Q: Why did you go to the Sinai Desert?

A: I traveled through the Egyptian Sinai desert in 2007. I traveled with the Bedouin tribe, sleeping on sand dunes in a sleeping bag or in their big U shaped tents.

The Bedouins are traditionally nomadic people but because of politics and the way the economy works there are very few that live traditionally and a lot of culture is being lost. Resorts around the Red Sea pump water out of the desert for tourists leaving the Bedouins with not enough water in their oasis’ to survive.

I helped build a wall around one of their wells to stop it from getting filled with sand when they have flash floods. Because they are Nomadic they never build anything so the concept of building a wall was very foreign to them.

During the journey we traveled through the desert to the Sinai mountain which we climbed. The Sinai mountain is where Mose’s receives the 10 Commandments in this story called ‘The Bible’. I also attended a Russian Orthodox service at the St Catherine’s monastery that has been doing the same service performed in greek for centuries. It was a long intense experience witnessing the service but looking back on it i guess i am glad to have experienced it.

The Bedouins were the most amazing hosts in the world, they were the kindest people i have met. I think about the desert almost everyday, i feel the strongest pull drawing me back. One day soon i will have to go and i might not come back.

All the men in the tribe smoked mad weed, they had huge bags of it and they rolled huge sloppy joints with the seeds and stems! The first couple days they didn’t really smoke in front of us but after a couple days a few started passing the joints and after a few days one guy broke me off a sack of weed. The desert has an amazing energy, you wake up early with the sun but you are full of energy straight away. It was really hot but the heat was so dry, you could wear a jacket and be pretty comfortable as long as you drank a few litres of water in the morning. I don’t even think the weed was the greatest but because of the atmosphere i felt higher than i have ever been in my life. The morning i was leaving i still had a lot of weed left, so i rolled mad joints and smoked the first few with friends but they started tapping out. I couldn’t bare see the weed go to waste so i smoked the remaining joints by myself and ate the rest of the weed! Needless to say it was the best flight home ever, except for the ride to the airport where there was roadblocks with mounted machine guns every 10 miles!

I would recommend to everyone that they go traveling through the desert at some point in their life.

Oh yeah, I never saw the pyramids or the Sphinx the whole time i was in Egypt!

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