"Dangerous Driving in Cairo"

This news article is fascinating...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7904171.stm?lss

The Guardian, Saturday - Travel Section, Reader's Tips

The Guardian newspaper have a reader's Top Tips section on their Travel website and a few weeks ago I got a bit overexcited adding some of our tips to their pages. It all paid off though, as today they published my tip on finding the "real" Alexandria and their markets.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/feb/14/travel-readers-tips-accommodation-hotels-shopping

Egyptian Monopoly

February Catch-Up - Wissa Wassef and the APE Project

PART 1

PART 2

The Ramses Wissa Wassef Centre http://www.wissa-wassef-arts.com/

The Association for the Protection of the Environment http://www.ape-egypt.com/index.htm

New Year - walking back down Mount Sinai!

The thing about mountains is that once you're up there you know you've got to get back down again. The great thing about this walk, though, was that as we'd climbed in the dark we had the bonus of actually being able to see the landscape when we walked down again in the morning.

And, boy, was it amazing.

Instead of taking the camel trail down, we walked down the 3,000 "Steps of Penitence" which were built by a monk from St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of the mountain.

By the way, I've just realised that although I uploaded the video of us climbing the mountain I never actually linked to it. I've added it now, but you'll need to scroll below the sunrise video to see it.

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.