clairedavieswriter

Winner of The Daily Telegraph ‘Just Back’ travel Writing competition, 2011

No-one mentioned the donkey, or the nearby mosque, when we booked our rooms for the Eid weekend.  The Imam, his voice amplified by a loudspeaker attached to the wall beneath our window, and his four-legged chorister tethered in a stable across the narrow alley, treated us to a particularly long and rousing performance of the pre-dawn call to Friday prayer.  It was an unforgettable introduction to the Siwa Oasis.

We had arrived from Cairo the day before, having driven through very unusual torrential rain, sweeping across the desert in dark, angry squalls. We had half expected to find our mud-brick hotel looking like a sandcastle after the tide had come in. Fortunately, it was still standing, which was more than could be said for the rain-ruined 13th century fortress of Shali into whose walls it was built.

Siwa is an extraordinary place. The only habitable and cultivable speck of land for hundreds of miles, the immense dunes of the Great Sand Sea lapping at its edges a constant reminder of human limitations, it has always had to adapt to survive. Now, its agriculture threatened by dwindling water, it has embraced eco-tourism. And in some style.

In our hotel, everything was locally sourced and made – ceilings and floors of palm beams; doors, window shutters, side tables, chairs, and even bedframes, of olive wood.  Ceiling lights and bed-side lamps were carved from blocks of salt.  Beds were draped with thick and luxuriously soft unbleached sheep’s wool blankets, to ward off the chill of the desert night.  And camel-hair rugs in shades of tawny brown and cream softened the bare floorboards.

We hired bikes and followed shady tracks through olive and date-palm groves.  Children ran alongside, waving, the girls in shiny dresses with extravagant lace-edged collars, their faces uncovered; the boys more often than not in Manchester United shirts (Rooney is popular in Siwa). Like Alexander, we visited the Oracle, but it kept its opinions to itself. The spring where Cleopatra was said to have bathed was full of teenage Siwan boys. As we pedalled past, their splashes and excitable whoops echoed off the walls of the circular pool.

But for us the real draw of Siwa was the desert.  We followed a guide into the Great Sand Sea and experienced the exquisite terror of riding the biggest dunes we had seen in our lives.  He showed us vast inland saltwater seas, tiny hot springs, and fields of fossilized seashells so sharp we could not walk on them in bare feet.  He served us delicious Siwan tea in thimble-sized glasses atop a dune as the sunset turned the sand to every shade of gold. But the best was yet to come: a magical night alone in the desert, eating food cooked over an open fire and sleeping soundly, out of range of even the loudest donkey.