Mount Moses and the Monastery of St. Catherine

Mount Moses, also called Mount Sinai, is traditionally identified with the biblical mountain Horeb/ Sinai, where, according to the Old Testament, Moses received stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written and made a covenant with God. 

On our trip you will also visit the highest mountains in Egypt, with beautiful views & scenery that takes you away from the hotel’s pool or beach.

We will enter the summit of Mount Moses under the protection of local highlanders from the Gebelaya tribe. You should wear comfortable shoes as the path is stony and uneven. We start from a height of over 1,500 metres above sea level - here you can see millions of stars and the Milky Way in the sky above you! Ahead of us is a 6 kilometre walk under the starry sky (we provide flashlights), with a view of the glow of the rising sun from the Middle East. The path winds between canyons, plateaus, giving views of the valley and the sky.

Entering the Mount of Moses is not difficult, the most difficult part is to climb the 750 "penitential stairs" just before the summit. But the views of the stars and sunrise make it worth the effort! Mount Moses lies next to the highest peak of Egypt - Mount St. Catherine.

* To help you with the walk on the way to the top of Moses Mountain, you can use the "Path of Camels" or rent a camel on the way, which will take us some of the 6 kilometres. The last 750 stone stairs, which were once carved out of the rocks are not able to be entered by the camels, you have to make the climb in person to see the most beautiful sunrise in Egypt!

At the foot of the highest peak of the Sinai Peninsula is the Monastery of Saint. Catherine - a temple belonging to the Orthodox Greeks - we will visit here in the morning after descending from the mount. Here we will find the biblical Burning Bush and Well of Moses. The Monastery of St. Catherine is the oldest in Egypt, it has never been destroyed and has been continuously operating since the sixth century AD. This is where the manna from heaven and the betrayal of the golden calf described in the Bible were to happen. Contemporary library collections of the Monastery of St. Catherine's are compared as to the contents of the collections of the Vatican library. In the museum inside the Monastery you can see valuable iconographic collections, which contain the only icons in the world from the 6th-10th centuries.

Itinerary:
Departure from your hotel at ‪approx. 9pm‬, bus ride for about 2.5 hours to the entrance of Mount Moses (6 kilometres walk will take approx. 3.5 hours). We then watch the sunrise before descending to the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. We will visit the Basilica of the Transfiguration, Burning Bush, Well of Moses before our transfer back to Sharm el Sheikh, where you will return to your hotel at ‪around 2pm‬.