Seven Summits Sinai – America's Finest Ambassador

Cairo

: The two most reasonable points of entry to Egypt I had to choose between were Cairo, the capital, and Sharm el-Sheikh which is the most popular tourist hub on the Sinai Peninsula. Since I figured that no trip to Egypt would be complete without seeing the pyramids, I opted for Cairo due to its proximity to said world wonders. Here is Cairo as seen from the top of Cairo Tower on Gezira Island

: Get a load of this pasty-ass balding fuckin retard in front of the 614-foot-tall (187m) Cairo Tower. Completed in 1961, this is the tallest structure in Egypt and North Africa and had been the tallest structure in all of Africa for ten years until they were outdone by Hillbrow Tower in South Africa

: Qasr El Nil Bridge connecting downtown Cairo (near Tahrir Square) and Gezira Island on which Cairo Tower can be seen there in the background

: Girls hanging out an chatting on Qasr El Nil Bridge

: When I saw this KFC ad for their new “Messy Burger,” I couldn’t help but think of the scene in that one Mary Kate & Ashley movie “It Takes Two” in which the spoiled rich one of the two girls refers to a sloppy joe as a “big gooey messy burger”

: This is the elevator on the floor on which my Airbnb apartment had been located in the Zamalek area of the city. In spite of the shoddy appearance of this elevator, Zamalek is a very nice area and the apartment itself wasn’t bad at all. So, I get into town around 8pm or so and show up at this building and am having trouble getting in touch with the guy who’s supposed to come let me in. Long story short, I finally get into the building maybe around 9 or 9:30 or some shit and immediately start stretching my body and doing a workout and then showering because I felt like complete shit after having been in transit from Chicago for the past 24 hours. So after I get cleaned up, I decide to go pick up some dinner from one of the many local restaurants. So I go out in the hallway and call this elevator. It arrives on my floor. And the doors don’t open automatically. I gotta pull the handle towards me. So, I grab the handle and open this thing up and…

: …on the inside of this thing there was blood everywhere. It was on the walls and pooled up on the floor. It looked like a fuckin scene straight out of a horror movie. I was shocked. So I let go of the door handle and the thing shut and I went to the next elevator over and pressed the call button. A minute later the elevator arrived and there was a guy in there who was also going down to the ground floor. I stepped in, the door closed and we started moving. A second later I asked him, “Laish fii dum ik-tiir bil-ahsensore tah-nii?” Like, “Why is there so much blood in the other elevator?” And he just gestured a stabbing motion. And I asked, “Maa sik-kii-nay?” Like, “With a knife?” And he affirmed that, yes, it was with a knife. So I go out to dinner thinking that someone was stabbed in the elevator. Whatever…I mean, I was really hungry and just wanted to get something to eat so I just shrugged it off. Anyway…

: …I go out to eat and come back and now there’re a ton of cop cars and news people and weeping women in front of the building housing my Airbnb. I stop into a nearby store to grab some chocolate milk and ask the guy what’s going on. He tells me four people have been murdered. “Four!?” I asked. “Four,” he said. I think he’s fucking with me just because I’m a foreigner. Like, “No way four people were stabbed to death in that elevator,” I thought to myself. “There wasn’t enough blood. And there’s no way four people and a murderer could all fit in that elevator at once. Just doesn’t make sense.” So I took what he said with a grain of salt and I walked through the crowd back into my building and the “buh-wahb” (doorman) there in the lobby was casually mopping up the blood out of the elevator. I asked him if there was a problem. He shrugged and replied, “Ah-dii” which is means like, “Normal.” So, I just get in the elevator and go back to my room. Anyway, later on Tinder I was talking to a local girl and I told her what happened and she asked, “Oh, you’re staying in the murder building?!” and then sent me the above article which she told me to read using Google translate. Turns out some dude shot his family to death in one of the other apartments and then killed himself and the blood was left in the elevator by the lone survivor of the incident who’d been shot through the hand…Or something like that. Whatever the case, that was the most unusual Airbnb experience/start to a trip that I’d ever had.

