Tag: Sinai

June 13, 2015

The Sinai: cool places to sleep

‘Spread a blanket beneath an apple tree and it’ll only gather apples’ wrote French author Antoine de Saint Exupery in Wind Sand and Stars. ‘Spread a blanket beneath the stars’ – he carried on – ‘and it’ll gather the dust of stars’. Like the Bedouin, he was a man who loved the desert; especially at night. He liked to lie back, face to face with the universe, gazing up at the glittering heavens and immersing himself in a picture of eternity. I’m sort of like that. Sleeping under the stars – out in the open, without a tent – is about as good as it gets for me. The Bedouin call it the ‘million star hotel’. And I’m totally with them. When I go back to sleeping inside I feel trapped with a roof over me. Tents can be good sometimes – like in winter – but I still don’t usually carry one. Neither do the Bedouin. They like to travel light, finding shelter if they need it. And sometimes, you DO need it. Sometimes it’s cold or windy or raining or whatever.

Luckily, the Sinai has plenty of shelter. A cave, an old shepherd’s house; a hermit cell, a rock with a hole under it. Basic – yes but with a beautiful, epic, lost age feel.

So here are the COOLEST places to sleep if you’re on a hike:

CAVES – there’ll always be something cool to me about sleeping in a cave. I actually enquired about renovating and living in a cave near St Katherine once (alas, it didn’t work out). Sleeping in a cave puts you inside the landscape. It makes you feel part of it. Caves are always atmospheric, especially with a fire at night. The cave in the pic is Kahf el Ghoula – The Ghoul’s Cave – on Jebel el Rabba. It’s OK but a bit damp and if anything too big to really get warm. My favourite caves to sleep in are in Wadi Maghara, near Wadi Feiran; actually, they’re not caves, they’re ancient mines from Pharaonic times. They’re great shelter and gaze out over a beautiful sweep of mountains.

HERMIT CELLS – these might be the Sinai’s best spots to sleep. They’re basically boulder houses built over a thousand years ago by Christians seeking refuge and solitude in the wilderness. Some are more advanced than others, like the one in the pic. You can see my red bag next to the door. Walk in and there’s a big porch where you can leave your stuff and make a fire. Crouch down and a little wooden door lets you into the main chamber which has sleeping platforms, shelves and air vents. It’s near Jebel Bab el Dunya and I slept here for two nights in a heavy snowfall in December 2013. There are other good ones on Jebel el Deir, Mount Sinai and in lots of other secret mountain spots.

HOLLOWS & HOLES– go to the desert parts of the Sinai and you’ll find landscapes with a surreal, Salvador Dali type vibe. Some of the rocks look like they’re melting in the sun, with strange droops in their sides and psychedelic swirls of colour. It’s all because of the way the sandstone erodes here; occasionally, the erosion creates bigger hollows into which you can crawl and use as sleeping pods. Some even have holes in the side, like windows. The best are on Jebel Mileihis. But they’re hidden well – so you’ll have to hunt. Higher in the mountains, you don’t usually get the same sort of thing; the closest equivalent are holes under big boulders, like in the pic above.

BEDOUIN SHELTERS – the Bedouin built an extensive network of shelters in the Sinai. They’re like hermit cells but they’re not usually as ancient and the Bedouin didn’t live in them long term either. They were built for Bedouin travellers or for ibex hunters – who still use them today. There are also old storehouses, which the Bedouin used for storing brushwood and provisions for when they needed them. They’re well hidden and just look like a small door in the cliff. Storehouses are usually a bit small; but if you really need shelter you can still squeeze inside and use them. My favourite shelter is near Jebel el Thebt; a totally hidden boulder house in a remote, windswept wadi.

HUTS, HOUSES & RUINS – OK, a hut doesn’t have the rugged charm of a cave, but these are still pretty cool places to sleep. Some huts are owned by the Monastery of St Katherine and usually have a crucifix on the door. There are old Bedouin houses too; four stone walls with a palm fond roof, still sometimes used. If you find people inside, they’ll always welcome you the Bedouin way. I reckon the best are in Wadi Sigillia, a wadi with waterfalls. Finally, look out for old ruins. Few have roofs but they give good windbreaks. And you sleep inside history itself. Not many folks can say they’ve slept in a Byzantine monastery or Ottoman Palace – unless they’ve been to Sinai…

Finally: an obligatory word to the wise. Shelter in the Sinai isn’t always easy to find; often, it’s hidden, because the Bedouin like it that way. You can walk past an amazing shelter, mistaking it for any old rock. Most of the Bedouin know where shelter is because they know the area. If they don’t, they know how to find it. Or make it. Before hiking without a tent – which gives cover anywhere, anytime – check the weather forecast and know where the shelters are. As well as knowing where the shelters are also know how to find or make one in an emergency. There’s nothing better than a good Bedouin guide to keep you safe – so do your research and use one. Finally, remember to leave shelters as you find them; and, if you can, to leave some useful stuff behind – e.g. sugar, tea, wood – because you never know, the people who follow you might really, really need it…

May 1, 2015

El Gardood: the Gulf tableland

Walk inland from the Gulf of Aqaba coast – anywhere between Ras Shetan and Taba – and you’ll enter chain after chain of rugged coastal mountains. Carry on – following the wadis that snake between these mountains – and you’ll soon reach the bottom of a gigantic cliff: a huge natural foritification to the Sinai’s beautiful desert interior. Getting up it isn’t easy. Everything’s loose. There are big drops in places. If you hold your nerve and climb it though, you’ll emerge on one of the Sinai’s great natural wonders. A high desert plateau where you can gaze over the Gulf of Aqaba – the watery ribbon of blue – to the Hejaz mountains of Arabia. You can see cities like Hagl in Saudi Arabia and Aqaba in Jordan. Ocean liners look like tiny dots, never moving on the waves.

I’d been to the bottom of this plateau before. But I’d never gone up. I’d never heard anyone talk about it either. Not until a maverick Bedouin friend called Musallem called me a couple of months ago anyway, saying we should make a route over it for a new trail called the Abraham Path.

If you haven’t heard about the Abraham Path check it out HERE. It’s a new long-distance walking trail in the Middle East, lately voted the No. 1 trail in the world by National Geographic. The aim is to develop sustainable economies for local people, boost adventure tourism in part of the world that gets more bad press than any other, and get people walking, talking, and understanding the region better. It’s the most ambitious hiking project ever started in the Middle East and will be a major milestone for the region when it’s finished.

