In Moses' foot steps

It’s Friday evening. Eleven. We have just been driving for 8 hours and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I’m hungry and exhausted to point that everything is spinning around me.

Earlier that day we left Cairo in a rented car and made out way eastwards, to the Suez Channel, all the way through Sinai to the very tip, and up on the other side to Dahab – a small not (yet) very commercial divers spot mainly visited by young chilled out half hippies and reminding me strongly to the tiny Thai island Koh Tao. But we did not go diving.

The moment we left the car we hurried to a minibus that took us to the centre of Sinai into the very heart of the high mountains. After driving for about another 3 hours we go out and found ourselves in at 300 other tourists and more shockingly in 10 degrees celcius. After spending a ridiculous amount of money at the tourist shops, equipping ourselves with ponchos, scarfs and flashlights but still with empty stomachs we were set to go.

At 2 in the morning we started climbing up Mount Sinai, the highest mountain on Sinai, which is said to be the place where Moses received the ten amendments from God. It was the first time in some month that I saw the stars and I enjoyed. It was a weird hike: surely it will be 1st on my personal list of the most unpieceful hikes ever, with the hundreds of others storming up that mountain in the middle of the night – some screaming and others yelling in loudspeakers. It was for sure also the most commercial one, with kiosks at all 200 meters selling terribly overpriced water or trying to make you hire a camel that would take you up.

But it didn’t matter. Because I got to hike. I got to see the stars. I got to see the most amazing sunrise in my life and I had good company.

Once we arrived on the peak, we found ourselves some mattresses and blankets and where able to watch how the stars would disappear, the shapes of the mountains started be get clearer and the sky turned red. It was a pretty cool sunrise and I noticed that I was quite unaware of the beauty of Sinai, with its rough mountains.







We came down and looked at the monastery in which there is a bush that’s supposed to be the burning bush from 4000 years ago. There is also the body of the St. Kathrin, who was beheaded for her believe 1800 years ago in Alexandria, and who’s body was taken by an angel to some place far away. 300 years later they happened to find it on a mountain close to Mt. Sinai and identified it as Kathrin’s (astonishing, when you consider it was in the 4th century…)

Pondering over the credibility of many stories that are told, I was strolling around the oldest still used chapel in Christianity, which does give the feeling of eternity somehow. It’s hard to describe, but feels good.



I went for a huge fish that night. Fish soup, tuna salad and fish filet for dinner.