: Ahhh…so this is how they fund all their evil-doings and terrorist activities – through the profits from their tea company!

: Hey guy, don’t tell me how to live my life!

: This restaurant’s slogan was “Award your taste buds”

: Dude sellin coffee

: How to cross a flooded sidewalk

: El Moez Street in Islamic Cairo

: Inside the Qalawun Complex on El Moez Street

: Girl taking a selfie at the Qalawun Complex

: At first, I had no idea what the fuck this thing was. But I did take notice of the flocks of pigeons flying around it. So I later asked a local guy via a Whatsapp conversation what exactly this thing was and he said they’re built specifically for pigeon breeding. He added…

: If this brief exchange hasn’t satisfied your curiosity for pigeon breeding in Cairo, I’d recommend this article on the topic… https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/the-pigeon-breeders-of-cairo.html

: Walking down El-Gamaleya Street in Islamic Cairo

: SHUT UP WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!!!

: One of the more seemingly “out of place” buildings I came across while wandering around Cairo

: Someone told me this restaurant is named Heart Attack because it’s so good that it’ll give you one. Now, I’ve heard of things like this before. In Spanish, for example, when I was in Colombia and used to like to browse escort ads online, I’d see many of these chicks describe themselves as having a “cuerpo de infarto” which is literally “body of heart attack.” This is meant to say that they’re so hot and sexy that the mere sight of them could provoke a heart attack. Like…okay. I guess that works. But when I think of a greasy fried chicken and burger joint and I hear the phrase “heart attack,” I’m not thinking it’s because of how good the food is. I’m thinking it’s because the shit’s gonna clog all my fuckin arteries and I’ll end up on the floor clenching my chest as my life flashes before my eyes

: Wandering around the “City of the Dead” necropolis district of Cairo

: Here I got off one of the main streets and started wandering through these mausoleums when…

: …an old man came out of one and greeted me. He guided me out of the maze back to the main road through the area and told me to stay out there. He said it is safer for me. He said that maybe there among the mausoleums, someone might have a knife or something

: Still in City of the Dead

: Apologies if I got this wrong, but I think this building was the tomb of Khawand Tughay

: Forgot the name of this building and haven’t been able to find it after fifteen minutes of looking. Sorry, but I don’t wanna waste any more time on this. At any rate, this is the last place I visited before exiting the City of the Dead and catching an Uber outta there

: One last look back at the City of the Dead and one of the many packs of street dogs (some more aggressive than others) that inhabit the area

: The Churchill Disco… To me, nothing provokes the image of horny drunken dudes grinding their junk on the asses of strange women with club hits bumpin at an unreasonable volume quite like Winston Churchill’s fat, diplomatic, policy-makin ass. Cheers!

: I know, I know…it’s not legible. But this photo I took of a menu out at a restaurant in the Heliopolis area during my last night in the city said somethin like, “Get 5% off your bill if you give your waiter a high five.” To me, it seemed like a terribly stupid idea to encourage during covid times, but you bet your ass I high-fived my waiter that night. Five-finger discount, bro

Giza

: This mural was not too far away from the entrance to the pyramids in Giza and the writing says something like, “Military police.” Giza and Cairo are two different cities managed by different governments. I think at one point in time, they used to be – geographically speaking – two separate entities, but now the population in the area has gotten so large that the two cities are basically just one great big, gigantic, seemingly never-ending urban center

: No seatbelts either. Only losers use that shit

: Sphinx!

: Just a brief glimpse of the tourist scene here surrounding the pyramids. I’d definitely recommend coming here if one of your favorite hobbies is getting asked about thirty times an hour if you’d like to take a camel ride

: The sun in Egypt is quite powerful, even at the beginning of February

: Before going to the pyramids, I was not aware that you could go inside of them. I believe I decided to go to the center of Khufu which is the biggest one in the complex. This is what the first half of the climb looked like

: Then the second half looked like this

: This is what the room at the center of the pyramid looks like. It was hot and sweaty and struck me as a terrible place to get stuck in and suffocate to death

: There they are from a distance. Classic!

