Siwa oasis

Just got back from Siwa Oasis. Its a trek to get to but well worth it. Its about an 8 hour drive from Cairo, through El Alamein and Masa Matroud to get there. The Oasis is one the edge of the Eastern Sahara, near the Libyan border. We stayed at the amazing eco-lodge, Adrere Amellal, which has justifiably been writting up glowingly. Its a sprawling set of buildings built in the traditional manner of construction out of mud, solidified sea salt and palm trees (see top pic). The cavelike rooms have small windows to keep them cool in the hot summers and are furnished in a mixture of traditional furniture and high thread count super comfy sheets. There were only 3-5 of us there and dinner each night was in a different place in one of the many public spaces, sitting rooms, dining rooms, patios and hidden nooks around the place.

Siwa itself is an interesting little town. The people there are mostly Berber rather than Arabic, and it has a separate culture and language from much of the rest of Egypt. It has seen a lot of history despite its remoteness, from Alexander the Great coming to consult the Oracle of Siwa to confirm that he was of divine birth and hence able to be a Pharoah of Egypt, to Cleapatra and World War II. The town itself seems quite conservative. Whereas we've seen many women with headscarves in Egypt, and some with veils or even Burkas, in Siwa we saw some women who covered their entire heads with a black (presumably translucent from close enough) cloth, without even an eye slit, so that from a distance they looked like black dressmakers dummies wearing hoods, capes and robes.

The desert itself was the main highlight (see lower pic). We ventured out there a couple of times in an old Landcruiser with the desert guide Abdullah, visiting other oases and lakes, a hot spring, weird rock formations and miles of perfect dunes. It is breathtaking, and the photo really doesn't convey it. The unlikliness of coming over a dune top after driving for miles over nothing but sand and seeing a clump of palms surrounding a large lake is pretty incredible.

The second day the wind was picking up and the millions of tendrils of windblown sand a few inches of the ground made an amazing sight, impossible to caputure on film. So much sand was blowing over the tops of some of the dunes that I couldn't get my camera to autofocus and had to switch to manual - the blur between land and air was too blurred. We went fossil fossicking and found all sorts of sea shells fossilized and incongruous in the middle of the sandy desert.

Tried my hand at sandboarding and pretty much sucked at it - made one or two turns before invariably falling over the front of the board and sumersaulting into the (hard packed!) sand. Unlike snowboarding, the sand has a lot more friction, and so you need a steeper angle to get any movement, which makes learning a bit harder, and more painful. I ended up with fine gritty sand more or less everywhere.