Sinai

Hi, I'm back from my trip! Dad and I got up early on Monday (was it only Monday? It seems like an age ago) and took the 26 bus and a train for around 3 hours and another bus for 2 hours out to where we would stay. By that time it was evening. We stayed the night at Orit's nephew's kibbutz which is called Kibbutz Lotan (ki-but-z, a kibbutz is a community of people who live and work together on some sort of a campus).


The next day we took a bus to near the border with Sinai. We then took a taxi to the border. We had three bags, two backpacks and one duffel bag. When we got to the Israel/Sinai (or Egypt, depending how you think about it) border there was no one there. I mean no one! Dad paid the border tax and we got our passports checked. Then we walked across the border into a building where dad got some Egyptian pounds ($5.75 USA dollars to a pound, 0.729 Israeli shekels to a pound). Then we asked the people there how much a taxi would be and they said around 200 Egyptian pounds ($35 to 40 US dollars) for a hour ride or so. Yikes! So we went instead and waited on the back steps of the building, and Dad checked the guide book for information, but found none. There was also a college guy there waiting for his friends to pick him up. Somehow or other we ended up with the guy, his friends, and us trying to get a shared taxi together. Dad and the guys bargained for a while, but finally we got a reasonable price for a shared taxi. After some time of waiting, we got in the taxi and left. It was about an hour's drive to the place where we were going.

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When we arrived at our hotel, it was around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. There was some misunderstandings about the price of the room (I won't bore you by going into detail), but Dad and the manager finally agreed on the price. Our room was so cool, it is a suite with a big living room w/ a TV, a bedroom with a bed wide enough for 3 people that also had a TV, two bathrooms, and two balconies, one for the living room and one for the bedroom. There was a swimming pool there, and the beach outside.Over the course of 4 days, we did a lot of things.

We went snorkeling, which was my favorite. A quote from my diary: "Snorkeling was out of this world. In the water you moved along with sinuous grace, and it was slow there, as if in a dream. It was hard at first to get the hang of snorkeling, and the first time I got totally freaked out and almost went back to the room, but Dad coaxed me back in. At first the reef is dead from all the rubbish in the water and the water is shallow, but then slowly there is more color and suddenly the reef drops down into...caverns, almost, with a lot of fish." Most of the time it was low tide, and I hate low tide. But there was still a couple times where I really enjoyed myself.

The only bad thing with the time in Sinai was that I got these horrible stomachaches that woke me up in the middle of the night moaning. They weren't from the food, though. At first Dad was a little suspicious of the food because there aren't as many safety precautions as in the States. As Dad keeps reminding me "boil it, peel it, or forget it." Surprisingly, though, we didn't get sick from the food there, which was excellent. (Simon, you have a competitor!)

The time in Sinai was great, and I was sad to leave.