The mountain gorillas were fantastic, the drive back to civilization, was not. We spent five hours in a van on the verge of self destruction, behind another van that was kicking up so much dust we were all completely covered in red muck by the time we got back to Lake Bunyoni. The region that Bwindi park (where the Gorillas live) is in, is called the Impenetrable Forest. Sadly there's not a ton of forest left to be impenetrable, but the name is still apt because the road really sucks.

We spent a further two relaxing days at Lake Bunyoni where we tried to manage some laundry drying in between torrential rains and beers, its not the most exhilerating recreation in the world, but it passed the time.

From Lake Bunyoni we went to Jinja, the Malaria Capital of Africa. Or so they told us. Fortunately, the mosquitoes were incredibly stupid even if they were plentiful and completely ignored any amount of repellant. I think we only managed to get two or three bites between us over the three days we were there, so we'll find out in about three weeks if we have Malaria.

While in Jinja, most of our group went on a white water rafting trip down the nile which hit four class 5 rapids. Our raft managed to get through all but the last rapid unscathed. Then came "The Bad Place"... we weren't actually supposed to go into The Bad Place because the water was too high, so the raft was basically guaranteed to flip due to the giant standing wave. Well, our guide completely failed to steer us around The Bad Place, so flip we did. You'll all see it someday, as we bought the DVD. We were held under for a bit and then unceremoniously spit out into more white water. We did a lot of not breathing and wondering when we were going to surface, and we sampled some Nile water, my leg banged into a rock under water and that hurt a bit, but we were out of it in about 30 seconds. My leg is better now aside from some slight abrasions. It looks really cool on the DVD.

The next day I tried Kayaking, which I've ruled out as a future hobby, its just really annoying, but I'm glad I tried it. Next watersport to try... Sledging.

We had a long drive back to Nairobi where we are swapping some passengers tomorrow before we get back on the road and head to Arusha.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Chapter Six

There had been a lot of talk about the super-fast hydrofoil ferry that we got to take to Sharm-El-Sheikh. But due to the tragedy of the prior week, everyone was being a bit cautious, so our fast ferry had to move a bit slower than normal. It still felt pretty ridiculously fast to me, but lunch did wind up being an hour later than it was supposed to be.

We got off the ferry and had an hour long bus ride to Dahab, checked into our hotel, went off to lunch and had our Dahab briefing. Lunch turned out to be an excellent introduction to several great Dahab institutions: warm beer, cats (and cat spray), and wee Egyptian girls attempting to sell us bracelets. After we heard from our guide, and the owner of the scuba shop next door, we signed up for an introductory dive to see if we might want to get certified. But we would be doing that in another two days, our immediate concern was trying to take a nap, because that night we were going to climb Mount Sinai.

Unfortunately, climbing Mount Sinai turned out to be a really bad idea. Several factors contributed to this:

1. We were climbing the mountain in the middle of the night. So it was dark, we had one weak headlamp between the two of us, and after a couple of hours, and by 4 AM, we really wished we could find somewhere to go to sleep.

2. There were about a thousand other people also climbing the mountain. A lot of them could have been a little better behaved.

3. There were at least a hundred camels and really annoying camel guides going up and down the mountain all night long. It was bad enough that camels are completely silent, so you never know when one is going to run you over, but then the guides yelled at us for using artificial light because it was bad for the camel's eyes. They also had this irritating habit of lurking right behind you offering rides incessantly. It was just constant irritating harassment. We got to the point that we were just yelling and cursing at them anytime they spoke to us. Oh, and the whole mountain smelled like camel urine.

4. Once the camel path was finished, we had to climb some seriously old steps to get to the top. The steps were last refurbished in the 9th century. That's not an exageration either, so they were difficult to manage in the first place. Only now, the camel guides had taken up positions on the narrow steps in order to offer assistance in exchange for baksheesh. This just pissed us off even more and there was a lot more shouting, only now, some of the other climbers had joined us. About halfway up, they finally got out of the way.

Once we got to the top, and stopped moving, we started freezing. I had a backpack filled with blankets and sleeping bags, but since there were so many people, there was nowhere to actually sit and attempt to warm up, so after a brief break we attempted to fight the traffic jam up to the summit and find someplace to sit and watch the sunrise, which was apparently the whole point of this ordeal. It actually was a nice sunrise, but it wasn't worth all the pain.

The way down was fortunately much more pleasant. We took the stairs down the backside of the mountain that lead to St. Catherine's Monastery. The stairs, thankfully, are not camel compatible, and our group pretty much had the path to ourselves. I did manage to appreciate the scenery on the way down, but near the end, it became a very painful descent.

Once at the bottom, we paid a brief visit to the Monastery, but were a little too delerious to really pay too much attention. And all the people that had been on the mountain that night were now crowded into the monastery. The monastery is really famous for this shrub, we got a picture of it and stumbled back to the van and attempted to sleep during the two hour ride back.

Our second day in Dahab was sort of blown because we had to sleep so that made us even more bitter about climbing Mount Sinai. But the next day we woke up early and did our resort dive, and then our whole group went snorkelling at the blue hole. Every night for dinner our whole group would pile into the Chinese restaurant to buy beer, and then we took it to one of the Bedouin tent fish restaurants for ridiculous amounts of food, and some of the most incredibly giant squid I've ever seen. We enjoyed ourselves so much, and Dahab was so cheap, that we decided to come back once our tour was over and get scuba certified.

