Traveling Adventures Hi! Welcome to my travel journal. I created this so friends and family can keep track of me on my adventures. I'll update this when I can.

after visiting st. katherine's monastery, we drove 2.5 hours to nuweiba on the coast of the gulf of aqaba, which is a finger of the red sea between egypt and saudi arabia.  decending down into nuweiba we had our first glimpses of the mountains of saudi arabia which seemed so surreal to us.  the camp we stayed at was actually about 20km north of nuweiba.  the color of the water as we were driving was just incredible.  i suppose it is like all somewhat tropical oceans, but it was just so inviting.  our accomodations consisted of individual grass huts (literally grass huts, with palm frond roofs) on the beach.  this wasnt like the beaches in hawaii (the only other tropical beaches i've been to) in that there were absolutely no trees anywhere.  we threw our bags in our huts, put on sunscreen, rented snorkeling stuff and were in the water probably 15 mins after we pulled up to the camp.  we swam out along some sandy sea grass flats, then to some urchin-infested areas, and then out to the edge of the reef.  there were so many different types of corals i really couldnt even keep count.  many more than in hawaii.  and so many different colors.  there were branchy ones, and flat ones and brain ones and lattice-looking ones.  it was really cool.  and of course the fish!  similar to hawaii for sure, but there were tons and tons of lion fish!  oh my god i've never seen one before and these are truly amazing looking.  all furled out with there stripes and fins.  it was so cool.  the urchins had probably foot long spines an there were the biggest sea cucumbers i've ever seen and jellyfish that flashed pink when you got too close and huge anenomes and bright blue scallops and 2ft long puffer fish.  of course there were also the standard butterfly fish and angelfish in droves.  we also saw we were suspiciously similar to barracudas- i saw some of them hunting a little school of fish and they thrashed around and whipped out of the water a bit.  they made us a little nervous.  the first time we went out we also saw a sea turtle!  oh wow it was such an amazing snorkel.  we were out there for probably an hour and half at least the first time.  after our snorkel we had egyptian beer on the beach and calamari for dinner and watched the sunset and the mountains of saudi arabia light up.  then we listened to a guy from san francisco play some music by the fire (he brought his guitar) and a member of our group played some of the best bob dylan i've ever heard anyone play.    the next morning we went for one more snorkel and saw some more of those barracuda possibilities, but no turtles.  at 1230 we headed for the ferry to jordan which is chronically late (and was this time as well).  we arrived in aqaba last night without much problem and saw israel and saudi arabia on our drive to the hotel.  this morning we got up at 7am just in time to see Obama's speech live.  thank you all at home for voting.  we are all so excited.  and i think syria will like us more now...  love you all!