spring warmth!

March 29, 2009
Well, its only 7am and I am already awake, on a SUNDAY!! Not usual for me, but it may be because for the past week I fell asleep at about 9 and woke up as the blazing sun worked its way through our curtains as it climbed over the mountains of Saudi Arabia…
Yes, I just got back from Egypt for a week! It all started about 3 weeks ago when my girlfriend and I started to discuss what we should do for our spring break. Egypt was thrown out there but I wasn’t very serious about it because of money, logistics, etc. We also thought about Norway but we didn’t really want more winter. Eventually, after confusion about where to reserve tickets for Egypt, etc. we booked a week-long trip to Nuweiba, on the Sinai Peninsula for 7 nights, at a 3 star hotel right on the beach. We had friends that had gone to this hotel back in December, and they had only good things to say about it. I went to Egypt about 4 years ago with my parents, so I sort of knew what to expect, but was a little off.
So on March 20th Megan and I headed to Donetsk where our flight was leaving at 6am Saturday morning. We stayed with another peace corps volunteer who lives close-by to the airport, which was nice because the weather had decided it didn’t want to be spring quite yet and was snowing and windy… we were ready to head to Egypt. Our first snag was when I tried to go through passport-control on the way out of Ukraine, and found out I didn’t have the required departure-form which you fill out when you come IN to Ukraine. The immigration officer kept asking in Russian where it was and I stubbornly kept saying, I don’t know, but I have a visa… After I went through he told Megan that he had noted this and I might have problems in the future…
So we arrived into Sharm Al Sheik after a 3 hour flight south, and started driving… (we thought North-west, but again were a little off) Megan and I had originally thought we would arrive at an airport only 40 minutes from out hotel, but I think due to not enough people wanting to go there we went to an airport over 2 hours away. We got off the plane, bought our visas, and headed out into the glorious Egyptian sun. We found a guy with a sign for our tour company, and he directed us towards a bunch of tourist buses, which of course we thought we were going to get on. Oh no, as we headed over a guy with what looked to be a brand new Audi, asked, are you the ones going to Nuweiba (in Russian), after we said yes he directed us to get in the car. Both megan and I were thinking, “what the heck?!” We realized that no one else was going to where our hotel was so we had this fancy car all to ourselves. After briefly talking with a tour agent in the front (who spoke very little English but excellent Russian, which was common there and which I was VERY surprised about) and driving over 200km an hour as I held tightly onto the “oh crap” handles in the back, we got to Nuweiba.
We pulled up to our hotel and they showed us to our room. The view was amazing, with beautiful shades of blue in front of us and mountains in all directions. I was a little confused though, since I thought Hurghada and the rest of Egypt would be straight across from us. After looking on a map of Egypt, Megan and I found out we had not gone north-WEST of Sharm, but north-east, and were now looking at Saudi Arabia, with Jordan and Israel less than an hour away. Very cool!
Our first trip out was to find some water, and of course the hotel didn’t have a place close by or cheap. We kept asking for bazaar, bazaar (international word for market) and kept being directed to single shops with very over-priced merchandise. We then wanted a taxi and first asked a worker at the hotel how much it would cost. 50 pounds round trip he said. That was almost 9 dollars so we then asked the front desk how much it should be and they said no more than 10 pounds one way… we needed to get into bargaining mode!!! We headed into the small town of Nuweiba, and found what we needed. Water, snacks, and snorkeling stuff. We walked the hot, dry 5 km back to our hotel and immediately went to the beach. At first I thought the beach wasn’t that cool because it seemed very shallow and it wasn’t easy to get out to deeper water, but as I explored more and more, I realized that we were incredibly lucky to stay at a place with such a great reef only 300 feet from the shore. Over the 7 days that we were there, I spent about 3 hours a day swimming back and forth along the beach, seeing all sorts of fish, corals, Moray eels, and what I am really hoping WASN’T a Sea Snake! The water was cold at times, but over-all it was great to swim and then come back on-shore and get warm but not too hot.
Most of our days evolved around the schedule of waking up at 6:30 due to the very bright sun, slowly moving around till 7 when we headed straight to the buffet breakfast, then back to our rooms for a bit of reading, getting ready for the beach; then snorkeling, sun-tanning, maybe a little beach volley-ball till about 11, then back inside from a break from the sun. We would then play some cards, read, take a nap, eat some food, then maybe take a walk into town and buy some more snacks, then repeat the beach excursion till 5, when it was time for showers, clean clothes, and another buffet dinner! Then maybe a movie, and falling asleep by 9:15!! Megan and I both got a lot of sun, but she was a little smarter about applying the sun lotion, so I eventually ended up burning my forehead, the top of my head, somehow my lip, and the back of my thighs when I wore a new Ukrainian ‘speedo’ which left some pretty white skin exposed!!
