Blogs from Siwa Oasis, Western Desert, Egypt, Africa - page 2

Hi everyone, I am Yehia from Cairo Egypt, and I will be posting a series of posts for what to do in Egypt out of my own experiences, and hope it will be useful for you. For this post I will start with one of my favorite activities to do during a weekend, Visiting Egypt, and stying at Cairo, having few days to spend there and don't know what to do, looking for something exiting to do, and don't know what is it, don't worry if the adventure one of your hobbies how about sand boarding in the Oasis road desert, enjoy the Qatanya dune over 180 M. slide, only 1 hour away from Cairo, trip goes on 4X4 safari cars, from the main road into the desert till you reach Qatanya dune, then you get ... read more

Day 30 We spent the night here in the Bahariya Oasis and leave this morning for a 10 hours in our 4 WD deep into the Western Desert The only things out here are sand and checkpoints. There are markers for a new road to be built but only minor construction has started in small sections. The landscape here is mainly that of sand dunes and flat rocky areas. We stop at a wreckage of a helicopter. We are told that it is of a German helicopter from World War II. We stop for a picnic lunch along the desolate road under a large rock appropriately called “ship rock”. The desert once again has shown its versatile history as the rocks here are made entirely of shells. Millions of years ago this entire area was a ... read more

After all the hustle and bustle of Cairo and a serious overdose of culture we needed rest and relaxation (yes again). What better place to go than the desert. Not being Laurence of Arabia and having no inclination of spending the night on sand we opted for the version of the desert with water, palms and donkeys. An oasis like in the fairly tales would be a nice option. The closest to that must be the Siwa Oasis in the western desert. It is a fairly large oasis with some 23.000 inhabitants (yep I also thought an oasis is small) which still has the advantage that donkey carts outnumber cars and not many tourists come here as 5 star cruise ships do not plough through the desert. The only thing missing here to complete the oasis ... read more

Saturday 30th August What a day. We travelled from Alexandria to Siwa. Our first stop was Al Alamein battle field cemetery and Military museum, the cemetery was very beautiful, peaceful and well maintained. Reading some inscriptions on the headstones and being in the hot dry desert where the young Australian men had fought and lost there lives was a very moving experience. The drive followed the coast passing a continuous stream of condo style apartments built on the beach. After watching the apartments go by for the first 20kms we were impressed, after 100km we were even more impressed, after 300kms we got bored and just ignored them. The apartments had all been built in the last 20 years. Ron commented give them another twenty years and no one could invade by sea as the whole ... read more

Disconnected is one of many words that could be used to describe the Egyptian transport infrastructure (hopelessly inefficient is another good way of describing it). We were lucky to score a night train ticket out of Luxor and into Cairo although we had to pay extra to catch the train originating in Aswan (even though we were boarding in Luxor) as the train originating in Luxor had been sold out (makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?). Regardless, we were fit to say our goodbyes to Luxor and hustle our way to Siwa along what amounts to a big “L” shaped series of tracks and roads. The first leg was an overnight train to Cairo, followed by an afternoon train from Cairo to Alexandria then a series of two buses (one from Alexandria to Marsa Matrah, and one ... read more