: A monument presumably modeled after the penis of one of the ancient pharaohs

Sinai

Getting to St. K’s and meeting the trail team

: Circled in red in the southern part of the Sinai Peninsula is the town of St. Katherine which was selected to be the meeting point of all group members for the start of the trek

: Camel-carrying pickup we were briefly riding behind when first entering the Sinai Peninsula

: It took like five or six hours to get from Cairo to St. Katherine in a private taxi. Once I got settled in, there wasn’t much daylight left, so I decided to take a walk to the center of town

: Maybe instead of walking to the center of town, I should’ve gone in the opposite direction and visited St. Catherine’s Monastery. Oh well, maybe next time (photo by fellow hiker Gary)

: This is Ben Hoffler. He is the first person with whom I had contact while inquiring about the Sinal Trail and Red Sea Mountain Trail which are sister trails of the Seven Summits Sinai. I actually didn’t even know that the Seven Summits existed until Ben told me about it via a Whatsapp message. Needless to say, that’s the route I ended up going on. Ben’s blog from his earlier days of hiking in Sinai can be found at https://gotellitonthemountain.net/blog/ . Also, this is Ben as described on the Seven Summits official website… “Ben is one of the Middle East’s leading trail developers. He co-founded the award-winning Sinai Trail with leaders of the Sinai’s Bedouin tribes in 2015, growing it into a bigger intertribal project in 2018. He developed & founded the Red Sea Mountain Trail, voted one of TIME’s World’s Greatest Places. He also founded the Three Peaks Egypt Challenge and has overseen the development of hiking trails in Saudi Arabia as part of the country’s 2030 Vision. He authored Trailblazer’s 2014 guidebook Sinai: The Trekking Guide and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has walked over 10,000km with Egypt’s Bedouin tribes & his focus is on mobilising tourism to conserve endangered heritage.” (photo by fellow hiker Philippe)

: This is our head guide, Salem. Now…Ben is a pretty tough dude. I was impressed how he hiked the whole trail in sandals, even in parts where it was all snowy and shit. Even so though, he’s not as tough as Salem. I think that Salem is the ultimate badass mountain guy on the Sinai. There’s no situation the dude couldn’t handle without grace and ease. With Salem, the entire hike I felt like I was in really good hands. The official trail site says of Salem that, “Salem Abu Ramadan is a tribesman of the Jebeleya from St Katherine. He was born at the foot of Egypt’s highest mountain and walked thousands of kilometres in scouting routes for Egypt’s Sinai Trail. Today, he works as one of the head guides on the Sinai Trail. He is also a founder and head guide of the Three Peaks Egypt Challenge. Salem had a leading role in developing the Seven Summits Sinai Challenge and has climbed each of the summits multiple times. He is a mountain man, known for his resilience, superb route-finding capabilities and an extensive knowledge of the Sinai’s mountains. Nobody of his generation has walked the highlands of the Sinai more widely.” (photo by Ben Hoffler)

: Next to Salem in this photo is Khaled. Khaled is about ten or fifteen years younger than Salem and – although a very capable mountain man himself – still has some learning to do from the more experienced Salem. In Bedouin communities, all of the traditional knowledge about the terrain and their way of life is passed down from generation to generation not through formal schooling but by getting out there and doing stuff together. And this way of life has been threatened in recent years as tourism has dropped and job opportunities in the region have disappeared and many young men are leaving to go find work in the cities. Due to this trend, it’s feared that the traditions will be lost and Bedouin culture as it has existed for years and years and years will become a thing of the past. (photo by fellow hiker Amy)

: The group. The two guides, Salem and Khaled, are local Bedouins and Ben (who took this photo) is British. Aside from that, there were two Egyptians, two New Zealanders, two Germans, two Americans (including yours truly down on the bottom right), one Brit and one French national

Day 1

: 4AM at the guesthouse in St. Katherine. After we all got our shit together, we hopped in a van and took a ride for…I have no idea how long the ride was. Maybe half-an-hour? Then we started walking in pitch blackness for a good hour or hour and a half until…

: …the sun finally started to creep up

: We kept walking until…

: …we reached this spot where we had breakfast.

