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I’m a hopeless dreamer at heart – a sucker for mystery, history and romance. And, if all three come wrapped up in heat rather than the pages of a Mills & Boon novel, then the formula is damn near faultless as far as I’m concerned. Which makes Siwa oasis my perfect winter sun destination, since it combines all three elements.
This place has never been easy to get to. The Persian army lost 50,000 men while trying to reach this isolated Saharan oasis in the
Perhaps the biggest change here occurred 20 years ago when a permanent asphalt road connecting Siwa to the outside world was built. That says a lot about the town’s extraordinary isolation. Clinging to the edge of the Qattara Depression, just shy of the Libyan border, it’s enveloped for hundreds of kilometres by the Sahara desert. For centuries, only caravans passed through, leaving Siwans in their exceptional seclusion to evolve a distinct identity, cultural heritage and Berber language (Siwi) all their own.
Siwa is still hard to reach by modern standards. A cab from Cairo takes the best part of 10 hours and comes at a price (I paid $400 return) – the bus journey is considerably cheaper but can take even longer. However you travel, the 21st Century sprawls inexorably beside the road for the first 150km: giant billboards exhort you to buy anything from hair gel to real estate, lonely advertising that seems utterly surreal deep in the desert wastes.
After sundown another type of strangeness quickly gripped me; the trance induced by mile after endless mile of road disappearing into night.
I thought I’d be pleased when I finally arrived at Siwa’s Adrere Amellal eco lodge; but I was surprised by its disturbing magic instead. The moon bathed what appeared to be a ghost town in an eery silver light. Had I not known I was staying here I’d have believed it deserted. Not a single light shone, the windows were black and the heavy silence was unnerving.
A man padded out of the shadows into the moonlight, courteously showed me my candlelit room and vanished. I crept into bed and blew the candles out feeling, it must be said, nonplussed.
Morning was revelatory. My doubts dissolved in dazzling sunshine that revealed a warren of traditional village houses that hugged the base of the high rock face that gave the eco lodge its name.
Adrere Amellal is Siwi for White Mountain – although that’s a little inflationary. Unlike a more traditional hotel, Adrere Amellal doesn’t have a reception or obvious fixed public areas. This flexible environment takes a while to get used to. Some spaces are used in winter, others in summer.
I must have looked lost – I certainly didn’t know where I was going. Then a voice called out and asked if I wanted breakfast, and at that moment I fell in love with Adrere Amellal.
The simple building materials here – kershef, or mud-plastered with rock salt – have remained unchanged for centuries. But the traditional techniques of construction were nearly lost forever before they were revived for the construction of Adrere Amellal. The results are spectacular.
Perched beside Lake Siwa, an immense, shimmering salt lake, the buildings are all but invisible from a distance, merging perfectly into the environment like an inverted mirage. Doors and furniture are made from olive wood, and electricity, which they have in town a few miles away, has been banned.
Geometric blocks of light, shade and architecture create stunning vistas and windows into the oasis. There’s real beauty in the simplicity and crudeness – think Kelly Hoppen meets the Flintstones – and an obsession with salt that borders on bonkers. There are salt tables, salt chairs, salt bedside tables and beds, windows, wall tiles, even an entire building.
Dr Mounir Neamatalla and his company, the Cairo-based Environmental Quality International, created the lodge as part of a bigger scheme to preserve both Siwan tradition and the fragile ecosystem. Since 1997, EQI has invested heavily in four local objectives: eco lodging, traditional artisanship, organic agriculture and renewable energy.
The initiatives are already having an impact. Most of the local population are smallholders who haven’t always found the best deals for their produce.
EQI champions the use of organic farming methods and pre-purchases their crops at a fair market price as well as providing micro-finance schemes. They’re currently experimenting with a bio-feeder to create a natural source of cooking gas and organic fertiliser, and have set up a large olive factory, built from the ubiquitous kershef.
But it’s their work with local women that deserves special mention. Women are all but invisible to outsiders in Siwa; they live in a strictly conservative society, even by Egyptian standards. Gradually EQI is encouraging their economic self-sufficiency and empowerment through a women’s artisanship initiative. You can buy their exquisite embroideries in the lodge.
I wanted to see the projects in action, but as a man’s presence would not have been acceptable, I went to see a shepherd and his flock instead, and inadvertently created a stampede by leaving the barn door open. Three dozen animals made a frantic bid for freedom in a hail of dust and grit, and the shepherd spent the next 10 minutes wiping tears from his face – tears of laughter.
Red-faced, I sought sanctuary in the simple luxury of a spring-fed Roman pool. There aren’t many hotels on the planet that can lay claim to one of these, let alone two. Extraordinary turquoise waters bubble up from the seemingly bottomless wells then trickle into a series of stone cisterns and on into the palm-shaded gardens. It was magical.
So good, in fact, that Alexander the Great might have dipped his toe into one of these pools when he visited. Not that he’d come to chill out.
He had an oracle to consult. And incredibly, the temple that housed Siwa’s Oracle of Amun still exists, along with Cleopatra’s bath, another extraordinary Roman plunge pool; it’s that kind of place. Other royals have come, too – the Prince of Wales, for example.
You’d be right to guess from all this that a holiday here isn’t cheap.
The good news is that EQI has two other places to stay that are a fraction of the price and just as beautiful, if not quite as spacious and tranquil.
Shali Lodge and Albabenshal Heritage Hotel are both in the old part of Siwa town. Of the two, it was Albabenshal that entranced me. Its 11 rooms, connected through a network of alleys and terraces that overlook the centre of town, are built in the ruins of the Shali Fortress, a 13th-century citadel that remained all but impregnable until 1926. Then the unimaginable happened: three days of rain all but destroyed it.
At present, the long journey from Cairo is still a deterrent to those who don’t truly want to visit, but rumour has it that an airport is planned and the results could be catastrophic; this engaging culture and beautiful, magical oasis would be lost forever.
