $2.50 torch and off we went alone down the Steps of the Sadist.

Before we reached the first landing of sorts the last faint rays of day had faded on the far horizon. I took the rear and played the torch down the steps in front of Tess, all our attention focussed intensely on the little pool of yellow light. We travelled thus for ages, talking each other up and urging each other on. At length we came to Elijah’s Hollow, passed through the wind tunnel – now eerily still – and, keeping a third eye out for camel crap, followed the stony path back along the base of the wall until we came to the first Bedouin stall on the way down. Here, I remembered, the path took a sharp left. With the steps out of the way I assumed the lead and with eyes fixed firmly on the ground at my feet pushed on for several hundred meters until I suddenly came up against a boulder and realised the path had evaporated and I’d momentarily lost the way.

As a former Sydney taxi driver I don’t do getting lost and it was bad enough to have strayed from a well-trodden track without Tess rubbing it in with unseemly relish.

We tried backtracking but ended up where we started so we took a breather and assessed the situation. I doused the torch in the hope I’d be able to pick up something in the landscape to take a bearing from, a light or a silhouette. Surely we’d make out the torches of other climbers on the one true path. Not so. For the first time in my life I beheld a truly total darkness; it was too early for the stars, too late for ambience and the world was a wall of black. The silence and the stillness were profound; not a movement, not even an insect rustling in the undergrowth broke the spell of complete sensory absence. It was deeply calming, peaceful and, yes, the closest thing I’ve had to a spiritual experience since I sampled my first 12 year old single malt.

This new mellowness had an immediate effect. I passed the plastic torch of command to Tess. At that precise moment I couldn’t have cared less if we’d groped around the mountain all night. We had enough nuts, chocolate and water to sustain us, we were warmly dressed and as long as we kept descending it stood to reason we’d eventually reach the bottom. Worst case scenario was waiting for the lights of the sunrise climbers to materialise around 3, but we’d freeze solid just hanging around so we needed to move.

After due consideration the navigator prodded the darkness and said, “This way.” Tess is one of the few people I know who can get lost going down a flight of stairs and ordinarily I’d be tempted to go in exactly the opposite direction, but I’d surrendered the baton and followed without protest. It wasn’t long, however, before I began to feel things weren’t entirely right. I didn’t recognise any features we passed and had a nagging sense we were still tracking laterally along the base of the wall rather than trending downwards, but I kept my own counsel. I’d stuffed up and it was Tess’s turn to lead us from the wilderness. Delightfully, she led us further into the wilderness instead. It was a hoot, the best laugh we’d both had in ages, and I wondered how far our deranged giggling travelled in the void. Someone somewhere on the mountain that night is probably dining out on the story of how they heard the voice of god on Sinai and, verily, but he sounded like a pair of loonies in an echo chamber.

This went on for half an hour or more; forward ten meters, back five, take a detour here, end up there, hello again rock face. The one positive sign was heaps of fresh camel poop on the path. In the beam of a torch camel shit looks like an exotic fruit, almost good enough to eat. Just thought I’d mention that.

At last we came to a blank wall of cold stone. The mountain, scattered here with loose rubble, fell away steeply to our left and rose just as steeply to our right. We killed the torch. Enough faint stars had come out to describe the profile of the brow above us against the night sky and we could make out the massive wall. By the time we retraced our steps and regained the one true path an hour had elapsed since our leaving it.

Cadbury’s chocolate, a fag and then headlong for the monastery.

This was the stage that really wrecked us, especially me. We virtually ran the whole way down the mountain, when we weren’t slipping, tripping or tumbling that is. We skidded round corners and hurtled past the Bedouin stalls closed up before the 2am ascent. The rocks bit into our boots. The lights of the monastery appeared as we crested a saddle and shortly afterwards we were on the flat and picking our way through the rocks. A camel loomed in the torch beam and scared the bejeezus out of me. “Shit Abdul!” I said, “Don’t do that.” It made a noise like a fart under a bedsheet and a Bedouin voice came out of the darkness, “Thees way, thees way.”

“Shukran,” I said as I made my way around the beast.

Tess helped me shuffle up the last slope to the Al Fairoz. My feet throbbed, I was fairly weeping with the pain in my legs and my pelvis was on backwards. It was 10:15 when we finally staggered into room 4 and collapsed on the bed. When Tess removed my boots I expected to see blood. There wasn’t any. “Cheer up,” she said, “It’ll be worse the day after tomorrow.” Instead of holding my dirty socks to her nose until she surrendered, which is what she deserved for such thoughtless levity at my expense, I reminded her it was two weeks to the day since we’d flown out of Perth, congratulated her on being so marvellous and prescient in buying the Cointreau and wasn’t it fortunate the little man in Jeddah had been so nice to us after all.

A few slugs and I was out of my misery.

 

*

 

Since he hadn’t shown last night we guessed Christopher had found his way to Nuweiba so the problem remained for us to secure our own transport. Four young Japanese backpackers were at the tourist village on the same mission and we quickly formed an alliance with them for a taxi to the coast. We bargained with a Bedouin driver and climbed in to his battered Renault wagon. The driver wanted two more bodies if he could get them and on the way out to St Catherine’s where he hoped to find them we came across the young Germans walking into town. On an impulse I told the driver to pull over and asked the Germans if they cared to join us.

“Yes, of course,” the guy jumped at the chance. “But were are so unprepared, we must get our packs at the hotel.” We drove them back to the Al Fairoz where they checked out, and we were off to the coast.

We arrived at the ferry terminal in Nuweiba just in time to be too late for the slow boat to Aqaba which was now drawing away from the wharf. Even from this distance we could see the passengers crammed like cattle on the decks. Three of the Japanese elected to push on to Taba so the driver dropped us off at the office where we could ticket up for the fast boat leaving at 4 this afternoon. This accomplished we repaired to the market along the waterfront from the terminal to burn off the intervening hours sipping sweet tea, eating oranges and trying to converse over the racket from an extremely loud TV broadcast of the People’s Congress of Libya or something.

Our German friends turned out to be Slovenes, Micha and Lea, on vacation from university in Ljubljana while the Japanese chap Yoshi had taken a year off work to travel the world. We passed a few hours swapping travel stories and plans and at 3 made our way over to catch the fast boat to Jordan.

Coming up: The Grand Poobah...