: From the breakfast spot in the photo previous, everyone from the group piled into the back of these pickup trucks which were going to take us to the official starting place of the hike. It was pretty cold that morning and whereas my core temperature was okay because I was still relatively warm from the morning’s walk, my fingers (which were gloved) were stinging as I held on to the side of the truck bed to stabilize myself while we flew over the sandy track. Let it be known that there had been the option to sit inside the truck which would’ve remedied my frozen finger problem, but I wanted to sit in the back with everyone else because it was part of the experience

: At the end of the ride in the pickup, all the shit we didn’t want to carry was handed over to these here Bedouin gentleman that were going to load it all onto camels and carry it (via a less rugged path than we were to hike) up to that evening’s campsite. This area of the Sinal is controlled by the Garasha tribe, as such all these camel men were from the Garasha

: Let it begin

: Head for the hills

: As soon as the sun started hitting us, it was time to ditch a layer. It’s crazy how much the temps differ when in the sun and when in the shade in Sinai during this time of year

: So, the night before the hike, everyone was required to take a covid test to make sure that none of us had the disease and would spread it around to other hikers and the local Bedouin communities. Miraculously, no one came up positive. That said, when we started the hike, there’d originally been three Americans, not just me and one other person as I mentioned in the caption for the group picture earlier. The third guy, Mike, it turns out, had contracted covid several months beforehand and it must’ve did a number on his overall health. He was an experienced hiker who’d done some big hikes before, but only about an hour into this hike (an hour of relatively easy hiking, before we’d even reached the parts where you gotta scramble) this dude was unfortunately done for. He was sweating profusely, having trouble breathing and could not keep up with the rest of the group. Ben and the guides had to arrange to get Mike back to St. Katherine via camel and car where he’d wait a few days to see if he felt better and could possibly rejoin the group. Mike unfortunately did not end up feeling well enough to rejoin and that was the last we saw of him

: Philippe lookin cool

: Julian, the most jet-lagged hiker of the bunch, lookin at me strangely as I capture a quick snap of our first lunch together. This is pretty much what all of our meals were like. Err…dinners were different. There were bowls and plates and hot food (soup and rice and chicken) for dinner. This, I should say, is what pretty much all our breakfasts and lunches were like – everyone crowded around food on the ground. Most lunches included at least some of the following elements: either tuna or sardines, bread, cheese, tomato, cucumber, baba ghanoush, halawa, apples and/or oranges, and – if we were lucky – nutella (or one of its local generic spinoffs)

: Getting higher

: Salem and a couple of the Garasha guys preparing dinner at the campsite

: Everyone who decided to go up to the summit of Jebel Serbal (for those of you that don’t know, “jebel” means “mountain” in Arabic) left their bags behind at camp and kept on goin up here to the top before the sun was due to set around 6 or 6:30

: Ancient Nabataean script carved into one of the rocks near the summit

: The top of Jebel Serbal (2070m)

: Ben photographing one of the Garasha at the top of Serbal

Day 2

: This camel seems to enjoy chowing box even more than I do! 😋

: Takin a break a couple hours into this morning’s hike

: Chillin

: This here stack of stones is known as a “rujum” (plural: “rujoom”). And rujoom are used as waymarkers to let future walkers know they’re on the right path. Like this one, they’re generally left in clearly visible places (atop boulders for example) because…well, that just makes the most sense, doesn’t it?

