Immigration Schmimmigration!

Got back last night around one from another exhausting trip designed by my new friend Karim, an Egyptian-Canadian who, at 24, runs four international businesses ranging from tourism to internet marketing. His tour company offers partially-subsidized trips to foreigners in Egypt when they need to send their photographer to take updated photos of different tourist sites. This trip was to St. Catherine’s monastery and Mt. Sinai (where Moses received the Ten Commandments), and Dhahab, a tiny resort town on the Red Sea known for incredible snorkeling and SCUBA diving.

Moses was a STUD, let me just say. The hike up Mt. Sinai is 7 kilometers at sometimes more than a 45 degree angle straight up. Huge boulders and many smaller, sharp, uneven stones pockmark the path and since most visitors climb the trail before sunrise, in order to see the sun come up over the range of rocky cliffs surrounding the mountain, you climb the entire distance in the pitch black dark. We were fortunate to have almost a full moon but many of us still lost our footing and went down several times. I hiked about 2 kilometers before realizing there was no way I could keep up with the majority of our group, who were around 22 years old. I rode a camel the rest of the way up and it is a testament to the truly death-defying nature of the path and the true BADASSNESS of Moses that even the camel nearly fell twice when it lost its footing in the dark. Despite my issues with vertigo, made all the worse on camelback, and the embarrassment of taking the easy way up while the youngsters trekked on their own, I was granted some satisfaction when my gassy, gassy camel emitted literally GUSTS of buttcheek flapping farts into the faces of those exact youngsters with nearly every step.

After about two hours climbing on the “path,” already a horrorshow of false steps, sharp stones, cactuses, camel poop and donkey pee, we had come as far as the camels could go and the rest was up to us. The rest, it turns out, was a switchbacking trail of 750 “steps,” really enormous, uneven boulders arranged one above the other straight up the side of the mountain. By this time the light from the imminent sunrise made it possible to at least see when the boulder you were standing on jerked to one side and sent your foot whooshing into a crevice, turning your ankle. Which of course everyone had the privilege of seeing several times!

The sunset was incredibly beautiful, as was the view. The rocky cliffs jutting straight out of the desert below had a coyote-and-roadrunner scenery feel and the sun lit the stone first pink, then orange as it rose. We stayed only long enough to see the sun itself pop up over the horizon and once it became a full red-orange sphere, it was time to head back down. Though we could have gone back down the “long” way we had come up, and thus had a leisurely stroll complete with the smug triumph of passing all those stones that had tripped us up before, but this time in broad daylight with a nice view and a comfortable downward angle of travel, the majority of the group opted for the “short” way down. It took easily as long as the trip up, but was another series of “steps” – boulders again, set impermanently directly into the mountain side on what was often a FULL VERTICAL ANGLE STRAIGHT DOWN. Each step was over a foot high, sometimes two, making it necessary to cling to the rocks on either side (often pre-treated with cactus and donkey pee), and even sit down before swinging your legs down to the next step.

It was a holy terror on the knees and ankles. Several of the group fell hard and skidded some terrifying distance and nearly over the cliffside before wedging some body part in between the bigger boulders to stop the fall. After two hours, everyone’s legs were shaking so bad that more and more people fell, increasing the danger that one faller above would slip into the row of climbers on the stairs below and cause a crash of dominos down the mountainside. All of this in blazing desert heat.

Dhahab was a welcome change. Our hotel had a pool, which was freezing, and was only about 20 yards from the ocean itself, with near-perfect snorkeling as long as you could navigate your way 15 feet or so over the rocky beach. Five kilometers up the road was the famous “Blue Hole,” a wide hole in the reef over three hundred feet straight down. Skilled divers can go down this hole in the reef, navigate a series of tunnels through the reef, and surface in another location further on but many inexperienced and reckless divers drown every year when they lose their way, panic in the tunnels, or miscalculate their decompression or oxygen figures. I stuck with snorkeling, which was amazing and beautiful, and helped loosen up my sore legs from the climb the day before, but diving in Dhahab is going to be a NECESSITY once I have some savings. Screw the Blue Hole, though, I will stick to lovely shallow reef diving, where the sunlight is bright and perfect and the fish are plentiful and accustomed to tourists. What is the point of diving deeper than an underwater camera can go?!

The other adventure of the last few days was my trip to the Mogamma, the GIGANTIC grey building in the central square of Cairo that DWARFS the Egyptian Museum across the road to get my visa renewed. The tourist visa you can get at the airport lasts only a month and mine expired today. It is a process that gives a whole new dimension to the word “bureaucracy” and puts even the American postal system to shame with its unnecessary complexities and frustrating lack of sense and flexibility. Even so, the ease with which foreigners are allowed to get legal permission to stay in Egypt indefinitely and for absolutely no reason is awe-inspiring compared with how difficult it is for foreigners to enter the U.S. for even a short time for very good reasons.

First, one goes to window 12 to get the visa extension application. You then leave, fill out the application on any nearby flat surface (where you must jostle the sweaty people around you for a few square inches to write on), then return to window 12. You give the woman there your passport, a photo and photocopies of your passport and visa page. She then tells you to go to window 43 and ask for 11 pounds and 10 piasters of stamps. You go to window 43 and, after shoving and being shoved for several minutes, you reach the window and announce “11 pounds, ten piasters!” The woman at window 43, way more adorable and polite than the woman in window 12, gives you four stamps and announces, “four stamps!” You return to window 12 with your hard-earned stamps and she tells you to come back in two hours.

When you come back, you pick your passport up at window 38, buy more stamps at window 43 (yep, the nice little old lady was still there!), go to window 2 (what a hobag!) and get a different application, this one for multiple entries. After you ram your way to the flat surface again and fill in your info, you return the application and your stamps and passport to window 2 and leave again. You then need to wait AN ENTIRE DAY before you can pick up your passport but when you do, you have legal permission to stay in Egypt for six months, for purposes of “tourism” and come and go multiple times during that period.

If only the results of our immigration process were so certain, I’m sure immigrants to the U.S. would put up with equally labyrinthine requirements!

I have slept less than 12 of the last 72 hours and now really need to rally to have a productive afternoon at work. Second wind, where are you?!