This was our life for a week, except for two very exciting exceptions. When Megan and I first decided we were going to Egypt, we talked about different things we wanted to see there, and we finally decided that we had to go to Cairo and see the Pyramids, since you can’t go to Egypt twice and not see them, and also do a sun-rise hike up Mt. Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.
So our first job was to find out how to get to these places and after some research on the internet we had thought the trips would be VERY expensive, but upon arriving in Nuweiba we were flooded with offers for taxi rides and other one day trips to both locations. We settled on an actual tour-group for Cairo because we wanted to feel more secure about this trip because it was expensive, long, and in Cairo, a CRAZY city! Tuesday night we woke up at 2 and headed out in our private mini-bus (not sure why we had such a big vehicle for only 2 people) with our driver and a ‘tour-guide’ whose Russian and English were incredibly hard to understand. After 6 hours of driving through desert we arrived on the out-skirts of Cairo, and it took us another 90 minutes to get to the Cairo History Museum. (We heard about 5 different numbers, but it seems that there are around 17 million people who live in Cairo, with another 3 coming in every day for work, and over a million cars on the road!) We had a great guide from Cairo nick-named Cassanova, who had worked as a tour-guide for over 25 years, knew everyone and carried a plastic gavel which he used to hit people on the head so they would get out of his way!! Pretty funny. The museum was huge, with pieces from a bunch of different Pharaohs, and some pieces over 5000 years old!
We then headed west towards the pyramids, and as we crossed the Nile we got out for a quick photo shoot. After another crazy drive though horrible traffic we could see the pyramids in the distance. Of course we had to stop at the papyrus factory and do the usual tourist thing of pretending you are interested in buying something when you are not at all! After another huge buffet lunch we finally headed to the Pyramids. As most people, Megan and I of course had seen the pyramids in tons of pictures, but you really do have to be there to truly understand how amazing it is that something like that could be created without modern machinery so long ago!! Breathtaking. We walked all around the 3 pyramids, took a brief tour down into one of them, then down to the Sphinx (which for some reason I thought was far away from the pyramids, not less than a kilometer away) and of course took hundreds of pictures. Definitely a worth-while experience. After that we were both exhausted, but we had another stop at a perfume shop, which Megan I were both leery about because we didn’t really expect to buy anything and we both get uncomfortable in these positions. But after some great tea, good sales pitch and smelling over 6 different scents I bought Megan a VERY small bottle of Sweet Pea extract for baths and stuff. I know my dad would have loved it, as we sat on plushy cushions and there were hundreds of bottles with all different scents which were eventually sent to Perfume companies all around the world! After another 6 hour ride back, taking a tunnel under the Suez cannel, he made it back our hotel around 11pm.
24 short hours later we woke up and headed out on a 2 hour drive to Mt. Sinai/Moses (whatever you want to call it) for a supposedly 3 hour hike up to see the sun rise over the mountains. We had hired a local taxi driver so we didn’t have a guide and didn’t really know what to expect from the whole experience. Megan and I arrived at the base of the mountain at 2am, and started climbing. Within 10 minutes we were asked by another tour-guide, ‘where is your guide, you have to have a guide or you will get in trouble with the police.’ This is the first we had heard of it so we chose to ignore it. We had been told by others that had climbed it that it was very cold so Megan and I were bundled up in everything we had brought with us.
As we sluggishly followed the numerous paths up the mountain, with only my head lamp and the lights of other groups above us to follow, I got warmer and warmer and started shedding clothes. We had to occasionally get out of the way for groups of camels coming down the mountain, and it was a challenge to not get run over by them or pushed off the trail. We slowly worked our way up, passing other, larger groups, and only stopping for some water and to turn of the light so we could see all of the stars. The view was amazing and it was probably the most stars I have ever seen. Megan said it was one of her favorite moments of the trip. After two hours of switch-backs and loose gravel, we realized we were almost at the top and it was only 4 am. We stopped at a tea shop (which there were over 20 along the trail almost the whole way up) and got some hot chocolate and tea. We decided to rent a blanket since by this point Megan and I were both freezing. At around 4:30 we headed to the actual top of the mountain, which was slow going because by this point it was single-file up the stairs to the small monastery on top of the mountain. We got up there and right away found a good place that we could see the sun rise. About 5 min. after we got there we could see light on the horizon, but it took over an hour before the sun was actually visible. It was a pretty cool experience, as he huddled to keep warm, and listened to a group of Russian Orthodox priests sing as the sun rose!!
A difficult climb down, but overall, awesome. After we got back we only had another day and a half left, and it flew by. On our flight home, which was delayed over 30 minutes, the captain announced in Russian that it was only 33 degrees F back in Ukraine. Both Megan and I thought he had to be joking, but when we finally landed, we looked around us and saw wet, slushy snow and fog, a great welcome back to Ukraine!

Sorry this was so long, hope you enjoyed it, will post pictures on facebook soon!
With love,
Seth