This private 5 day Cairo and Mount Sinai tour joins the two halves of Egypt’s sacred story in one short trip: the churches, synagogue and cave cathedral of Old Cairo, and the mountain where Moses is said to have received the Law. You spend three nights in Cairo and one in Sharm El-Sheikh, climb Mount Sinai through the night with a Bedouin guide to stand on the 2,285-metre summit at sunrise, then walk into St Catherine’s Monastery, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. Domestic flights, entrance fees, nine meals and an Egyptologist guide are included, from $920 per person in a triple room.
By road, Cairo to St Catherine is six to seven hours each way through the Suez Canal tunnel and across the desert. Done that way, a five-day trip loses two whole days to the windscreen. So we fly. On day three you finish Old Cairo, take the one-hour flight to Sharm El-Sheikh, have dinner and sleep for a few hours. Around eleven at night your driver takes you up into the High Mountains, two and a half to three hours inland, and you start walking under the stars. By the next evening you are back in your Cairo hotel, with the mountain, the monastery and the Burning Bush behind you.
The order matters too. Day two gives you the Pyramids and the Grand Egyptian Museum, the pharaonic background every later faith in Egypt grew out of. Day three is the Holy Family’s Cairo, the Jewish quarter of Fustat and the Coptic church carved into the Mokattam cliffs. Day four is Sinai, and day five closes on the Citadel and the minarets of Islamic Cairo. It is a short tour with one hard night in it, and the rest is paced so you have the energy for that night.
We run this Cairo and Sinai pilgrimage at two other lengths. The 6 Day Egypt Spiritual Tour: Coptic Cairo & Moses Mount adds an extra day in Cairo, from $1,045, and the 7 Day Egypt Spiritual Travel: Cairo, Mount Moses & St Catherine leaves time to rest after the climb, from $1,135. If you would rather not climb at all, the 4 Day Spiritual Cairo Tour stays with the churches, the Citadel and the Pyramids, from $570. All of them sit in our Egypt spiritual tours collection.
Your representative is waiting for you inside the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport with a signboard, and helps you through the visa counter and passport control. A private driver then takes you to your hotel. The rest of the day is yours to rest; the trip ahead has one very early start, so a quiet first evening is time well spent.
Meals Plan: No Meals Included
After breakfast your Egyptologist guide collects you for the Giza Plateau. The Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure were already two thousand years old when the Holy Family came to Egypt, and your guide will show you how the kings who built them imagined the afterlife: the climb to the stars, the boat of the sun, the judgement that came long before the Book of Exodus. Below them the Sphinx lies in its quarry, beside the granite Valley Temple of Khafre.
After lunch at a local restaurant, a ten-minute drive brings you to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where colossal royal statues line the Grand Staircase and Tutankhamun’s burial treasures are displayed together for the first time, with the Pyramids framed in the windows. Your guide picks out the pieces that tell the story of Egyptian belief, from the afterlife beds and shrines of the boy king to the gods who guarded him. Return to your hotel in the late afternoon.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Today belongs to the faiths of Old Cairo. The Hanging Church stands on the gate towers of the Roman fortress of Babylon, its nave suspended over the old passage. A few lanes away, the Church of Abu Serga keeps the crypt where tradition says Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus sheltered on their flight into Egypt. Next door, the Ben Ezra Synagogue was the home of the Cairo Geniza, the storeroom of medieval documents that changed what we know of Jewish life in Egypt and the whole Mediterranean world. Your guide connects the three to the longer story of Christianity in Egypt.
After lunch you cross to the Mokattam hills and the Monastery of St Simeon the Tanner, where the Coptic community of the Zabbaleen quarter carved a series of churches into the cliff face. Coptic tradition holds that in the tenth century St Simeon’s prayers moved this mountain in front of the Fatimid caliph al-Mu’izz; the largest cave church seats some 20,000 people. In the afternoon you transfer to Cairo Airport for the flight to Sharm El-Sheikh. Dinner at your hotel, then an early night: your pick-up is at about 11 pm.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Your driver collects you around 11 pm for the two-and-a-half to three-hour drive to St Catherine. At the foot of the mountain you meet your Bedouin guide, from the Jebeliya tribe who have guarded the monastery for centuries, and start up the camel path at about 2 am by torchlight. The path climbs gently for around two and a half hours, then the last 750 rock-cut steps lead to the 2,285-metre summit, where a small chapel and a mosque stand side by side. Wrapped in a blanket among pilgrims of every faith, you watch the first light come up over the granite ranges, the place Exodus remembers as the mountain of the Law.
After the descent and a packed breakfast, you enter St Catherine’s Monastery when its doors open in the morning. Emperor Justinian built these fortress walls between 548 and 565 around the chapel of the Burning Bush, and monks have lived here without a break ever since. Your guide shows you the Basilica of the Transfiguration, the bush itself, growing against the outer wall, and the Well of Moses, and explains the library that once held the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the two oldest complete Bibles, and still holds the second-largest collection of early manuscripts after the Vatican. Inside the walls stands a small Fatimid mosque, built for the Bedouin who serve the monks. After lunch you drive back to Sharm El-Sheikh and fly to Cairo for your final night.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
After a slower breakfast, your last visit looks over the whole city. The Citadel of Saladin, begun in 1176, was the seat of Egypt’s rulers for nearly seven hundred years. Inside its walls the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali, finished in 1848, gives Cairo its skyline, and from the terrace you can see from the Mokattam hills you visited two days ago to the Pyramids on the horizon. After lunch at a local restaurant, your driver takes you to Cairo Airport for your departure flight.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