Chapter Seven

Our tour left Dahab on an overnight bus back to Cairo. Overnight busses in theory are an efficient use of time, but I never manage to sleep much on them. We spent four more days in Cairo, two of them sleeping and updating the website, and two days playing tourist. We attempted to go see the Coptic museum, but it was closed to flooding, so we wandered around the Coptic quarter instead, which proved to be fairly interesting by itself. We liked the cab driver that took us to the Coptic quarter, so we hired him to drive us to Sakkara, Dashur, and Memphis the next day. The pictures sum those sights up fairly well.

We returned to Dahab (travelling in daylight this time) and on the way managed to see some boats moving through the Suez canal, which we thought was pretty cool. When we got back we discovered the weather had turned pretty cold and windy, and Heather had a cold herself, so we had to wait three days before we could start our scuba classes. We met up with our old guide's next tour group when they came through Dahab and tried to warn as many of them as we could off of climbing Mt. Sinai, but none of them listened. Actually there were only five of them planning to go in the first place, and they said they enjoyed themselves, go figure.

Our scuba classes were quite tiring, but we had a fantastic chain-smoking, tea drinking, English instructor named Tim. Hi Tim! If you go to Dahab, we highly recommend the dive shop we used, Big Blue. Tell them we said Hello.

From this point, the rest of the story has been told. I'm not sure why we felt compelled to give such a ridiculously detailed account of our trip to Egypt, other than we really enjoyed it. We hope you've enjoyed reading it.

The End

Before you start reading this, you might be interested to know that the final photo album from Egypt is now online. Enjoy!

Despite the fact that we haven't finished the Egypt Encompassed story yet, we have moved on. We left Dahab on the morning of Feb 27 for Petra, Jordan. It was a tad slow for the tiny amount of distance involved, but considering there was a ferry involved, I think we did OK. Actually we could have really screwed ourselves in our choice of which ferry to take. There's a fast ferry and a slow ferry. Naturally the fast ferry is more expensive, but it's supposed to get from Nuweiba, Egypt to Aqaba, Jordan in about an hour, just like Lens Crafters. Due to fog and choppy conditions, and then a very slow customs process, it took about four hours, which is how long the slow ferry takes. We were wondering for a little while if we had just wasted money by taking the fast ferry. Fortunately some people told us later that the 4 hour "slow" ferry had actually taken 18 hours that night and that a 24 hour crossing was not a rare occurence.

Anyway, we manged to get from Dahab to Petra in one day and were fairly proud of ourselves. Day one in Petra, we got up and had breakfast and got a reasonably early start walking down into Petra. I was very excited. Petra for me was one of the major reasons for this trip, so I was actually a little giddy. As we were walking down towards the main city of Petra, Heather ran into Parag, a friend of hers from Georgetown. We all thought this was a little strange, commenced with the usual "small world" banter - which it's really not, it's friggin' huge, I have a much greater appreciation of that now. We parted ways with Parag having exchanged contact info so we could meet up later in Tel Aviv. We spent several sweaty hours climbing around Petra and covered all the major highlights on our first day, and even managed to do some serious damage to the lunch buffet. It was dark by the time we were leaving the ruins, and we were in need of fuel, so we stopped at The Cave Bar for beer, and the best tuna salad sandwich I've ever had. The Cave Bar really could be considered a part of Petra itself. Its carved into the sandstone like all the other major buildings in Petra. It used to serve as a Nabatean Caravanserai, which to my understanding would have basically meant it served many of the same functions of a bar way back in the first century. So now I can say I've had overpriced Dutch beer in a 1900 year old pub in Jordan.

Heather's legs were too sore to go poke around Petra with me the next day, so I went by myself to get pictures of The Treasury when the sun first hits it at around 9am. I climbed around the ruins until about noon, and then my legs gave out on me, so I started the long walk out. I had another tuna salad sandwich for lunch and then Heather and I went to do some travel planning in town. We returned to the Cave Bar for dinner (Yes, I did have another tuna salad sandwich) and then we went on a candlelit walk back down to The Treasury and listened to some Bedouin music and had some herb tea. We wanted to get an early start back to Aqaba in the morning, so we called it a night right after the Petra by Candlelight tour.

On March 2nd we had a leisurely border crossing for breakfast into Eilat and picked up our rental car. We drove straight for the Dead Sea, and due to an aggressive lack of planning, had to check in to about the most expensive hotel/spa in Ein Bokek.

I was totally blown away by how much fun floating in the Dead Sea is. So our second day in Israel we spent doing nothing but floating. First we floated in the Dead Sea itself, and once we were sufficiently irradiated, we retreated inside the hotel to the indoor pool of Dead Sea water, where we floated for a few more hours. Floating is fantastic, I highly recommend a trip to the Dead Sea, I've never enjoyed a body of water more. For those of you who have asked whether anything lives in the Dead Sea, there are apparently four bacteria that live in it. Now whether that is four individual bacteria, or four different types of bacteria is beyond me.

The next morning we spent a very hot 2 hours at Masada, which was interesting to me because it is tangentially related to the Josephus Mass Suicide Problem, for which all computer science students are required to write simulations. Over the course of the evening my sunburn developed rather nicely (its not a bad one Mom and Dad) so I got hot pretty quick up on Masada. We went back to our Dead Sea beach in front of our hotel with some black Dead Sea mud in hand to use as sunblock. We smeared on our mud and cooked for a bit. We had a quick rinse in the Dead Sea, and made another retreat to the indoor hotel spa for some pool floating before it was time to leave for Jereusalem that evening.

Which brings us to this post. We are now in Jereusalem, which we will have a lot more to say about later. For now, go enjoy the last photo album from Egypt, the final chapter of Egypt Encompassed will also be posted soon.

PS. I'm really sorry about the lack of links in this post. Try Google or WikiPedia.