What it's like trekking with the Bedouin on Egypt's Sinai Trail

Not long after leaving the town of Nuweiba, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the old-school white Datsun truck parts ways with the pavement, an abrupt final farewell to civilisation. My Bedouin driver barrels into the wadi, a dry valley with sheer, dark walls of towering granite mountains formed by long-extinct volcanoes that press ever closer the deeper we go. When we come to a halt, the cloud of dust that had been trailing the truck follows Newton’s first law of motion and carries on obliviously without us.

The place where we stop seems monumental, but no signs mark the start of the Sinai Trail we’re about to embark on. I stumble out of the truck, and Musallem Abu Faraj, my guide, hands me a plastic-wrapped red-and-white chequered keffiyeh. I drape it over my hair, and Musallem gingerly takes the folded edges of the square cloth and folds it in proper Bedouin style behind my head, nodding with fatherly approval at his work. Now that this essential ritual is taken care of, our journey can begin.

The Sinai Trail, Egypt’s first long-distance hike at 340 miles, cuts in from the Red Sea to the peninsula’s lofty mountains, including the country’s highest peak of Mt Catherine at 2,629m. Launched as a community tourism project in 2015 by three local Bedouin tribes, the Sinai Trail has more than doubled from its initial 135 miles, and now eight tribes in the region lead hikers through their territories. In Egypt, where much of the tourist experience comes tightly pre-packaged, a locally run initiative such as this is a brilliant exercise — literally — in slow, immersive travel that preserves and places great importance on Bedouin heritage and knowledge.

Musallem, one of the trail’s founding fathers, is part of the Tarabin tribe and has been guiding hikers in Sinai for nearly as long as the 35 years I’ve been alive. His expertise is unparalleled and widely known in the community. For several hours, we walk through wide, camel-coloured wadis, that spread through the mountains like lines on the palm of my hand, following a track invisible to my eyes but deeply engrained in Musallem’s mind. His light blue jellabiya is rolled up slightly and tucked into the straps of his Osprey rucksack, showing the bottoms of his immaculately white and seemingly dust-free trousers. Musallem reads the landscape as if it were his favourite book, eagerly pointing out the geology of the mountains and the names of medicinal plants with an infectious, child-like enthuasiasm. He hands me a tiny leaf of super-sticky samwa, which has a strong scent like a cross between lilac and marijuana and is used by the Bedouin to treat bee stings and clean infections.

We pause for tea under a lone spiny acacia tree, and Musallem sings merrily while coaxing a small fire from sticks he’s picked up off the ground. In a world of eight billion people, it’s a surreal luxury to be where no one else is. This landscape feels so rugged and raw, as if I’m the first person to set foot on it. But many have passed before me. Even Moses allegedly spent more time here than I will, called to the mountains over 3,000 years ago. I don’t consider myself a religious person, but there’s certainly something magic in the mountains of Sinai.

Back en route, my mind wanders, but never too far. Hiking forces me to focus on the physical and the immediate — the strong Sinai sun on my back, the whisper of the wind urging me onwards, the swirls of stones on the ground put in place by water’s now-invisible hand — leaving little space for anything else in my brain: ‘trail therapy’ perhaps. Walking is one of the first gravity-defying movements we master as babies, and especially out here in Sinai’s raw, elemental hinterlands, it still feels like the most foundational of actions.

The sun has shifted to the other side of the sky by the time we reach Coloured Canyon. The concave rock walls of this narrow ravine swirl with a rainbow of hues — reds, yellows and even purples, which I’ve never encountered elsewhere in the natural world — as if an artist playfully swiped her paintbrush across a palette. The route twists and turns, and some parts of the slot canyon are so narrow that my hiking boot doesn’t fall fully to the floor, necessitating some scrambling and squeezing, transforming the canyon walls into nature’s climbing frame.

After about nine miles of hiking, we stop to make camp for the night, eating a surprisingly hearty dinner — given our limited supplies — and swapping tales around the fire. As the dancing flames diminish into glowing embers, I decide it’s time for me to call it a night too. I curl up under heavy blankets, gazing at a starry sky so clear that it feels like a hallucination. With the lights extinguished, night descends like a curtain, and Sinai’s silence is so deafening that it takes me longer than usual to fall asleep. We’re certainly a far cry from the car horns of Cairo.

The following morning, Musallem and I pack up and move onward, one foot in front of the other, as all the generations before us have done and will continue to do after we’ve gone.