Yesterday we visited St Katherine’s monastery which is built on the spot where some chap named moses is said to have had a chat with a burning bush (and maybe breathed a little too deeply on that bush’s smoke eh, moses?). The bush told him to climb a nearby mountain where god gave him some stone slabs with writing on. Not only did we climb the mountain but we climbed a good two thirds of a nearby mountian too by mistake. We did the whole thing on empty stomachs (lydia would disagree, pointing out that we had eaten 4 fig biscuits and a date each but I think that still constitutes an empty stomach). And with only 1/2 a litre of water between us. Crazy? Probably but they were charging almost 50p for bottles of water at the trekker’s cafes on the way up and neither of us were going to be conned to that degree!

Anyway it was pretty cool (hot at the bottom but there were patches of snow towards the top) and the mountain-desert scenery of Sinai is amazing.

My legs are aching a little today but that’s OK cos we are now in Dahab which the lp call’s “the wannabe Koh Samui of the Middle East”. I can see what they mean. It’s not the actual setting (unless you exchange the coconut palms for date palms, the jungle for desert and the open sea for Saudi Arabia which we can see across the gulf) but rather the relaxed atmosphere and the beach front cafes serving lassi’s and playing ambient beats.

We went for a quick dip in the Red Sea when we got here and in 10 minutes I saw three different kinds of amazingly brightly coloured fish in combinations of blue, black, yellow and red! We’ll be renting masks for some snorkelling tomorrow but unfortunately I won’t have any photos to show of it…

So it’s happy new year from us - hope you all have good ones!