: Heading towards that descent straight ahead

: Bout to go down

: This here is a very old-ass leopard trap. What they used to do is put a baby goat in there to lure the leopard in and then somehow the trap would be set off and the entrance that the leopard went into would now be closed off. Although there are rumors that so-and-so saw a leopard here or there X amount of years ago, there’s a good chance that leopards on the Sinai are actually fully extinct

: Salem throwing together some homemade bread for lunch

: Cookin it up. Stupid me, I neglected to get a photo of the finished product

: Another break spot a couple hours after lunch. That’s Ben on the right pointing out some of the mountains and telling us their names. He’s unbelievably knowledgeable when it comes to that stuff, but I unfortunately could neither remember any of the names nor recognize which mountain was which from different angles as we continued hiking

Day 3

: This is a complicated topic that I’m not qualified to explain in great detail, but I think it’s important to mention. From what I picked up on during this hike is that the Bedouin people of South Sinai (actually, the Bedouin community as a whole in Egypt) are largely marginalized by the Egyptian government. They don’t have many job opportunities and for many years their main source of income had been from tourists coming to visit and go on hikes and desert excursions not much unlike this one that I went on. But in recent years, following political unrest and violence resulting from the 2011 revolution as well as the military coup that ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, tourism to Egypt dropped dramatically. Many foreign governments warned against coming here and – as a matter of fact, now in 2022 – the US Department of State still has a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory to all areas of the Sinai Peninsula with the exception of the resort town Sharm el-Sheikh in the very south of the peninsula which now has a 20-mile-long concrete and barbed wire wall around it to keep all the hypothetical terrorists out. As a result from this loss of tourist dollars and with no other opportunities to keep their families from starving, quite a few Bedouins have turned to growing opium as a means of survival. As such, seeing opium fields like the one pictured here is not an uncommon sight all throughout South Sinai. I’m definitely not a regular reader of the Christian Science Monitor, but I found this to be a very good article on the subject… https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0427/Poppies-replace-tourists-in-Egypt-s-Sinai-desert

: That said, not all Bedouin take the opium route to save their families. Some, unfortunately, decide to abandon their traditional ways of life out in the desert and go to cities where they hope to make enough money to send back home. Others stick around and have taken to growing legal things like fruits and nuts, and cultivating honey. One such organization that supports this movement (supporting women growers specifically) is Mountain Rose. Mountain Rose purchases nuts and fruits from the local orchards and uses them to produce energy bars and jams and other food products that you can learn more about at mountainrose.org I personally ordered one of their energy bars to eat on each day of the hike and thought they were pretty tasty – a nice supplement to the three daily meals provided by the trail team and the daily protein bar I’d eat from my stash that I’d brought from home

: Truckin along

: The camel caravan carrying all our camping shit and the group food stash

: Having just ran up this hill trying to keep pace with Ben and the guides, the view back down shows the rest of the group ascending up and out of the wadi (“wadi” means “valley”) that we’d just traversed

: Salem using boulders to smash logs from a dead tree that could then be carried to that evening’s campsite to put on the fire

: The sun was already beginning to set…

: …by the time we reached camp on this day. If you look closely down into the wadi, you can see they already got a fire started.

: Hangin out by the fire after a long day

Day 4

: A breakfast-time selfie taken by fellow hiker Gary on the left with members of the Awlad Said tribe in the background behind him

: Lunch break in an oasis we crossed through and ended up chillin at for a few hours

: Guide Salem up in a palm tree fetching a fresh bundle of dates for the group to enjoy during our break in the oasis (photo by fellow hiker Laurence)

: I’m pretty sure that the far, faraway mountains here are mountains on mainland Egypt all the way on the other side of the Gulf of Suez

: Salem, just kickin it and lookin out over the view shown in the photo previous

: By traditional standards, this photo sucks. But I kinda like it. Because at this point in the trip I had a pretty fucked-up cold and here we were in this old Byzantine cave where the guys are cooking chicken over a big-ass fire. The smoke was very thick and was irritating my sore throat causing me to cough and my eyes to water. So, the way this photo looks, with everyone and everything all distorted, is kinda the way I was seeing it at the time with my dried-out, watery-ass eyes

Day 5

: When climbing up to the top of the second peak – Jebel Abu Gasaba – we left our bags near the bottom of the summit because the climb involved lots of scrambling and we planned on coming back down the same way we went up