Musallem and me have been helping here and there with the Sinai part. Last year we nailed down a 200km route from Ras Shetan to St Katherine. By doing this plateau, he reckoned we could add an extra 30km too, opening up a new trekking area in the Sinai and spreading the benefits to more communities.

As it turned out, Musallem had been up here before. Actually he’s been pretty much everywhere in the Sinai. At least in the desert. He goes to the places where virtually nobody else ever goes. Because they’re there. Which is one of the reasons I like him so much. He hadn’t just walked this plateau either. He’d ridden a mountain bike over it (probably the first person in history ever to even think of riding a mountain bike across it). Anyway, we arranged to do it, finding a hiking route that’d cross the plateau and connect to the route we already had further south. The first time we did it, we drove inland from the coast, circling round to the interior side of the plateau, where it’s easier to get up.

A strong wind blows over the edge of this plateau at night, rushing down to the sea. It’s nearly 1000m in altitude too, which makes it extra cold. We slept up here, waking to see frost clinging to the retem bushes and our sleeping bags wet with dew. We huddled over the fire, warming our hands before leaving the jeep behind and heading south on foot, mapping the trail.

When most people think of mountains in the Sinai, they think of Mount Sinai: a dramatic granite highlands type of landscape with bulging bronze cliffs and smooth whaleback summits. When it comes to the mountains of the Sinai, plateaulands like this are much more common though.

As mountains, or highlands, or whatever we should call them though, they cover more of the peninsula in area size. And they’re almost as high as some of those peaks of the Mount Sinai area too. Some are nearly 1500m high.

Of all these plateualand mountains the most popular with trekkers is one called Jebel el Gunna. The most famous is Hadabat el Teeh: the Biblical Wilderness of the Wanderings where legend has it Moses walked for 40 years. El Gardood – as they call this plateau along the Gulf – is the most little known of these highlands. For what it’s worth (and as someone who’s walked all of these highland plateaus) I reckon it deserves much more attention than it gets though. Whatever merits the other plateaus have, standing up here and looking over the Gulf to the Arabian Peninsula is one of the Sinai’s great views. Gazing down over the sea and looking at four countries at once makes it feel like you’re standing on a gigantic map of the Middle East. It’s all there, spread out before you.

We took a whole day finding our way across the plateau that day, walking 28km through deserted basins and rugged passes until we got to its southerly edge. This was exactly where we needed to be to connect this new trail to the southerly one we’d already put down the year before. And a good path ran all the way down.

The next week – gluttons for punishment that we are – we went back to do the whole thing again, only this time with someone from the Abraham Path. And this time, there was no cheating with a jeep. We needed to find a way up onto the plateau from the sea – and a way through its foreboding cliffs – which we finally did. Actually, there are a couple of old trails; or rather, remnants of old trails. They have been damaged by repeated flash floods over the years so they’re tricky.

Up on the top, walking on the flats, we took the same route over the plateau as the first time. This time though – taking notes and making route guides – we took our time with everything. We also explored a few new areas of the plateau. One of the best spots we saw was an oasis called Ein el Shefalla; just a few palms below a high cliff, but a real beauty of a spot. Nearby – where the water plunges from the high cliff into the sands after rain – is a dry hole where you can dig to get water. The Bedouin call a hole like this a themila. Start digging and after a while, you’ll smell the water, seeping through the sand. Soon, the water seeps into the hole, which you can scoop up. Or sponge it in a shemagh.

The more I walked up on El Gardood the more I liked it. It’s different to the Sinai’s other plateaus. Grander, with massive highland chunks. Its wadis are deeper. And greener. Everywhere feels much lesser trodden. There are no footprints. No litter. It’s easy to find firewood, because so few people ever use it.

It’s also like a window back to the more ancient times.

Look carefully and you’ll find blackened fireplaces and stones marking out Bedouin sitting places. There are old cemeteries with graves pointing towards Mecca and old storerooms in the cliffs. Once upon a time, El Gardood was where the Bedouin came to graze their flocks in the springtime.

That second time on El Gardood we walked all the way out: down from the plateau, into the the sandstone desert, then out of the coastal chains to Ras Shetan. Everything said, it was mission accomplished: we’d connected the two trails. The guys at the Abraham Path are busy developing trail guides right now – along with lots of other great stuff – and I’ll update the blog when they’re ready. Look out for the trail as it’s going to be great. If you want to do El Gardood before the trail’s finished, you can. There’s a lot to explore and discover. Just be sure to go with a good Bedouin guide: my tried and tested tip is Mussalem. Take it all in and remember it too. Because once places like this get discovered and put on the map, they don’t stay secret for long…

Check out this Google Map I made of the rough area of El Gardood.

April 5, 2015

Wild foods of the Sinai

Where I grew up, we got most of the food we ate at a supermarket, walking the aisles and picking it off the shelves. When I came to the Sinai and began walking with the Bedouin my relationship with food – what I ate and how I got it – changed. We’d still buy food in town before leaving for the mountains. Out on the trail though, the Bedouin would always be scanning the ground for other stuff to add to the general supply. Whenever they saw edible plants, they’d have a trailside nibble. They might keep some for a later meal. Sometimes, they’d pick more, to take home. Except for a few wild blackberries I never really ate like that back home. In the Sinai though, watching the Bedouin, I had the privilege of learning what I could eat, how I could find it myself, where and when.

Eating wild food feels good. It’s liberating not to pick it off a shelf. Not to have to pay for it. It can be fun. It tastes a bit different too, which is new. More than that, it feels like a rediscovery. Foraging was key to human survival from early times, but we lost the knowledge needed to do it centuries ago in Europe, as we settled in towns. Discovering it again feels like reclaiming an old birthright.

The Sinai isn’t overgrown with food. Plant cover is patchy at best so you have to look carefully and take your opportunities. It’ll rarely be enough alone. But it’ll be a brilliant supplement to help you stave off the hunger pangs.

So here are my ten all-time favourite wild foods of the Sinai.

1. WILD FIGS There are two types of fig tree in the Sinai, but the fruit of one is much better than the other. It grows in the high mountains and, occasionally, in mid-altitudes of the desert, and ripens in July. For me, it’s the Sinai’s best wild treat. You can dry the figs if you’re out a long time too.

