2 Day Tour to St. Catherine from Taba by bus

Once crossing into Egypt, from Taba Border our representative will await you and drive you to St. Cathrine, where we will make a through visit of the monastery, including the museum with its priceless objects, and ancient icons and manuscripts. In the afternoon we will meet the monk responsible for the famous library of the St. Cathrine’s monastery, known for its old manuscripts. We will also join the monks in their evening prayer (pretty boring, but an experience…).

We will spend the night in the Monastery’s Guest house. Spending the night there gives us an opportunity to a close encounter with the monks that run the guest house and the Muslim Jabaliya Bedouins that have a long tradition of working closely with the monks in the monastery. This will also open for us the famous library & the evening prayer at the monastery, at the time when the monastery is really quite, and closed to the public.

We will spend the whole day exploring Mt. Moses from sites mostly unvisited: After breakfast we will drive to Sheikh Moussa’s House, where a staff of Bedouins with camels will join us. A Bedouin “Dalil” (Pathfinder) will join us as we will climb Mt. Moses from behind, on ancient paths built by the eremite monks more than 1500 years ago. We will visit many archaeological sites built by those monks, sites that will enable us to understand in a better way the spiritual world of the eremites. This is a very spiritual hike, that gives us also a direct biblical experience, just like in old times… Reaching “Elijah’s Plateau” – a place with it’s own biblical and monastical importance, we will meet our camels and the rest of the Bedouins, who will cook with us a Bedouin lunch, including the baking of fresh “Fatir” bread, the original “Mazzah”, just the way the bedouins baked it on this very mountain.

After lunch we will ascend the summit of Mt. Moses, and then descend the mountain through “The Stairs of Repentance” built in the 6th century, visiting on the way the “Chapel of the Flees” as well as other archaeological and religious sites. A car will wait for us at the St. Catherine’s Monastery and take us back to the Taba border.