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Through the Egyptian Desert

Sitting in the smoke-filled room of a police station on the outskirts of the Egyptian oasis village of Siwa, somewhere in the middle of the Libyan desert, we realized that we were in a place far above our heads.
We started earlier that afternoon heading south from Siwa Oasis on a seemingly endless dirt road that wound through a golden landscape of increasingly large and barren mountains of sand, whose valleys were flooded by the waters of a mirage that he constantly retreated before us. . As evening fell, we saw bonfires burning in the distance that we more than once mistook for another small oasis village, only to discover later that they were the fires of Bedouin camps bringing herds of camels from northern Sudan to market in Cairo. .

As we approached one such bonfire, it gradually illuminated two large metal barrels blocking the path and four young Egyptian soldiers absently holding machine guns to their chests. One of the soldiers moved for us to open our window and with the flash of one flat palm perpendicular to the other indicated that he wanted to see our papers. We didn’t know we needed any paper, we informed him, after which he ordered us to get out of our car to wait in a small tin shack while they radioed their superiors for instructions. From the sound of voices emanating from the radio static, it was not very common for an American car to show up at a checkpoint in the middle of the Libyan desert at night without permission. So, while we waited, we chatted with the soldiers, some of whom had spent months without speaking to any other living thing besides their camels that were tethered to the edge of the camp. Eventually we were invited to play an impromptu game of soccer and share a dinner of scrambled eggs with sand while we waited for a response. One of the soldiers asked for our help to fix a small generator, as the instruction booklet was in English and none of them spoke a word. We eventually discovered that the choke lever had not been lowered, and soon the generator was running to cheers from the soldiers.

Finally we were informed that we would have to return to Siwa to obtain the necessary permits before we could continue through the desert. So we said goodbye to our new friends, who helped pull our car out of the deep sand it had sunk into as a result of coming to a complete stop.
Less than two days before this, myself and a group of classmates studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo had arrived at this beautiful oasis town just five hours west of Cairo that Alexander the Great himself had visited in the year 331 BC. Since it’s only a few square miles, you don’t need a car to explore the oasis, so we opted to rent four rusty bikes from a shop in the town square, lined with vegetable vendors, traditional rug dealers, and shacks selling They offer desert tours to the few tourists adventurous enough to make it that far into the desert. We drove through the few main streets of the town that are dominated by the crumbling ruins of an ancient city center, called a shali-ghali, standing out sharply against the surrounding desert like a half-evil castle floating on a sea of ​​sand. No one has lived in the ruins of the city center for centuries, we were told, but no one dared to disturb or demolish the ancient mud dwellings for fear of jinn (evil spirits).

We stopped our bikes at the many ancient ruins that dot the area, such as the Temple of Amun, whose oracle is said to have confirmed Alexander’s divine persona, and the now cement-lined pond in which Cleopatra is said to have bathed. We walk up the ‘mountain of the dead’ littered with ancient tombs and vaults, read past pottery shards and ancient human bones that have been scattered by tomb raiders over the years. We spent the night idyllically sitting in hammocks strung between palm trees on the shore of a large, shallow saltwater lake on the western edge of the city, trying to communicate with the curious children who spoke to us in a mixture of Arabic and their native language. . Berber dialect.

The next morning, we paid a driver in town to take us in his jeep for a short drive through the endless seas of sand that surround the town. Our guide sped up the sand dunes to incredible speeds, sometimes flipping over on two wheels, other times cruising through the air and landing with a crash of sand on the other side of the dune. We got out of the jeep and ran up the steep mountains of sand in the sweltering heat, surrounded by the surreal lunar landscape of deep orange, red, and yellow mounds of sand that turned into rolling tan waves all the way. the eye could see in all directions. It was easy to see how one could quickly get lost in this desert, as ten minutes from the oasis it was completely hidden in the depressions of the giant dunes. As we dove into a small freshwater spring at our destination, surrounded on all sides by 100-foot sand cliffs buffeted by a strong wind that felt like a hair dryer on our faces, we asked our guide for details about the path. that led to the next oasis of Bahariyya, another five hours south of Siwa. He told us that, for safety’s sake, there were convoys of travelers grouping together and driving down the treacherous road once a week, and that we would have to wait for the next one before we could leave. He also asked us what kind of Jeep we had and nearly fell out of the seat laughing at him when we told him we intended to drive down the desert highway in a rented Toyota Camry. “Large mounds of sand often fall on the roads making them impassable even for a Hummer,” he laughed.

Despite these caveats, our itinerary did not allow for an extended stay in Siwa and in order to see the other oases and get back to Cairo before classes started, we had to leave immediately. We decided to leave that afternoon to escape the brunt of the midday heat, and after a dinner of stringy boiled chicken from one of the two restaurants in town, we headed out. After returning from the checkpoint described above and driving the three-hour drive north again, we find ourselves sitting in the aforementioned smoke-filled police station.
‘They can’t go any more tonight,’ the teary-eyed policeman told us as he exhaled a long puff of cigarette smoke, ‘they’ll have to come back in the morning and apply for a permit and then wait for the next convoy.’ Since it was past midnight and none of the three hotels in the oasis were open, we begged the policeman to let us take our chances on the desert road. We told him that we were willing to undertake the journey in full knowledge of the consequences, and discreetly slipped a $20 bill into one of our passports as we handed it to him. He slowly smiled and chuckled, and then urged God to protect us, for if we were stranded in the desert we’d be dead by the time the next convoy arrived. Shaking his head at our obvious American idiocy, he radioed, then wiped his hands with the implication that since we had been warned, his hands were clean.

We eventually made it back to the first checkpoint, where very tired and bedraggled soldiers now greeted us as we passed. We continued through four more checkpoints in the middle of the desert where soldiers woke up and laughed as our familiar one-car caravan came limping through the desert and hastily moved the barrels to save them. us the task of pushing our car out of the sand once it stopped. We visited four other oasis towns on our trip, each with its own character and history, but none of them had the unique charm of the Siwa oasis. By the time we got back to Cairo, we had appreciated not only the beautiful Libyan desert and Egyptian oasis life, but also the kind-hearted soldiers who may spend a good portion of their two-year military service manning remote checkpoints hundreds of thousands of miles away. of miles. in the middle of an unforgiving desert, without many visitors.

Siwa Oasis can be visited by bus or car from Cairo or Marsa Matruh. Driving on the road south of Siwa without a jeep or caravan is not recommended.