2. FENNEL A plant with stringy, feathery leaves and a strong aniseed flavour, this can be eaten as you find it. It won’t fill you up like fruit, but it’s a still a good trailside nibble that’ll stave off the hunger pangs. You usually get it in rocky mountain areas, mostly in the lower elevations.

3. DATES From the date palm, a high energy food, perfect for walking. You get them mostly in oases or lower lying wadis. Finding a bundle of dates is a blessing that’ll keep you going for days if you need it. Sometimes the dry and shrivelled dates on the floor are a sweeter, better snack.

4. ATHMAAN A high rush-type plant with a feathery tip. Each stalk is a series of inter-connected parts; pull gently between these parts until one slides out of the other. The moist, fleshy stuff inisde is edible. It’s not much. But it wets your mouth and tastes OK. You usually get it in sandy areas.

5. HAWTHORN BERRIES These are the berries of the Sinai Hawthorn: they’re small and red, with a pip and not much flesh, so you have to grab a handful to make it worthwhile. They make a brilliant trail snack to nibble on though. The trees grow in rocky, shadowy gullies in the high mountains.

6. HOMATH One of my favourites. You can eat its leaves. They have a sharp, lemony taste and chomping into a clump in the desert sun is always refreshing. You can cut them and add them to salads too. You can also boil the leaves, then strain them and eat them in soups or even with sour goat’s milk.

7. OREGANO A common mountain herb. This grows on rocky hillsides and the Bedouin use it a lot. It’s hot and spicy if you eat it raw and alone. It’s best sprinkled over cheese, salads, with olive oil etc. You can dry it too, then grind and mix it with pepper and salt as a flavouring for other food.

8. CHRIST’S THORN The Bedouin call this nabag. The fruit is a small, red berry, about the size of a marble. I don’t like it straight off the tree; like with dates, the dry fruits from the ground are better. They’re good, sugary nibbles, perfect for snacking. The tree grows mostly in mountain wadis.

9. HORSEMINT The perfect addition to tea and therefore a Bedouin favourite. A few leaves in your glass gives tea the wild mountain touch. You can eat it too, but it’s strong. It grows near water – remember that, you might need water! – and you’ll often smell it on the breeze before you see it.

10. LASSAF Caper fruit and the biggest fruit on this list. Cut it in half and scrape the yellow flesh off, levering it over your bottom teeth. Gulp it down whole. Don’t munch it. The seeds are hot and will make you retch. Swallowing it whole, it’s sweet and delicious. It grows out of cliffs and rocky walls.

Here are the Latin/ English names for these plants. All the ones I know, anyway. I use the Bedouin names in the Sinai. If you know any of the missing names, please drop me a line so I can update this blog post.

ENGLISH	BEDOUIN	LATIN
Wild fig	Teen Beree/ Hamaat	Ficus carica
Fennel	Shamaar	Foeniculum vulgare
Date palm	Balah/ Nakhl	Phoenix dactylifera
Sinai Hawthorn	Zahroor	Crataegus sinaica
?	Athmaan	?
?	Homath	Rumex cyprius
Oregano	Zaatar	Origanum syriacum
Christ’s Thorn Jujube	Nabag	Ziziphus spina christi
Horsemint	Habag	Mentha longifolia
Caper	Lassaf	Capparis cartilaginea

Remember, eating wild foods has potential risks. Some plants in this list have lookalikes and are easy to mistake with others. Some plants are poisonous too, so you need a Bedouin who really knows what they’re doing. Don’t use this list as a definitive field guide, because that’s not what it is. Please remember too, plants are key to the ecosystem and although nibbling one here or there is generally OK, you should be responsible with it. Don’t go harvesting wild plants for use at home. Just nibble them if you really need them.

February 2, 2015

Five holy peaks of the Sinai

Mount Sinai is the spot they say God spoke with Moses, giving the 10 Commandments. It’s the Sinai’s holiest peak. You could make a good case for it being the holiest in the world too. Holier to more people, in more parts of the world, over a longer time, than any other mountain on earth – which is really something. It isn’t the Sinai’s only holy peak though. There are plenty of others. Some of them are holy because – like Mount Sinai – they’re on the Biblical map. Others, because of later miracles. And some were holy in much more distant eras, to much earlier peoples of the peninsula, whose religions we know little about today. Here are five holy peaks of the Sinai you rarely hear about:

1. JEBEL SERBAL Jebel Serbal looks amazing. If you had to say any peak in the Sinai was holy based on looks alone, it’d probably be this. And for a long time, people did say it was holy. Some scholars reckon the name Serbal comes from ‘Baal’, a pagan God who was worshipped in these parts of the Middle East in ancient times. There’s a little ruin on the mountain top that dates from a later era, which archaeologists reckon was a Nabataean temple. Later still, in Christian times, Jebel Serbal took on a whole new association. Early Christians believed it was the real Mount Sinai of The Bible – i.e not the peak we call Mount Sinai today. The ruins of the Sinai’s first episcopal city, plus hermit cells, chapels and crumbling stairways, still stand around the mountain today.

2. JEBEL KATHERINA Egypt’s highest peak. Legend has it angels carried the body of St Katherine here after the Romans killed her in Alexandria. The exact whereabouts of her bones remained unknown until one day in the 9th century when, claiming all had been revealed in a God-given dream, a local monk wandered up the mountain and found them on this summit (the lower of the mountain’s two high points and the second highest point in Egypt 2637m). Ever since then, this peak has been hallowed ground. There’s a small chapel on top but the bones of St Katherine are now in the Monastery of St Katherine.

3. JEBEL TAHUNA A little peak in Wadi Feiran, local legend has it Jebel Tahuna is the spot where Moses watched the Battle of Rephidim, raising his magic staff to spur the Israelites on to victory. A 1500 year oratory crowns the summit, with a near-perfectly preserved water cistern dug into its foundations. Small chapels, whose walls, columns and altars are all still visible, stand by the path up the mountain. Hermit cells are dug into banks along its lower slopes and the higher hillsides are scattered with ancient Christian tombs. Travellers have been climbing this peak for centuries, and you should too. As much as the history, it’s worth it for the beautiful views you get over Wadi Feiran – one of the Sinai’s biggest, most beautiful wadis – and of Jebel Serbal, towering up like a castle.

