Crossing the Sinai, Israel, Red Sea & Petra

This is a Beduin kid, 16 years old - and he owned the two Donkeys Liz and I road out of the Canyon. It was fun but hard to take photos from the back of the donkey. The camels are easier to shoot from.




Our Mormon group. 12 of us now with another 2 joining us in Jerusalem.

This was a trip getting here. We left our hotel around 7:15 AM - arrived here at around 12:30. CRAZY amazing place - Petra. This was a hike - like 2 miles in and 2 miles out - down a cool tight canyon. Very uniqure rock structures but parts reminded me of Pariah Canyon. Tombs of varying levels of awesomeness.
Beduin community of Petra.
Kid with a camel on the side of the highway available for tourists. Paid him a buck and Liz took a ride. We had to coax him into smiling!
This is the Negev desert of southern Jordan - where they filmed Lawrence of Arabia and I think some scenes in Transformers 2. We saw camel heards regularly along this area.

A view of Eilat from the border crossing area
On Saturday we drove into Jordan through Aqaba to Petra Jordan. So we have four countries very close here on the Red Sea; Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The border crossing into Jordan was a bunch of odd stuff - but border crossing are just weird sometimes. It took about 1 1/2 hours to complete the crossing and get on our way with the Jordan tour company en-route to Petra.
This part of the Red Sea is a tourist/resourt area. A lot of water sports going on including parasailing and scuba diving. We left our Egyptian guide/driver at Eilat and walked with all bags cross the border into Israel. Someone else picked us up (6 of us total) and we drove to our hotel right on the water. The area is nice but not luxurious. Our rooms in Cairo were really amazing but these are adequate. One of our group made the comment that their bathroom in Cairo was the size of the entire hotel room here! About right.

Everything seemed to changed leaving Egypt. It was like returning to the US on a Rockypoint trip. Israel is modern and clean. White people everywhere. everyone speaks Hebrew and they are not nearly as pleasant and accommodating as the Egyptians. The Egyptians seemed thrilled for the most part to have us but the people here just don't care.
The road dropped down steep from the desert mountains and we caught sight of the Red sea - very similar to the area around Lake Mead.
The Sinai varied from very flat lifeless appearing desert with no trees or shrubs to something more like this. We never saw anything like sand duns forever - the camel shot was as close as it got to that. The small part of the Sinai we saw is not too unlike the various deserts around Az - Lake Havasu area, Page, the Painted Desert north of Flagstaff, Yuma.

She had three children - photos here of two. We were told the women and children live in this tent home while the father lives in a cement/brick structure not shown here.

The guides knew of this very small beduin camp where we stopped and paid for some photos. Three room tent home made from a variety of scrounged materials. She dropped her vail thing a couple of times and laughed or talked a little. Not sure of her age - probably around 30.
OK!!! The Sinai Desert. (Steve gets to do this blog)

We left Cairo in one of those old folks tourist van things (I had to shoot through the dumb windows a lot of the time but I got over it) and drove about an hour to the Suez Canal. Not a picturesque area to say the least. We drove under the canal and continued across the Sinai. We hadn't gone far before we saw Camels in groups along the road out in the desert. I had the driver stop at the next flock of Camels and walked out close enough for some good shots. Liz says they were camel-flauged :). Apparently these are all owned by specific Beduin tribes and return to their tribes/owners when they feel like it.