and into the desert

Siwa was not actually a place I had heard of until a room-mate in Thailand heard that I was travelling next to Egypt, and told me, “You have to go to Siwa Oasis!”, and having looked the place up online I decided that I would do so.  Only 50km from the Libya border, it is a town of the Berbers, where the local language (Siwi) is still dominant.  It reminded me in some ways of northern Mali, with the ancient mosque (dating from 1203) constructed in a very similar style to those in Timbuktu.  In an oasis some 25 metres below sea level, it apparently has more than 300,000 palm trees and 70,000 olive trees – but these are nourished by spring-water (via streams), not by rainfall, which is rare.  However in 1926 there were three days of rain, and most of the town existing at that point was badly damaged, as the buildings were made from large chunks of salt mixed with rock and plastered with local clay.

The ruins are still there in the centre of town (with newer buildings around the edges), and are very much worth a wander around.  Thankfully there seem to be a fair number of locals making money from cafes and souvenir shops around the outskirts, so hopefully these ruins will be preserved.

Not so far away is a small hill known as the Mountain of the Dead, honeycombed (apparently) with some 3-4,000 rock tombs, mostly dating back to Ptolemaic and Roman times.  Google Maps is not that detailed on this part of the world, so I unknowingly entered this site through a back way and thus didn't have to pay the entrance fee... oh well, never mind...

I went into some of the tombs, including the two best known which still contain some pretty good quality ancient Egyptian paintings on the walls and ceilings.  & I went to see the Amun Temple (where Alexander the Great was supposedly told by the oracle that he was the son of the god Amun), the little that remains of the Temple of Umm Ubayd, and walked around the pool known as Cleopatra's Spring (she might, or might not, have bathed there ... I didn't).

Then, not sure whether I'd done enough walking (haha) I went to see the Siwa Saltworks, where they are mining the salt from the - very salty - lake a few kilometres east of the oasis.  The weather was not good, but the sun peeped out a few times and when it did, the water was an amazing turquoise colour.


Then I took another overnight bus, this one to Cairo where I was ending my trip.  But I had left myself enough time to visit the much-talked-about new Grand Egyptian Museum - which I must say is very impressive - as well as a bit more desert, with an overnight trip camping in the White Desert.  This was originally (70-100 million years ago) a seabed, where layers of marine sediment - calcium carbonate from shells and skeletons - compacted to form white bedrock.  Then some 30 million years ago, tectonic movements lifted this seafloor above sea level, exposing the limestone and chalk to the elements, where strong wind and temperature fluctuations have eroded the soft rock into various formations.  It was beautiful.


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