New Year sunrise at the summit of Mount Sinai

As you already know from our previous post, we climbed Mount Sinai to watch the sunrise on 1st January 2009. When we reached the summit, we set up our video camera pointing at where we thought the sun would appear...and waited.

We filmed for an hour, and this movie is that hour - but sped-up so that it only lasts for three and a half minutes. As a result, the whole thing takes an other-worldly appearance. It may seem pointless to watch the full video but I realise encourage you to do so. The way the colours change as the sun gets nearer to the horizon, and the swirling of the clouds, is something else. We also found a beautiful track to accompany it (Waiting by Pacific UV) and the song swells as the sun appears above the cloud.

Apologies for the occasional focussing issue: obvious the lighting conditions on the top were a bit funny, so the camera struggled a bit at first. Hopefully it doesn't detract from how brilliantly the rest of this has come out.

Climbing Mount Sinai

We arrived at Mount Sinai at around 1am on New Year's Day. It was freezing. Absolutely freezing.

However, that didn't stop us putting on our layers and hiking for a few hours us pitch black camel trails to reach the summit.

Dahab - Coloured Canyon, Oasis, White Canyon

Our trip to Dahab was a bit of an adventure holiday. The Sinai Peninsula features some absolutely amazing rock formations, and so we signed up to do a jeep safari for a day.

We began by visiting the famous Coloured Canyon to go trecking, then were taken by jeep to a bedouin camp at an oasis for lunch cooked over an open fire. From here, we trecked through the White Canyon (which was much less busy than the Coloured Canyon) before heading back to Dahab.

Part 1 - in the wilderness

Part 2 - reflecting on the day

Dahab - First Impressions

Nile Cruise 16 - The Last Day (on the Nile around Aswan)

It's taken us over a month, but we've finally done it! All the video we shot on the Nile Cruise we went on in December is now edited, uploaded and linked to from the blog.

Now to get a move on with our Dahab/New Year vids. Eeeeeek!

Nile Cruise 15 - Abu Simbel

Read the Casbah

I decided this morning that I would set up a new blog. This was after realising how much I am enjoying reading at the moment.
You can find it here http://www.readthecasbahcairo.blogspot.com/

Nile Cruise 14 - Aswan and Philae Temple

Nile Cruise 13 - Post-Temple Reflection

Part 1

Part 2

Nile Cruise 12 - Kom Ombo

Nile Cruise 11 - Cruising to Kom Ombo

The sights of an afternoon cruise to Kom Ombo temple.

StillVision Wedding Couple of the Year

Woah. Well, this came in from the left-field!

Our fantastic wedding photographer, Mike at StillVision, recently sent out a round-robin email to all his clients. It was a basic run-down of what he's been up to over the past year, and a bit of a reminder that he's still there to be booked - and we would have no hesitation in recommending him to anyone.

Anyhow, his newsletter included some awards he wanted to present. And there, at the top of the page, was our photo :-)

Thanks, Mike!

Nile Cruise 10 - Edfu Temple

Nile Cruise 9 - Going Through Esna Lock

Happy New Year 2009!

Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy New Year for 2009!

We welcomed in the first sunrise of 2009 from the top of Mount Sinai. It was a truly amazing and beautiful night and we feel so lucky to have watched this sun rise in such a special place. Our love and thanks go out to all our family and friends for making 2008 such a memorable and special year for us, and we hope that everyone has a brilliant 2009.

The importance of the internet

It's one of those things that everyone has, and assumes will never disappear. But - as we have found this Christmas - sometimes the internet does disappear. It's not the internet - browsing, downloading British TV, comparing the altitude of Mount Sinai to Saint Catherine's Monastery - that we feel at a loss without but more the access it gives us to the world. And, by the world, I mean friends.

Email and Skype really are incredibly important to us out here, and so to find that the undersea cables were cut throughout the holiday season has meant that I have felt particularly "cut off" from the world. It's not really been such a big and terrible thing as communications were re-routed by the ISPs, but in those moments where you realise you're completely out of contact until a temporary fix is put in place it has been rather nerve-wracking as we both of course want to know we can call our folks when we feel like it - and not when the fickle nature of our current internet connection allows.

We do, of course, use the internet for other things. Such as looking up the altitude of Mount Sinai and working out how far we climbed from St Catherine's Monastery in the wee-small hours of New Year's Day (715m, by the way, to the peak at 2285m - two and a half times the height of Scafell Pike). Or downloading up-to-date British TV shows. Wasn't Wallace and Gromit brilliant?! Wasn't Dr Who terrible?!

Anyway, the point is that things are still flaky. According to Bloomberg, "internet and telephone traffic between the Middle East and Europe will continue to be disrupted until Jan. 4." That's because even though the first break in the main cable (caused by a ship's anchor) was fixed on Christmas Day, within just a few hours there was a second break on the cable a few hundred miles from the first following a suspected under-sea earthquake.