4. JEBEL MONEJA A lot of tourists climb this, making the mistake of thinking it’s Mount Sinai. Actually, it’s just a smaller, sister peak, half way up. It’s also called Jethro’s Mountain, after Jethro, the Biblical figure, whose daughter is supposed to have married Moses. Monks say God spoke to Moses here, beckoning him further up the mountain, and it’s another of the Sinai’s holiest spots. With a chapel on top, this is a brilliant peak with what is – in my opinion – the best view of the Monastery of St Katherine in the Sinai; the classic viewpoint from which artists sketched it, huddling below Mount Sinai, for centuries.

5. JEBEL EL AHMAR Sometimes also known as Jebel Moneja – like the peak above – this is a little-known summit in the northern foothills of Jebel Serbal. It isn’t as dramatic-looking as the other peaks here, but all the same, this was one of the Sinai’s holiest summits for a long time. Early explorers recorded it having a special place for the local Bedouin of Wadi Feiran. They’d make pilgrimage trips to a shrine on the top, tying rags, beads, camel reigns and other offerings to the stones. That’s stopped today, but I’ve still heard people talk about it in the past. If you go you’ll have a spectacular view over Wadi Feiran, with its big palm grove; and one of the best views of Jebel Serbal. You can also visit the tomb of Sheikh Shebib, a holy saint of the Gararsha tribe, at the foot of the peak.

December 23, 2014

Wadi Sig: the Sinai jungle

The Sinai is a desert – every part of it. Most parts get less than 50mm rain a year. Some parts, less than 13mm. It’s a trans-continental sweep of sandy plains and harsh, rocky highlands. Not every part of it though. In some places, the Sinai gets green. It gets overgrown. Walk some wadis and it it feels like you’ve left the desert and entered the jungle. These wadis of the Sinai – the jungle wadis – are absolutely amazing: an environmental oddity you find only on the west side of the peninsula. On the high mountain side. The wetter side, where steep, impervious mountainsides channel all the water direct into the bottom of the wadis. The east side is totally different. The west of the Sinai is where desert meets jungle. There are a few great jungle wadis.

And for me, the best of all – the best wadi in the Sinai – is Wadi Sig. I reckon this is the King of the Sinai’s wadis.

It’s the emerald gem; the buried, secret jewel of the peninsula.

There’s hardly any writing about it. I clocked it the first time on a high peak called Jebel el Reeh about a year ago. Far below there was a big wadi that cut down – deep, deep down – as it ran down to the sea.

It’s overgrown with vegetation for long stretches. And vegetation on a bigger scale than what you find in other wadis. There are giant horsemint bushes higher than your waist and thickets of bamboo where you can’t see where you’re going. Where you have to push your way through. There are places with running water, pools and small waterfalls. And there are huge canyons: long, narrow parts where the sides tower vertically. There’s history too: look carefully on the sides of the wadi and you’ll see little dwellings built into the cliffs. It’s a wadi that has everything. And there’s no let up – it never eases off.

All these riches aren’t won easily though – Wadi Sig is a tough walk.

And it’s made tougher by the fact it takes you irreversibly deep; it commits you to a remote, multi-day expedition you can’t get out of easily. And one where you have to carry all your stuff except water. Camels can’t come this way. There are no paths. It’s mostly stony river bed terrain. There’s plenty of boulder hopping. Plus bits of scrambling. There are a lot of routefinding puzzles too. We got stuck at one point, jumping down into a black abyss, with a shower of vegetation falling on our heads, before escaping through a bamboo thicket (only to discover a much more sensible way around the other side). Black piping is tied on some rocks so you can abseil in places; but you never go down more than a few metres.

Wadi Sig isn’t technically tricky – it’s just long. And tough. A stamina thing.

If walking a wadi was a boxing match, Wadi Sig would be the equivalent of going the distance; of doing the full 12 rounds. We did it in a day, starting at 6am, finishing about 5pm, just before sunset; and going fast all the way. Ideally, it’d be better done in two days. The best plan would be to hike in from St Katherine on the first day – which takes about five hours – and then camp in the wadi. Then to continue to the end over the second day. It ends at a junction with Wadi Khareeta. After this, it becomes known as Wadi Mirr. It’s the same wadi – just with a different name – and it runs down to the Plain of Qa.

The easiest option is to just walk out of Wadi Mirr. It takes about a day to the end of the wadi, where you can find a jeep at a small Bedouin village. The downside of this is the jeep can cost a lot – probably at least LE500 to El Tur considering you won’t have much bargaining power. The other options are 1. to walk out through Wadi Khareeta, which takes you back to St Katherine in 2-3 days 2. to go through Wadi Zeregeiyah, which goes to Jebel Umm Shomer over 1-2 days, after which it’s another day’s walk back to St Katherine. You can also go to a place called Baghabugh, near Jebel Madsus, and then back to St Katherine over 2-3 days. Or you can go over the high pass of Naqb Umm Seikha to Wadi Jibal and back to St Katherine in 2 days. Be warned – none of these routes are easy.

The easiest of all is the Baghabugh route. This is mostly a hike. All the other routes are off piste adventure routes. Naqb Umm Seikha is the way the postman used to take from El Tur to St Katherine in the 19th century. But it’s seriously steep and would be a monster with a heavy bag. Wadi Khareeta is also steep at the end. Wadi Zeregeiyah is like a mini Wadi Sig, with lots of scrambling; including bits that are more technical than Wadi Sig.

And perhaps that’s another great thing about Wadi Sig.

It commits you to a mission where getting out is as much of an adventure as getting in in the first place…

December 17, 2014

Jebel Rimhan: a sleeping giant

Jebel Rimhan was once a complete obsession of a mountain for me. It struck me the first time I saw it; more than any other peak in the Sinai. I was on my way to Jebel Umm Shomer and it was there in the dawn; its huge, twin peaks rising in the morning haze; each a perfect pyramid. Behind it, the Hejaz lined the horizon along the coast of Arabia. I saw it from a lot of other places after that. And wherever it appeared – from whatever angle – it looked just as beautiful; just as majestic. Jebel Rimhan is one of the Sinai’s biggest peaks at 2437m; but unlike other big peaks here – like Umm Shomer, Thebt and Serbal – it didn’t have an established route on it, which just added to the allure.

