GOODBYE EGYPT, HELLO JORDAN

The sounds of the night blew in with the cool breeze from the balcony of our luxury hotel on the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba.  The call for prayers from a nearby mosque mingled with the clip clop of a camel as his Arab rider takes the sidewalk that borders the perimeter of the property.

Strange and exotic was the new norm on this, our fifth night of a whirlwind trip through Egypt, Jordan and Israel.  Excitement was in the air, punctuated by the bright lights of Jordan’s only port city, Aqaba, once known as the city of Elat as per the Bible.

Egypt is now part of my past, a point I ponder with a tinge of regret (so may pyramids; so little time)

given my experience there has simply left me wanting more, even as I relish the idea of seeing Jordon’s ancient city of Petra, once the ancient capital of the Nabateans during the 3rd century BC.  

We descended Egypt’s Mount Sinai yesterday, the same Mt. Sinai where Moses received the ten commandments.  This pinnacle of a vast desert region of rugged rocks skirts the Red Sea (so named for the red color that saturates the waters at sunset). 

Without a doubt, I have a much greater appreciation for the plight of Moses, both his forty-year pilgrimage through this harsh and desolate region and the exodus when leading the Israelites into the Promised Land.    

We crossed the Red Sea without as much fanfare as Moses and the Israelites via a tunnel beneath the Suez Canal, Egypt’s number one source of income for her struggling economy.  

Our fourteen-hour trek through the Sinai Peninsula required an armed escort; guards looking more like kids than military men wielded semi-automatics to tackle the reality of transporting such precious cargo, our tourist dollars in this crippled economy struggling to get back on its feet.

I cannot lie; there was a tension that permeated the five hundred miles we covered going from Cairo to St. Catherine's Monastery along Mt. Sinai.  Passage through each checkpoint did nothing but accentuate the risks in traveling the Middle East, much less the reality of life day in and day out under these conditions.

Blessedly (for me that is) the only excitement that day involved another weary traveler whose world (and vehicle) had been turned upside down along this lonely stretch of desert highway on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.