Teacherinegypt: April 11, 2012

This morning three of us set off for Jabal (mountain) Akhdar, a mountain about 2 hours away. We rented a 4 wheel drive for to get there you need the 4x4 because of the steep grades. The views on the way up were awesome, comparable to Grand Canyon. It is about 2500 meters high. The road up there is very good with very high barriers by the road side, where there is a steep drop. We reached the top it is a plateau with many terraced gardens growing all kinds of fruit trees. We stopped in a hotel for lunch and sat out on the patio but were rained out. There was thunder and a bit of rain and it got quite cool, (felt like at home). The hotel was beautiful and was built with what they said was fossil rock, a very hard black rock with white ‘fossils’. The trip down in low gear 4x4 wasn’t that bad at all. The gear down kept the vehicle going very slow and it wasn’t half as scary as when Archie and I went to Arizona and went down a mountain with about an 8 inch high brick ‘guard rail’. At about 6 places on the way down they are just finishing off runaway lanes for vehicles that lose their brakes on the way down, much fancier than the ones in BC. Arrived home to a wind storm with so much sand blowing around, it is not nice, in my eyes, and everywhere. I feel gritty and dirty, snow is so much nicer. Walked in to the tsunami warning news, realized if it did happen we would have been in the safest place in Oman. Warning cancelled and all is well.