The first – and only – recorded ascent I know of was made nearly 100 years ago, by George W Murray, a highland Scot who worked on the British Survey of Egypt.

Talking about recorded anythings is always dubious in a place like Sinai, whose people were historically one of the spoken word, never putting anything on paper. But Murray had climbed mountains all over the Sinai, he knew the Bedouin well and – even then – reckoned the ‘maiden pikes of Rimhan, the Two Lances’ were unscaled; either in recorded or unrecorded terms.

Whatever the story, he didn’t go with a local Bedouin. He went with a Bedouin from the mountains of mainland Egypt – Ali Kheir – who found the way from scratch. Murray found it such a tough route to follow that – as a mark of gratitude and respect – he bought his guide the best cross-handled sword he could find when they got back to Cairo; a prized relic from the Battle of Omdurman.

Unfortunately, Murray didn’t record specifics of the route they did that day.

I spent years asking around, trying to find someone who knew the way. There were plenty of folks who reckoned they knew it; but none of them were ever available. I gave it the first go in winter of 2012 with a Bedouin guide called Auda; an ageing talkaholic in white plimsolls and a baggy coat down to his knees. I’d walked with him before – to Jebel Umm Shomer – and found it totally exhausting. Not the walk. All the talking. I like silence in the mountains. I don’t like to talk; or even think through language.

I just like to exist. To see stuff. To feel things.

Auda was the enemy of silence itself. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d just whoop, or scream. He’d be a challenge on a par with the mountain itself but if he knew the way – and he said he did – it was a fair price to pay.

Half way up he stopped on a high promontory, leant back in a limbo like pose and bellowed up at the sky – with a celebratory edge – ‘MAFEESH TAREEEEEEEEEEG! Which was to say, no way. He was right too. A huge ravine sliced the mountain in half. Getting down into it wasn’t the only problem. We’d have to climb out the other side onto the summit section; a mass of smooth, bulging granite, towering up hundreds of metres. The whole thing looked frightening. Cracks, cuts and black lines ran through the crags, like scars on an ancient face. Jebel Rimhan was like a giant’s head, sleeping and ready to wake.

Auda didn’t seem bothered. He just stood there, bellowing.

Walking back that day felt like a failure; I kept turning round, wanting to go back. Looking at the mountain; thinking we should have tried the last crags. That we should’ve been bolder or braver. Or found another way. That we should have gambled. That we should have just done it without thinking. For weeks afterwards – when I went back to downtown Cairo – I saw Jebel Rimhan when I closed my eyes; like its twin peaks had been photographically exposed on my retina. They appeared in the darkness, like a silhouette; the specks and phosphenes floating over them.

It was a year before I got another chance to do it; going back in 2013. And the second time was even more of an unmitigated failure than the first, ending when I thought my guide was having a heart attack after the first pass.

He wasn’t – hamduleleh – but something wasn’t right. So we bailed.

On the way back we met a local Bedouin who said he’d been up. He was an elderly guy called Salem who set a princely sum for guiding me, which I paid only to avoid having to break the news of another failure back in town.

We made a dawn raid, shooting straight for the summit on a dragon’s back type ridge. The Sinai doesn’t have many ridges; not like the glaciated ranges of Europe, with their knife edge arêtes and cirques. Occasionally, a geological quirk creates one in the landscape though; and most of the time, they’re gems. This was one of the best; bristling with high fins of rock you had to weave between all the way along. About half way up the ridge, the summit suddenly appeared. I got a sudden burst of hope, thinking we’d do it; third time lucky. Further up though, Salem sat down on a rock and got his binoculars out; an ominous sign.

We could see an impenetrable looking thimble of crags at the end.

We went up to look. Sure enough though; they were too high, too tricky and serious for a pair of scramblers – looking for a scrambler’s route up – like us. We’d got higher than ever. Just below the top. We weren’t there; but it wasn’t totally wasted. Getting this far showed us the peak we’d been centering on – the northerly one of the twin peaks – wasn’t actually the highest.

As it transpired, Salem didn’t know the way up Jebel Rimhan. He’d said he did, gambling and hoping it’d unfold as we got up.

And all that talk is a big part of Jebel Rimhan for me. Down in the towns; in the tents, by the fires, where everything’s comortable and everybody can just talk without ever showing anything for it, people know the way. Everyone’s an expert. Press them on the specifics though – especially when you’ve been on the mountain – and you’ll see it’s all totally empty. It mirrors the way mountain knowledge is getting moth eaten across the Sinai too. Bedouin knowledge – hard won by earlier generations – is gradually being forgotten. And knowledge of the mountain tops is the worst hit; it’s been the first to go of everything on the peninsula.

It’s partly because the Bedouin inhabit a new, modern world in which mountain knowledge is irrelevant. They don’t need it any more. Especially nothing about the high mountain tops. Why would they? Wadis are still highways in the mountains; so they still get talked about. They’re still better known.

In some ways, the empty, feigned knowledge about Jebel Rimhan is sad to me.

As much as it’s a charade born from bravado, I think it’s born from a feeling they should know the mountains better. Especially in front of an outsider; I think it’s born of a feeling that something precious has been lost. And that they’re the generation that lost it; that they’re responsible the knowledge that set them aside from anybody else; the knowledge that made them Bedouin – rather than anything else – is waning. And it’s waning on their watch.

Anyway, after that third time, I gave up on people who said they knew the way.

I went back again in summer 2014 with a guy called Salem Abu Ramadan; the fittest Bedouin I know; and one of the best climbers and routefinders. We began early, heading for the higher peak; the one we’d spotted from the last attempt. I didn’t have high hopes; it looked even harder than the other. I was just there because I couldn’t rest easy until I’d tried everything I could on Jebel Rimhan.

We spent the morning creeping round the mountain like a pair of assassins trying to get into a forbidden castle. We started up a ravine that ended in a cul de sac. After that, we tried smaller gully with a rojom – a trail marking stone – in it. It was the first rojom I’d seen on Jebel Rimhan. A a sure sign someone had been here before. Maybe it was an old route marker. We followed it, then found a line of them that ended below a high, sheer wall we couldn’t pass.

We were running out of options. The last chance we had was a ravine that we’d avoided in the morning because a huge boulder was wedged half way up, blocking it. But we gave it a go: there was nothing else.

