Night falls quickly in Egypt’s Sinai mountains. I watch the sun drop below the clouds that skim the jagged peaks of Bab el Dunya (Door to the Universe), a name, which seems pretty justified given this view. Layers of mountains, stretching to the horizon, turn orange, purple, then dusty pink, and a strange luminosity touches the rock before we’re plunged into sudden darkness.
There’s no one here but us – the guide, photographer and me – three tiny figures who pick their way down the mountainside by torchlight, the silence only broken by the sound of stones shifting under foot. The rest of the world seems a very long way away.
Most tourists heading to Sinai – the triangle of land wedged in between the Egyptian mainland and Israel – come for resorts like Sharm El Sheikh and Dahab, and the Red Sea’s world-class diving. Visitors who do tear themselves away from the coast tend to join short excursions, climbing Mount Sinai (where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments) for sunrise, then visiting St Katherine’s monastery (the oldest continually inhabited monastery in the world) before being whisked back to the beach.
But this region, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is a bewitching mountainous wilderness, a sacred place of pilgrimage since biblical times, dotted with historic sites and crossed by ancient trade routes. The St Katherine Protectorate, spanning 4,350sq km, is home to Egypt’s highest peaks, which soar to over 2,600m, and its loveliest valleys (known locally as wadis). I’m here to spend a few days trekking with Bedouin Paths, a company which encourages people to linger and learn about the area and its people, the Jebeliya, one of seven Bedouin tribes in south Sinai.
Our base is the Bedouin Camp in St Katherine’s town, a comfy, rustic place with simple rooms (the ensuites were opening the week after our stay). We fuel up for our first hike on a breakfast of traditional fuul (beans) and shakshuka (spicy scrambled egg), sitting cross-legged on cushions, with a few curious cats for company.
It’s still early when we set out with Hussein, our guide, and a camel laden with provisions for a day and night in the mountains – food, sleeping bags and the photographer’s heavy equipment. ‘That’ll be the tripod that breaks the camel’s back,’ he quips.
Leaving the town behind we take a steep, zig-zagging path up Abu Jiffa. It’s not long before I’m out of breath – naturally blaming the altitude (we are at 2,000m, after all). But as we climb higher, the views take my mind off my fitness level and I become absorbed by the dramatic scenery. This is one of the world’s oldest massifs, formed mostly of red granite that dates back some 600m years. In places volcanic rock streaks it dark green, black, pink and purple and we wander through narrow gorges and across open plateaus debating whether it looks more like a Star Trek film set or Mars.
There’s a definite biblical feel about the place – I can imagine bumping into Moses at any moment. In Wadi Matter, we peer into a hermit’s cave, where the 800-year-old bones of a monk lie scattered. We pass no one, bar a lone Bedouin woman, completely covered head-to-toe in black, sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette next to her grazing camel.
