On reflection, maybe I laughed a little bit too loudly. But by now I was probably bordering on delirium. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours and I’d just come down from the summit on a wave of jubilation mixed with exhaustion. What I really needed was to fend off yet another barrage of feverish sales pitches. I can’t tell you exactly how many times over the last few hours I’d declined offers of camel rides. Or how often I’d turned down the opportunity to buy a fragment of the mountain I’d just stood on top of. Earlier, as we’d queued up to open our backpacks for inspection and walk through an airport style metal detector that was presumably here to make sure none of us was about to blow up this famous mountain, we were surrounded by a host of jabbering tribesmen, dementedly waving their wares in our faces and asking prices higher than the invisible peaks that were cloaked in the inky night above us. I didn’t need a headscarf - really I didn’t. I had brought my fleece lined beanie hat. I didn’t need gloves either. Not with a camera to operate at the summit later on. And what were those strange squares of cloth the locals seemed so convinced my life would be incomplete without? Did they think I might have time to stitch a patchwork quilt together while I waited for the sun to come up? Was someone else waiting at the other end of the queue with a basket of reasonably priced needles and thread? As I sat on a slab of flat rock outside the walls of St Katherine’s Monastery, quenching my labours with the last dregs from my water bottle, a voice emerged from the melee, thrown in my direction. “What’s that, a sleeping bag?” The man, a local Bedouin wheeler dealer, had taken an interest in the blue stuff sack at my side.
“No it’s my coat,” I replied. I’d needed that coat up there earlier. It was very cold in the hours leading up to sunrise at the summit. “Look at these!” he went on excitedly, brandishing two matching halves of a lump of quartz. “Very cheap!” I replied politely but firmly that thank you, I wasn’t interested. I could have had any number of rocks from that mountain by now without paying for them. By this stage, having done what I’d come here to do, I just wanted to get on the bus and go to sleep on the long journey back to Sharm el-Sheikh. I'm ashamed to say I'd lost interest in the fabled burning bush and the chapel on the inside of the huge monastery walls. “Ok, how about a trade? You give me that in exchange for them?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the blue stuff sack. It was at this point that I burst out laughing in response. Two lumps of quartz that I didn’t want in a swap deal for my treasured down filled winter coat. I’m not going to tell you how much I paid for that coat. I gave him a vague idea though. “No, not Egyptian pounds! That wouldn’t pay for a cup of coffee.” I asked him if he had a car to throw into the deal. He looked a bit confused at this. I made my escape while I could. It’s a very good coat and even after a hefty sale discount it’s the most expensive garment I’ve ever invested in. I intend to carry on using it each winter until one or the other of us expires.
I’m not keen on people who try to sell me things. Beyond a nod and a brief exchange of greetings, human interaction really isn't my thing you see. If a sales assistant spots me browsing in a shop and asks whether they can help, my usual response is to run for the exits. And when, as they do in Egypt, the salesman regards bartering as a way of life, I’m at even more of a disadvantage. Here, where tourists have to run the gauntlet of traders to make their way onto the mountain trail, it can be a bit scary for people like me. There were plenty of enthusiastic customers around, ready to part with a few dollars for a trinket to take home with them. We don’t like clutter at home. My souvenirs were sitting happily in my memory and saved on an SD card. Once you make it onto the trail, you’re forever trudging up towards the summit of Mount Sinai in the pitch of night, listening for the tell-tale gastric groans of approaching camels, their keepers trying to sell you a ride to the bottom of the last flight to heaven. Suddenly they loom over you in the darkness, inches away, filling the air with their musky ruminant scent as a lugubrious dark eye gazes disinterestedly into the beam of your head torch. Every kilometre brings a pit stop with a covered seating area, plying its trade, offering hot drinks and snacks for the weary traveller. Even the hole in the ground “facilities” have a callow youth stationed by the entrance, relieving visitors of one US dollar before the visitors can relieve themselves. Finally, after the penultimate section of the climb, a kilometre long flight of six hundred and fifty steps to a small plateau just beneath the summit, there are four or five of these small coffee stops huddled together, one or two of them selling genuine Mount Sinai rocks. Why not add a few extra pounds to your bag for the hike back down to the monastery? Why not just pick up a rock from the ground? Only at the end of another hundred steps do you finally escape the din of commerce. Here at the summit is where everyone is lost for words.
Ali had already made it clear that she had no intention of joining me on this trip. She dislikes pressure selling just as much as I do, and unlike myself she had previous experience of this weird and wonderful old country. In the early nineties, long before I met her; when she was just a slip of a girl, a Luxor trader offered one hundred camels in exchange for her. Luckily for me the bid was turned down. One hundred belching, hungry flatulent camels. What on earth would anyone do with one hundred camels? Open the world's most challenging petting zoo? Lead a party of thirsty thrill seekers across the Sahara Desert? Train the fastest ones and enter them into the Cheltenham Gold Camel Cup? The mind boggles.
I’ll never regret getting on that bus and making the long journey into the mountains of the Sinai Desert. It’s a memory I’ll cherish. But in so many ways it wasn’t an easy ride. Even without climbing onto the back of a camel. Of course the hard sell is how these people earn a modest living. But there are plenty of far more willing customers than this one. When I returned to Sharm el-Sheikh and into the arms of the subject of that one hundred camel bid, I described the trip as fourteen hours of purgatory for forty-five minutes of raw landscape mountain morning magic, and that’s how I’ll always remember it. The highlight of the holiday amid the depths of the toughest hours, of which I spent almost nine squashed onto a cramped coach. I’d survived the gauntlet and now I could quietly celebrate and look back on the adventure through a pair of rose tinted spectacles that I didn’t buy from a Bedouin tribesman. Back on the slumbering sunbeds with a good book and unfettered access to the first world cocktail menu. Mostly in Egypt my alcohol intake outscored the daily step count, but much like today’s ascent, the graph suddenly went steeply upwards before plunging down to pina colada level once more. Days one to eight, zero steps. Day nine, thirty-two thousand steps. Days ten to fourteen, zero steps. Or something like that anyway. Mind you, even by the pool you have to tell the same man that you don’t want a massage at least twice a day every day. It’s hard work running the gauntlet.