Getting round the block turned out easy. Big views soon unlocked over the landscape as we got higher and the towering crags soon began to taper off. At the end of the ravine we scrambled onto a ridge.

We looked left, and there it was. The summit. No big crags. No big obstacles.

The ridge – flanked by massive drops – ran up to it. We followed it along – crossing a few wobbly boulders, one of which groaned like it was about to plunge off – to reach the top. It felt lik hallowed ground. Finally, after all the years, we were there. We could see the other peak – the object of our three failures – and behind it Jebel Umm Shomer. The Sinai unfolded all around, looking beautiful. Where it ended, the summits of Africa stood up across the sea; with the mountains of Arabia on the other. It was one of the most spectacular sights I’d seen in the Sinai; almost as beautiful as the twin peaks of Jebel Rimhan itself. As much as it felt good to be on the top, part of me felt sad the story was over. That there wouldn’t be another mountain like it.

Not such an epic, forgotten and mysterious a peak as Jebel Rimhan.

The best thing about doing it wasn’t getting there. It was finding a good way up. A way anybody could do. It was winning back that lost knowledge about one of the Sinai’s biggest, most beautiful peaks. Jebel Rimhan is a sleeping giant of a peak; I hope this route we did might begin to make it wake because this is a mountain that deserves a place alongside the Sinai’s other great summits.

If you want to try the mountain, I can guarantee this guy knows the way, as we went together. Salem Abu Ramadan: 0101-497-6289.

October 11, 2014

The Sinai: in five travellers…

Travel writing about Egypt stretches back thousands of years; the Greek historian Herodotus was writing about travel here in the 5th century BC. Over history, it’s probably been one of the most written-about travel destinations in the world. But the Sinai’s different. Faraway from the Nile, out on Egypt’s frontiers, it’s always been hard to reach. Things changed a bit in the 19th century, with travel becoming easier, and plenty of intrepid types made the trip to Mount Sinai. A golden age of travel writing followed, with lots of travellers keeping diaires; some of which are still brilliantly readable today. Since then, few folks have written about the Sinai. I wish we had accounts of Bedouin travellers. But, being a people of the spoken word, they never recorded their journeys. Anyway, here are five of the most interesting travellers we DO know about.

1. EDWARD HENRY PALMER Palmer grew up an orphan, spending a lot of time with Romany Gypsies and developing a love of travelling, nomadic peoples. He was diagnosed terminally ill aged 19 – with just a few months to live – but recovered and went on to study langauges at Cambridge University. He finished with a 3rd class degree, the lowest possible. But his brilliant language skills outshone the exam results and he was soon made a professor. Soon after, he was employed as the interpreter on the 1869 British Ordnance Survey of Sinai. Through him – his Arabic and his way with people – his colleagues put together the best survey ever made on the area. He wrote The Desert of The Exodus – a beautiful account of his travels – before being killed here in 1882.

2. ISABELLA BIRD Most stuff about the Sinai is written by men. Isabella Bird was one of the few women who wrote anything. She was fiercely independent and adventurous with a wanderlust that drove her all the way from the Rocky Mountains to Tibet and Kurdistan. She covered thousands of kilometres in her lifetime, a lot of them on horseback. She visited the Sinai in the 1870s, swapping her horse for a camel and following the old route of The Exodus to Mount Sinai. She captured the beauty of the Sinai and its people as well as anyone, all with a cutting, self-deprecating humour.

3. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE Held up as a travelling hero through the Middle Ages, Sir John was an English knight who penned his memoirs in retirement. Or that’s what he said, anyway. He was branded the ‘greatest liar OF ALL TIME’ a few centuries later. Honestly, nobody really knows if Sir John existed. Or who the author of his stuff was, if it wasn’t him. The likelihood is his memoirs were written up from a mishmash of other diaires. Whatever the story, I can say that the Sinai bits ARE very evocative. That they DO capture something of a much, much more distant time here. Also that – whoever wrote his stuff – compiling such a huge, complex narrative was a feat surpassed only by the epic chutzpah of passing it off as his own travels for a few hundred years.

4. JEAN LOUIS BURCKHARDT Burckhardt was born into the Swiss aristocracy; he moved to Germany when he was young, before travelling to England, becoming almost destitute in London and landing a dream role as an explorer in the Middle East. He spent a couple of years in Syria, perfecting his Arabic so he’d really understand the region. Later, he won immortal fame as the first European to see the ancient Nabataean city of Petra, before going to the Sinai, making notes upon which later explorers built and which are still brilliant to read today.

5. GEORGE W. MURRAY Hailing from the Scottish highlands, George Murray took his love of high places all the way to the mountains of Egypt. He worked on the British Survey of Egypt, mapping the Red Sea Mountains from Hurghada to Jebel Elba, moving south at a degree of latitude every year; he also mapped the Sinai’s mountains. Without a doubt, he climbed more mountains in Egypt than any traveller before him. I’d say probably more than any since too. The Sinai was one of his great loves and he walked far and wide, seeking out its hardest peaks and its most little-known wadis, even when he wasn’t working. He’s one of the great unsung heroes of mountaineering in Egypt and you can read his memoirs in the beautifully-titled book Dare Me To The Desert.

September 28, 2014

The blog: how it all began

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN EGYPTIAN STREETS. Check out their website HERE and like their Facebook page HERE!

When it comes to mountains and the Middle East, a few countries might spring to mind. There’s Yemen, with its pretty mountain villages and the highest peak of the Arabian peninsula; Oman too, home to the mighty Al Hajar range. In the wider Arab world, there’s Morocco, with the high, snowy peaks of the Atlas. Egypt has mountains too – lots of them – but it’s not famous for them in the same way other countries are. Few outsiders see Egypt as a mountain country. And mountains aren’t really part of the image Egyptians project about their country to the world either; they’re not woven into the national identity like the Nile, or even the sweeping deserts along its banks. Mount Sinai might be famous; but it’s a single peak. Beyond this and perhaps a couple of other iconic summits the mountains of Egypt are little-known; much less actually visited.

The mountains of mainland Egypt are amazing; on the Libyan side of the Nile, there’s Jebel Uweinat; on the other, the Red Sea Mountains.

But perhaps the most amazing of all are those of the Sinai.