: That’s what it was like! (photo by fellow hiker Gavin)

: Chillin at the top of Abu Gasaba (2187m)

Day 6

: Ice, ice, baby

: Anker is a leading brand in selling mobile charging devices, but I somehow think that their brand would get even more sales if they put a W at the beginning of the name

: That’s me and I don’t know what the fuck I was lookin at in this photo here

: Circled over there is the little Orthodox chapel atop the summit of Jebel Katerina which is where I’ll be walking to right after this photo was taken

: The chapel as seen from much, much closer up. Check out that moon rising in the background

: Fellow hikers at the peak of Jebal Katerina (2642m)

: Pretty awesome place to watch a sunset

: One of the nicer spots for an evening fire. Walls all around to protect us from the wind, but with no roof atop so the smoke has a place to escape

Day 7

: Getting water from one of the wells along the way. If we weren’t getting water from wells, we were filling up in little streams or pools left over in different places from recently melted snow

: Not sure if this is accurate because I don’t have any of the elevation stats in front of me, but I feel like there was a lot of downhill on this day

: “I’m goin down, down, down, down” – Bruce Springsteen

Day 8

: Making our way up to Jebel Um Shomer

: View from the top of Um Shomer. Of this mountain, the Seven Summits site says, “A sharp, jagged summit with an almost Alpine feel, Jebel Um Shomer towers 2587m over a wilderness of rugged hills and winding wadis. Thunder was once said to echo around its summit, leading some to suggest it was the real Mount Sinai of The Bible.”

: What goes up must come down

: Still goin down until…

: …we reached this little unoccupied monastery here near the base of Jebel Rimhan which we were due to climb the following day. The monastery was locked and the plan was not to sleep inside it, but to just use the surrounding area to camp out in

Day 9

: So, while hiking the Seven Summits, I didn’t have a tent. I mostly just used my sleeping mat, sleeping bag and sleeping bag liner (which was locally made by Bedouin women) and I slept out under the stars. On really cold nights, I used a bivy bag for a little extra warmth. But even with the extra protection of a bivy…well, that just ain’t gonna cut it in the middle of a fucked-up rainstorm. So, thankfully it only rained one night. Well, it was actually like half rain, half ice pellets. Anyway, I went to bed at like 9pm and the sky was still clear, but Ben had warned us of a chance of rain overnight. At 2am, the sky erupted with lightning and thunder that seemed to be striking rather close to us. I sat up, alarmed, and so did Philippe who was sleeping nearby. Philippe also did not use a tent. It still wasn’t raining yet, but I saw Salem walking hurriedly past us towards the camels. I asked him what we should do. He didn’t respond, but walked purposefully towards the monastery. Next thing ya know, the windows to the monastery have all been jimmied open and Philippe is climbing in. It starts to rain and I hand all my and Philippe’s bags and sleeping gear to him through the window and climb in right after him. It was on the floor in this room in the photo where we slept and in this monastery where a bottle of wine was then cracked open and consumed until about 4 in the morning as the heavens pissed down onto the Sinai. Of all the nights it could’ve rained, thank God, thank Allah, thank whoever that it was right here next to this place that we tentless folks could climb into and sleep under the roof of

: Room in the monastery where all the Bedouin slept. The next day, one of the hikers asked one of the Bedouin something like, “Oh, so you guys got an understanding with the Church that owns this monastery that you can come and take shelter in here if you’re in the area and there’s a storm like there was the night before?” And the guy was like, “No. Absolutely not. This will definitely be a problem.”

