The Sinai

Sinai is the land of discovery. It is the route to the Promised Land, where Isis sought Osiris and the Pharaohs found gold. It is where Moses witnessed the Burning Bush and the Bedouins camped by Crusader forts. Sinai is the meeting point for three great religions, at the crossroads of Africa and Asia.

This is the description of the Sinai found on TourEgypt.net, an online guide to Egypt that tends to flatter the country with saccharine, epic accounts of its sights and culture--take, for instance, its assertion that "Egypt is probably one of the oldest vacation spots. Early Greeks, Romans and others went there just for fun, and to see the wonders of some of mankind's earliest triumphs." I'm tempted to suspect that the Egyptian government has a hand in, or at least veto power over, what goes up on TourEgypt.net, although oddly enough much of the "About Egypt" section has been lifted directly and without citation from the CIA World Factbook.

Still, I have to admit that TourEgypt.net is on the mark when it comes to the Sinai. The Sinai has been stamped by a diverse and often contradictory history. A wasteland of vast sands and scant water, it has nonetheless been inhabited for many thousands of years and is currently home to a dozen different Bedouin tribes; one of the holiest sites in Judaism, where God recognized his covenant with the Israelites in the form of the Ten Commandments, it is today part of a Muslim country and covered with Christian monasteries; best known in the 20th century as a cause of bitter international contention and warfare, it is agriculturally unusable and has few natural resources other than minerals.

In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai. - Exodus 19:1

The Sinai is not without its share of problems. Its gorgeous beaches on the Gulf of Aqaba attract barely enough tourism to sustain themselves thanks to a spate of terrorist attacks in the last decade (Taba in 2004, Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, Dahab in 2006), and half-finished hotels, quickly falling into ruin, line the coastal highway. Situated on a peninsula the size of Utah between the Red Sea and the Gulf, the Sinai sits uneasily among its neighboring regions: mainland Egypt to the west (the Dahab bombings were carried out by Sinai Bedouins allegedly protesting President Mubarak's more secular policies), Israel to the north, and Saudi Arabia to the east. From the Basata resort on the eastern coast of the Sinai where I stayed this weekend, you can look across the Gulf at night and see the lights of Eilat in Israel, Aqaba in Jordan, and the small towns among the mountains of Saudi Arabia, all twinkling brightly in the darkness.

I won't go into too much detail about our trip to Basata, except that Basata's an ecolodge that serves only organic food, has bamboo huts instead of rooms, and actually recycles, probably one of the few places in the whole country that does. Our journey there nearly killed us--our taxi driver was going 115 mph the entire time over barely paved, unlit roads--and our journey home took twelve hours owing to an unplanned stop to pick up a mysterious non-Egyptian couple who weren't allowed to leave the Sinai and two flat tires on our bus. More importantly, the sea was warm and blue, the sun was hot, the sand was soft, and bikinis were totally acceptable, even for Egyptians. You gotta love the Sinai.