The Sinai is Egypt’s great mountain land; a rugged wilderness where peaks tower up to gaze over the Red Sea to Africa and Asia. Egypt’s highest mountains are found here. But it’s not the height alone that makes them special. They’re some of the world’s most fabled mountains; the setting for ancient Biblical legends that are still told today. And there’s the history too; relics from the times of the Pharaohs – and even more distant eras – are still scattered by old paths.

I took my first hike in the Sinai over six years ago now.

Like most would-be hikers, I started out on a familiar path; doing the best known peaks at the beginning. I did Mount Sinai first – the most written about, talked about, and easily the most-climbed peak anywhere on the peninsula – and then Jebel Katherina, whose main claim to fame is being Egypt’s highest mountain. After that, I moved on to the sort of peaks that aren’t very well-known outside the Sinai – but which are still well-trodden within it – like Jebel Abbas Pasha, which has an unfinished Ottoman palace on top, and Jebel Umm Shomer, Egypt’s second highest mountain. After those, I began moving further out to the more rarely visited areas, seeking out the most little-trodden peaks.

Whether you walk a famous or a lesser-known peak, the Sinai’s rarely easy.

Good paths are hard to come by. There are virtually no signposts. Nor easy, end-of-the-day conveniences. The infrastructure for hiking tourism just hasn’t been widely built up. Good maps are pretty much non-existent. And whilst it’s good for some areas in the Sinai, Google Earth doesn’t cut it for navigating intricate mountain routes. As much as anything, there’s a dearth of information – good written information – about many parts of the Sinai’s mountains.

Sometimes, you can delve back into the travelogues of European explorers.

They might be old, but they’re usually still useful. These explorers walked more widely than any contemporary author; and a lot of the time their records are the only ones available for parts of the Sinai.

Amongst these early explorers was Jean Louis Burckhardt, who won immortal fame for unveiling Petra to the West. He travelled through the Sinai in 1816, walking widely and climbing a few iconic mountains.

There was Edward Henry Palmer too; a Cambridge professor who wrote a remarkable travelogue featuring many little-known parts of the Sinai.

And George Murray; a highland Scot and born mountain man who climbed some of the Sinai’s hardest peaks; and others across Egypt.

Of course though, these explorers didn’t go everywhere. Or record everything.

For large areas of the Sinai, there are still no written records. No modern ones; or older ones. Walking in these areas – in the most little documented parts of the Sinai – is a process that beings simply by asking questions. Specifically, by asking questions of the local Bedouin. The Bedouin arrived in the Sinai from the Arabian Peninsula centuries ago and walked the mountains widely from the start, looking for water, food, grazing and other essentials they needed to survive. They built up a huge bank of knowledge about its mountains through the ages. They were the Sinai explorers par excellence and their knowledge is still the only source of information available about a lot of the peninsula. When European explorers came to the Sinai they only ever explored it through the Bedouin, even if the Bedouin didn’t feature much in their written accounts. They had Bedouin guides; and they recorded Bedouin knowledge.

But Bedouin knowledge isn’t what it once was. Lifestyles have changed.

Today, many Bedouin have left the mountains for new towns and villages on their fringes. Knowledge about the mountains – once central to survival – is largely irrelevant now. And because it’s not used, a lot of it’s being forgotten.

You can see clear gaps in the knowledge of younger Bedouin already.

It’s the older Bedouin who know the Sinai best. But even then, tracking down the ones who know the ways up the hardest, most little-trodden peaks is a challenge. Sometimes, it can be simpler to just re-discover the routes from scratch.

This dearth of good written information about the little-known peaks of the Sinai is a hindrance to anybody wanting to do them. And to the development of hiking generally. I still experience it today. And it’s something I’ve tried to address through several projects. Earlier this year, I finished a trekking guidebook to the Sinai, published in the UK. It gives the best, most classic walks in the peninsula and the practical information needed to organise them.

More lately I created the website Go Tell It on the Mountain.

This is a project with a more specific mountain focus. And one which aims to start a grassroots documentation process. To begin a simple list of peaks – from the most famous to the most little-known – that will grow into a bigger bank of information that can be used to go deeper and discover more.

But it’s not just about showing what mountains are in the Sinai.

It records a more personal journey that I hope might help change perceptions about the peninsula. Over the last few years there has been a near constant stream of bad news from the Sinai; most of it from the North. But all too often North Sinai has been conflated with South Sinai; the peninsula portrayed as an undivided, unvariegated whole. Sinai is just Sinai. In reality the two areas have big geographical and social divides and South Sinai – which is where the mountains are – has been largely peaceful. Along with the bad press, Western governments have issued travel warnings for South Sinai, which have only reinforced perceptions of it as a place of danger. And even when warnings have been lifted for South Sinai resorts like Sharm they have remained in place for the mountains. The official message has been clear for years – don’t go.

It’s a state of affairs that has undermined the tourism upon which many local communities have grown to depend. Many are seriously struggling.

This website is about creating a counter-narrative to the bad news.

It’s about putting an alternative voice out there and showing a more real, everyday side to the mountains. It’s about telling stories that show these mountains are home to an ancient Arab culture built on honour and hospitality to travellers. And that these traditions still hold strong today. Ultimately, it’s about showing that you can travel safely here – even in the most little-visited parts of South Sinai’s mountains – despite what they say.

My biggest hope is that tourism will return; and not just to those parts of the Sinai that had it before. But to the most little-trodden mountain areas.

The Bedouin have always supplemented traditional livelihoods by guiding travellers in their lands; from traders to pilgrims and early explorers. Mountain tourism like hiking – which has proved so successful in other Arab countries – would be a sort of modern re-incarnation of that, creating a type of work that plays to natural Bedouin strengths in a way the Sinai’s glitzy beach resorts never could. It wouldn’t just open up a new treasure trove of beautiful mountains for the world; it would drive local development. And it’d put down a financial incentive for the preservation of Bedouin knowledge about the mountains. Knowledge it took centuries to build up and which – once lost – could never be re-created the same again. Knowledge that shouldn’t just be seen as part of Bedouin cultural heritage; but as part of humanity’s heritage at large.

My plans for the future are to carry on hiking in the Sinai. There are still new mountains I want to do. And old ones I want to try new ways. And I’d encourage anybody who’s in two minds about going to the Sinai to visit too.

