St. Catherine’s Monastery, on Mount Sinai, near the tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, has always been a place of refuge, these days from the harrowing traffic of Cairo and the persistent eight-year-old papyrus salesmen of Luxor.
It was on Mount Sinai that God revealed to Moses the stone tablets containing the Ten commandments, whose words, with the possible exception of “Here’s the money I owe you,” have proven to be the most meaningful in the human language.
Travel humor writer Bob Payne’s first journey to Egypt, and Mount Sinai, where he slept on the ground with only a Bedouin’s camel for company, appeared in the November 1988 Travel-Holiday magazine.
On another travel writing journey, chronicled in July 2000 on the travel website iExplore.com, Payne discovered, while aboard a local bus crossing the Sinai Peninsula, that friends are not always there for you, especially at military checkpoints.
Payne returned to the Sinai for a story that appeared in the May 2001 Conde Nast Traveler. The sentiment then, among environmental activists who were concerned about the growing influx of visitors, was “At least war keeps the crowds away.”
Bob Payne is the senior blogger and Egyptologist-in-residence at the travel humor website BobCarriesOn.com, which has brought you accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.
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