Sitting in the smoke-filled room of a police station on the outskirts of the Egyptian oasis village of Siwa, somewhere in the middle of the Libyan desert, we realized that we were high above our heads.
We started early that afternoon heading south from the Siwa oasis on a seemingly endless dirt road that snaked through a golden landscape of ever larger and more arid mountains of sand, the valleys of which were flooded with the waters of a mirage. constantly retreating before us. . As evening fell, we saw bonfires burning in the distance that we mistook more than once for another small oasis village, only to find out later that they were the bonfires of Bedouin camps bringing herds of camels from northern Sudan to El market. Cairo.
As we approached one of those bonfires, it gradually illuminated two large metal barrels blocking the road and four young Egyptian soldiers nonchalantly holding their machine guns to their chests. One of the soldiers told us to open the window and with the flash of a flat palm perpendicular to the other, he indicated that he wanted to see our papers. We didn’t know we needed papers, we informed him, after which he ordered us to get out of the car to wait in a small tin cabin while they radioed his superiors for instructions. From the sound of voices emanating from the static on the radio, it was not very common for an American car to show up at a checkpoint in the middle of the Libyan desert at night without a permit. So while we waited, we chatted a bit with the soldiers, some of whom had gone months without speaking to any other living being besides their camels that were tied up at the edge of the camp. Finally, they invited us to play an impromptu soccer game and share a dinner of scrambled eggs with sand while we waited for an answer. One of the soldiers asked for our help to fix a small generator, as the instruction booklet was in English and neither of them said a word. We finally discovered that the choke lever had not been lowered, and soon the generator began to run to the cheers of the soldiers.
Finally we were informed that we would have to return to Siwa to obtain the necessary permits before we could continue through the desert. So we said goodbye to our new friends, who helped push our car out of the deep sand it had sunk into as a result of coming to a complete stop.
Less than two days before this, I and a group of classmates studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo had arrived in this beautiful oasis town just five hours west of Cairo, which Alexander the Great himself had visited. in the year 331 a. C. Being only a few square kilometers, a car is not needed to explore the oasis, so we opted to rent four rusty bicycles from a shop in the town square, full of vegetable sellers, traditional carpet merchants, and shacks. They offer desert tours to the few tourists adventurous enough to go that far into the desert. We ride along the town’s few main streets, which are dominated by the ruined ruins of an ancient city center, called shali-ghali, starkly standing out against the surrounding desert like an evil castle half floating on a sand sea. No one has lived in the ruins of the city center for centuries, we were told, but no one dares to disturb or demolish the ancient mud houses for fear of jinn (evil spirits).
We stopped our bikes at the many ancient ruins that dot the area, such as the Temple of Ammon, whose oracle is said to have confirmed the divine character of Alexander, and the now cement-lined pond that Cleopatra is said to have bathed in. We walked the ‘mountain of the dead’ lined with ancient tombs and vaults, filled with fragments of pottery and ancient human bones that have been scattered about by grave robbers over the years. We spent the night idyllically sitting in hammocks perched between palm trees on the edge of a large shallow saltwater lake at the western end of the city, and tried to communicate with curious children who spoke to us in a mixture of Arabic and their native language. Berber dialect.
The next morning, we paid a driver in town to take us in his jeep for a short ride through the endless sandy seas that surround the town. Our guide sped up the sand dunes at incredible speeds, sometimes leaning on two wheels, other times navigating in the air and landing with a sandblast on the other side of the dune. We got out of the jeep and raced up the steep mountains of sand in the sweltering heat, surrounded by the surreal moonscape of deep mounds of orange, red, and yellow sand that turned into billowing tan waves as far as the eye could see into. all directions. It was easy to see how one could quickly get lost in this desert, since ten minutes from the oasis it was completely hidden in the channels of the giant dunes. As we plunged into a small freshwater spring at our destination, surrounded on all sides by 100-foot sand cliffs whipped by a strong wind that felt like a hair dryer to your face, we asked the guide for details about the trail. . that led to the next oasis of Bahariyya, five more hours south of Siwa. He told us that for the sake of safety, there were convoys of travelers that would band together and traverse the treacherous road once a week, and that we would have to wait for the next one to depart. He also asked us what kind of Jeep we had and almost fell out of his seat laughing when we told him we intended to drive down the desert highway in a rented Toyota Camry. “Large mounds of sand often blow onto the roads making them impassable even for a Hummer,” he laughed.
Despite these warnings, our itinerary did not allow for an extended stay in Siwa and in order to see the other oases and return to Cairo before classes started, we had to leave immediately. We decided to leave that afternoon to escape the worst of the midday heat, and after a dinner of stringy cooked chicken at one of the two restaurants in town, we headed out. After returning from the checkpoint described above and re-driving the three-hour drive back north, we found ourselves sitting in the aforementioned smoke-filled police station.
‘You can’t go anymore tonight’ the policeman told us with watery eyes as he exhaled a long puff of cigarette smoke, ‘you’ll have to come back in the morning and apply for a permit and then wait for the next convoy.’ Since it was past midnight and none of the three hotels in the oasis were open, we begged the police to let us take a chance on the desert highway. We told him that we were ready to go on the journey with full knowledge of the consequences, and we discreetly stuffed a $ 20 bill in one of our passports as we handed it over to him. He slowly smiled and chuckled, and then exhorted God to protect us, since if we were stranded in the desert we would be dead when the next convoy arrived. Shaking his head at our obvious American idiocy, he spoke on the radio and then wiped his hands with the hint that since we had been warned, his hands were clean.
We finally made it back to the first checkpoint, where very tired and scruffy soldiers were now greeting us as we passed. We continued past four more manned checkpoints in the middle of the desert where soldiers woke up and laughed as our now familiar caravan limped through the desert and hastily moved barrels to save us. the task of pushing our car out of the sand once it stopped. We visited four more oasis towns on our trip, each with its own character and history, but none of them had the unique charm of the Siwa oasis. When we returned to Cairo, we had gained an appreciation not only for the beautiful Libyan desert and the life of the Egyptian oases, but also for the caring soldiers who can spend a good part of their two years of military service manning remote checkpoints. hundreds of miles. in the middle of an unforgiving desert, without many visitors.
Siwa Oasis can be visited by bus or by car from Cairo or Marsa Matrouh. Driving on the road south of Siwa without a jeep or caravan is not recommended.
