I am exhausted...in a good way.

Last night after a full day of diving we let our hotel at 22:30 to take a bus to Mt. Sinai 2.5 hours away to climb Mt. Sinai, where Moses received the 10 commandments from God.  We got there around 2:30 after a few stops to pick other people up and proceeded up the mountain.  A few friends and I were dead set on one thing, riding camels...

We kept scanning the pitch black night trying to catch a glimpse of one or two and although we couldn't see anything, we could smell a strong odor that we deduced to be camels.  Needless to say our excitement rose.

A few hundred yards up the trail we found Bedouins offering camel rides for 80 Egyptian pounds (5.4 Egyptian pounds = 1 USD).  We paid as quick as we could count the money under our flashlights and mounted our desert steeds.  It was really hard to see anything and the camels weren't too accomodating so we didn't get any good pictures (sadly) mounted on the camels, but the next morning on the way down we were able to get some good pictures of us with camels in the daylight.

 Well...I just tried to upload the pictures I took, but apparently the internet here is even too slow for that so I guess I"ll just have to make links to other people's pictures that are similar to what I did:

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-photo/chadsteph/1/1258272045/hiking-mount-sinai-with-camels.jpg/tpod.html

We then watched this sunrise at the top:

 http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/mount-sinai-st-catherines-monastery-pictures/slides/sunrise7-c-becklectic.htm

It wasn't as good when we went b/c it was partially overcast, but still definitely an amazing experience.  After that we explored St. Catherine's monastery, the oldest in-use monastery in the world (500 A.D.) before heading back.

http://inillotempore.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=799

I've only got about 10 hours of sleep total in the past 4 nights from all the adventures and early mornings we've had, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.  We were supposed to have a night dive tonight, but the waves were too rough so we postponed it tomorrow after our first wreck dive (Dunraven), which I'm extremely excited for!