The mountains of the Sinai and amazing and safe to visit in the South. If you don’t want to go alone, small hiking groups have been active for years. New ones are springing up too, run by Egyptians and foreigners. I’ve seen more hikers in the mountains this year than any previous one too. It’s all grounds for hope; a sign things might be going in the right way. Once people start walking more in these mountains; going deeper and bringing their stories back it’ll become clear that Egypt isn’t just the equal of Arab neighbours like Yemen, Oman and Morocco when it comes to mountains. But that it’s the equal of anywhere in the world. And perhaps then – when the epic potential of these mountains becomes clear – it’ll be the base for more change and development.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN EGYPTIAN STREETS. Check out their website HERE and like their Facebook page HERE!

September 22, 2014

Jebel Thebt: a Sinai giant

Jebel Thebt is one of Sinai’s biggest peaks. Compared with the other big mountains though, it doesn’t get hiked much. That’s partly because it’s so isolated and hard to get to. Wherever you start, it’s a long walk in. You can knock the first few kilos off with a jeep but even then there’s a day’s walk to the mountain afterwards. As much as the isolation, its popularity was limited by the fact it wasn’t mixed up with the Biblical legend that made other mountains so famous. It never really got visited, talked-about, or put down on the map by early explorers. Not like other peaks did. Anyway, I hope more hikers start doing this one day. Because it’s a big, brooding giant of a peak that deserves better; one of the Sinai’s classic adventures, with some of its most stunning views.

The Bedouin climbed Jebel Thebt ages ago. The first European ascent I know of was made by the Rev F.W Holland in 1867. I meant to do it in 2012 but ran out of time trying to find a way up a nearby peak called Jebel Rimhan.

I finally got round to it again in the depths of winter 2014, going with a chain-smoking Bedouin of the Jebeleya tribe, called Musa.

We walked in from St Katherine and slept the first night in Wadi Tarfa; an old travelling passage between the Monastery of St Katherine and El Tur. It was absolutely freezing and everything was white with frost in the morning – Musa included. He was in one of those flimsy-type sleeping bags you’d take to Glastonbury or T-in the Park or something; doubled up with his knees to his chest, not moving. Half-worried he’d frozen to death, I nudged him which made him suddenly sit bolt upright, like a jack in the box. He stared at me a few seconds, then the fire, then me again; all with the confused look of a man who’d totally forgotten where he actually went to sleep.

We’d both overslept by a couple of hours. Which meant getting to Jebel Thebt and back in the couple of days we had was going to be tough.

Normally, to get to Jebel Thebt, you’d keep walking down Wadi Tarfa. Musa had a shortcut in mind though, which was just as well; because we’d never have got there the normal way. Not before sunset, anyway. And the last thing I wanted was to be stuck out on a big peak I didn’t know in the cold depths of a Sinai winter (according to one early climber, a Bedouin guide got frostbite on a mountain near Jebel Thebt in 1898). We clambered out of Wadi Tarfa and went over low, rocky hills. Sure enough, Musa’s shortcut was spot on. Jebel Thebt soon appeared on the horizon. Still huge. STILL faraway. It’s that highest, most distant peak on the left in the picture above. We went down to a wadi – Wadi Thebt – and began a long uphill slog to the bottom of the mountain.

I’d be going alone now. Me and Musa had already agreed he’d sit the climb out.

Looking at it now though, I sort of wished I’d persuaded him to come. It still looked massive. And difficult. And there wasn’t much time left.

Getting up Jebel Thebt is a two-step process. You follow the last stretch of Wadi Thebt up to a high pass. Then you turn and make a beeline straight for the top. It sounds easy but it’s a bit tricky in a rush.

There are no good trails. It’s hard to see where you’re going. You start on one side of the wadi. But further on, big crags block it. You can cross to the other side, but there are huge scree slopes here. And not the sort of scree slopes whose bulges have been flattened out by hundreds of hikers’ feet. Or lined with nice neat trails. Precarious scree slopes that feel like they’re going to slide out from under your feet at any moment, sweeping you away in an avalanche of rubble. If these scree slopes have ONE redeeming feature though it’s that they’re where a few rojoms – trail-marking stones – appear on the mountain for the first time.

Rojoms mark the way in hard-to-navigate parts of the Sinai. And they give you that important psychological security of knowing you ARE on the right trail. If you’re ever in a tricky place like this in the Sinai and you know the exact route, DO build them. Obviously, if you don’t; don’t. The last thing anybody needs is to be led off on a meandering, dead-man’s trail in places like this.

Anyway, after this scree, you get to the pass, where there’s an old leopard trap.

Jebel Thebt towers up here as a big mass of shattered, intimidating crags. But the rojoms continue, marking a line all the way: it twists up gullies, crosses terraces and then finally weaves through the high cliffs to the summit. Up here there’s a metal barrel. The Bedouin say the British put it here long ago. Maybe as a trig point. And the view here is amazing. You see mountains you don’t see anywhere else in the Sinai. You can gaze over the sea to Jebel Gharib in mainland Egypt too. Then the other way, to Jebel Loz and the high ranges of the Hijaz.

I wanted to stay longer, but my clothes were wet with sweat, going so fast; after just a few minutes in the summit wind I was shivering in big violent shakes.

I went down as fast as I could, getting back just before dusk.

I met Musa coming the other way and we began walking out down Wadi Thebt again. Further along we found a Bedouin guy in a dwelling below a boulder and went inside, huddling around a fire and listening to the wind outside. Sleeping in boulder dwellings like this is one of the things I love about the Sinai; in other parts of the world you sleep in huts, hostels and lodges; or at least in a tent, with zips and plastic. Here, you sleep in the landscape itself.

There are different ways you can finish from Jebel Thebt. You can walk out to El Tur – through the amazing Wadi Isleh – in 1-2 days. You can go to Ein Kidd in 1-2 days too; a pretty oasis where you can continue to Sharm. Or you can go back to St Katherine. Distance-wise, they’re not that different. Me and Musa went back the St Katherine way. We were supposed to meet a pick-up for the last bit but it didn’t come. We started walking, hoping we’d meet it later. Darkness fell and just as we’d resigned ourselves to a long, overnight walk back two headlights appeared on a high, distant pass. We flashed our torches; they flashed back. For sure, it was our ride. Half an hour later we were in the back of a Toyota pick up, trundling back to St Katherine under the stars. The best thing about Jebel Thebt for me wasn’t the climb. It was that it put so many new mountains on my radar; ones that are still bleeping, which I still want to do.