World Quest 2013: Sharm El Sheikh, or How to Go Nowhere

Here’s a riddle for you: how far have you travelled if you were driving 60 mph in a bus for three hours? The answer: 0 miles

It was a bad start to the day and that should have been a tip off about how the rest of the day was going to go. For starters, the ship was supposed to tie up to a pier. That didn’t happen. Instead, we had to anchor out and then tender into the pier. That took a bunch of time off an already short day. Our tour to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert was scheduled for 8.5 hours and the ship’s departure time was 5pm.

Secondly, we could not find the bus. It seems that our bus driver was on the cheap side and did not pay the bribe to get into the port gate to pick us up. So we had to haul ass out of the port and up the street to find our bus. That took up more time.

We finally got on our way and about ½ hour in, the bus stops right in the middle of the road, and the driver gets out and comes back with a few bottles of drinking water. Hum, what do engines and water have in common? A radiator – in this case, a leaking radiator – and we are going into the Sinai desert, a barren, rocky and deserted place where bad things can happen. Oh, and did I mention we had a security guy with a gun on board? Why do we need one, I asked the guide? That is to protect passengers from the Bedouin bad guys who like to capture and ransom AMERICANS. Are you getting a warm fuzzy feeling?

We continued on and the bus made terrible wheezing sounds as it barely made it up a hill. Uh oh, this is not good. We arrived at a gas station, the last bit of civilization before St. Catherine’s, and now the driver is bringing buckets of water. We were wondering if there was enough water to get us to our destination, especially if all our drinking water would be used to keep the radiator full. We even talked about filling up the empty bottles with our urine as the onboard toilet was full. Hahaha. This was not getting funny. After much discussion, the driver called for another bus. The bus was to meet us at St. Catherine’s. Several of us were VERY uncomfortable with this scenario. What if the bus didn’t make it to St. Catherine’s? We would be stranded out in the middle of the Sinai desert. In addition, so much time had elapsed that even if we did make it to St. Catherine’s, there would not be enough time to see anything; we would have to turn right around in order to make it back to the ship in time.

So I very vocally called out that I wanted to go back. In the meantime, the bus company had sent two vans out to take us to St. Catherine’s. No way, Jose. Now six of us wanted to go back and 12 wanted to go on. The large van only had room for 11. What to do? The group leader decided, after much loud discussion and disagreement, that we would all go back, and that we would wait for the replacement bus at the gas station.

And that is what we did. The guide felt really bad about the situation. We returned to Sharm El Sheikh and had a little tour that consisted of taking pictures of a mosque, a church, and a brief stop at a market. Then we tendered back to the ship where I spent a great deal of time trying to make my achy knees feel better.