: Old Man Salem helping hiker Amy out the monastery window (photo by fellow hiker Philippe)

: Soaking wet camel with snowy mountains in the background. Whereas the majority of the stuff we got hit with at the lower elevation had melted off by the morning, all the surrounding mountains were covered with white stuff

: My brain has a hard time seeing both palm trees and snowy mountains in the same picture. Those things feel like they just shouldn’t go together

: On this day, the plan had been to climb Jebel Rimhan. The trail website says of Rimhan that, “Of all the Seven Summits, Jebel Rimhan is the toughest: from beginning to end it is a challenging ascent with real hazards and exposure and only the most experienced, fittest mountaineers should consider an ascent.” So…on a normal day, Rimhan is said to be extraordinarily diffilcult. On a day when there’d been freshly dumped snow on the peak, it just seemed like a bad idea to make an attempt to summit. So, alternatively, we hiked up to the top of an adjacent mountain

: Here we are scrambling up to the top of the aforementioned adjacent mountain

: Fellow hiker Gavin approaching the top with the ever-foreboding Jebel Rimhan at his back

: Here’s Salem making a phone call. Service in this area of Sinai is shoddy at best, but any Bedouin mountain man worth his salt knows exactly where in the mountains a phone signal can be found. And each time they’re near one of these spots, you bet your ass they take advantage of it (photo by fellow hiker Gavin)

: Ben scrambling on some rocks at the peak of this mountain which’d at the time been being engulfed by that thick white cloud there in the background

Day 10

: Being down in this wadi on Day 10, it was very warm making it hard to believe that we’d been surrounded by snow-covered mountains just the day before

: Wadi-walkin

: Camel caravan

Day 11

: The next day we were back up and out of the wadis to make a summit attempt on Jebel Thebt. As you can see, some snow still remained up here near the top of Thebt

: View of the wadis that I believe we’d just come from as seen from the top of Jebel Thebt

: Me cold kickin it live up on Thebt (photo by Ben Hoffler)

: Jebel Thebt stands at 2449m

: Snowball fight at the peak

: Time to start heading back down

Day 12

: On this day, we were given the option of hiking up and over some peaks and down to the next camp or just walking with the camel guys through the wadis to the next camp. I opted for a wadi day

: The route

: As I walked, I was takin photos and vidoes of this camel walking right behind me. Turns out it really wanted to take a bite out of the back of my head and Salem’s brother told me to get away from the camel before it actually did end up getting a piece of me

: I think we did like 16 or 18 kilometers in four hours on this day which is a pretty brisk pace to move at. By my standards, at least

: Out here in the open wadi without any other hikers around me, I could pretend I was one of the kids from Stand By Me on my way to find Ray Brower while singing The Ballad of Paladin

: Check out that Fred Flintstone house-lookin rock on bottom left of the photo. I went inside to take a peek in and on the ground I remember seeing used baby diapers and women’s sanitary napkins. Wilma needs to up her housekeeping game

: The campfire in “The Haunted Oasis.” I may be messing this story up, but as I recall it: One time when Ben and Salem had camped there in the past, night had fallen and out of nowhere they could clearly hear a woman screaming. They went and had a look around and there was no one for miles and miles around. They were spooked the fuck out and didn’t sleep too well. The next morning, they packed all their shit up and left pretty early. Thankfully our night camping there, we didn’t experience anything like that. (photo by fellow hiker Gavin)

Day 13

: Our final big ascent of the trip out from the haunted oasis where we slept the night before

: View from the top of Jebal Sabbah (2280m)

: Gavin taking in the incredible view

: Very hard to see, but some little specks on the far right of the photo are some of the other hikers taking photos

: Alexandra enjoying a moment of peace

: Gary loungin

: At the top of Sabbah there’s a little tin containing a book for everyone who’s summited to write their name and a personal message or something like that, but since I’m as immature a dickhead at 34 as I had been at 12 years old, I couldn’t resist drawing a wee-wee in there. Sorry, Ben

: Bottles were popped. And yes, that’s snow keepin that puppy cold

Day 14

: The daunting final descent down to and out of that wadi from where we’d be picked up by 4x4s and driven out of the Sinai wilderness

: Laurence and Wessam walking away from a boulder that kinda looks like an eagle’s head

: An end-of-hike feast I was invited to by Philippe at one of the resorts down in Sharm el-Sheikh. This paired with my first shower in two weeks…I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the hike