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TKH
Over the course of seven weeks, beginning in late October, to early December of last year (2023) I backpacked the Sinai Trail on the Sinai peninsula in Egypt. The hike was organized by sinaitrail.org, a Bedouin-run non-profit that aims to give the Bedouins an income stream from tourism that they themselves control. Apart from my predilection for hiking in the desert, this concept made me decide to go on this trip.
Over the course of 48 days we hiked some 550 km (320 miles), between 10 and 22 km (6-15 miles) per day. Owing to the harshness of the terrain, this was a supported hike. This means that supplies, most importantly almost all of the water the group drank and the food, was carried by either a Jeep or camels. Also, each of us had a “camel bag” with gear that would be ferried from camp site to camp site by these means. For my standards this was unusually luxurious as I am used to carry all of my gear and supplies on my back during my long distance hikes. However, doing this particular trek unsupported is not possible as neither the Bedouin nor the Egyptian government will allow unaccompanied tourists, foreign or domestic, in the Sinai. Moreover, the resupply of food and water are orders of magnitude more difficult in the Sinai than, say, in the Utah or Arizona backcountry.
We started the hike on the West shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, midway between Taba on the border of Israel and Egypt and the Bedouin town of Nueiba. Over the next 12 days we hiked to the oasis of Ein Kid, a location so small that it is not shown on any topographic map (it is at the bottom of the red line in the schematic map). From there, over the following 12 days we hiked to the small town of St. Katherine where we had a rest day, well deserved and necessary. From there in another section lasting 12 days we hiked roughly Northwest inland of the Gulf of Suez to Serabit el Khadem, an ancient turquoise mine from Pharaonic times. The last section brought us back from there to Nueiba on the Coast of the Gulf of Aqaba.
A schematic map of our route through the peninsula
One late afternoon while we were setting up camp these two dudes walked past with their camels. They were playing some sort of world music on battery powered speakers. It struck me as odd for a moment until I came to realize that this is essentially the Bedouin analog of listening to your car radio, just that the station is KAML (if you pardon the pun).
Nothing, absolutely nothing happens without “chai” the incredibly sweet tea served in shot glasses (most of the time) or in metal cups used by our guides (to cut down on breakage). The tea leaves are from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the chai is prepared as shown here in cans that sit on the ashes/coals of a fire. Sugar is added by the handful. The guides were kind enough to some of us to also make a can of tea, not chai, without sugar as the sweetness just was too much.
The kitchen crew spent a good fraction of its time while we were hiking to procure fire wood.
Our support crew in Section 2. Notice the firewood on the right side of the guy on the right. They were amazing cooks if one considers the primitive means at their disposal. They worked their tails off, first to get up in the morning to get the fire started for chai/tea and last to get an hours rest before going to sleep after cleaning up after dinner and hobbling their animals for the night.
The camels are amazing animals. A full grown camel can carry 200 kg for hours per day and weeks on end, provided they get high quality feed. These guys fed their animals corn in the morning and at night as the high energy component of the feed and had them feed on greenery along the way during the day as this is the “natural diet” of wild camels. A pure corn diet would not be healthy , the same way that a pure corn diet for cattle is not healthy.
Owing to what’s going on in Ukraine, prices for feed have risen sharply in Egypt and many Bedouin cannot afford to feed corn to their animals. This squeeze is exacerbated by the collapse of tourism as a consequence of the mess in Gaza.
In these circumstances the animals are released into the wild to fend for themselves. The Bedouin owner will do a welfare check occasionally and recapture his animal when the situation improves.
Another staple of the food we were served during the trip is two kinds of unleavened bread made from a dough consisting of flour salt and water. Sometimes the guides ordered flat bread, called feteer, from local families who received pay for the service. At other times the guides/cooks would make it themselves as we were close to settlements only rarely.
Here the guide has made the dough and is getting ready to roll it out with a piece of 1 inch PVC pipe. The “ground cloth” is a flag from the COP Environmental Summit held in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. We found it while walking through a wadi where it was part of the ubiquitous plastic pollution. The Bedouin knew right away that this could be useful for “something” and in short order the “something” was identified. From that day on the flag was used as a table cloth and as a surface on which the dough for fetter could be rolled.
Just as in a real pizzeria the dough gets rolled out and then stretched by rotation. In the case of the feteer the final disk is much thinner and wider, though.
While all of this is happening a fire is fed under an iron half-dome made from the lid of an oil drum. I figured that the shape is chosen to capture some of the heat of the fire under the half-dome. We never saw feteer being made on a flat surface.
Feteer on the half-dome. The final product looks like a pancake about 20″ in diameter and less than a quarter inch in diameter. If the feteer is not made fresh right before the meal it gets warmed up on the fire for a couple of minutes before being handed out for consumption.
The lunches they served us were amazing all the more so when you consider the harsh environment and the isolation. The jeep crew or the camel guides would pass through villages away from our routes to resupply.
There was always a green salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, pomegranate, carrot with an oil/olive oil-lemon dressing, together with a tuna salad, baba ganough from freshly fire-roasted eggplant or hummus, and fresh cheese sold as feta, but that’s a bit of a misnomer, and oranges or melons as dessert. You also see the feteer that is used as the vehicle to transfer the above to your mouth. You tear off a piece of the feteer, use this piece to grab some “condiment” and eat away. The preparation of the food and its consumption happens while you sit on the ground.
I should add that this is the Bedouin version of feteer. The Egyptian version is more like a sweet pastry with lots of butter, as I understand it. The Bedouin are poor, so feteer for them is a form of bread to fulfill basic caloric needs and not an indulgence.
This is the second kind of bread that the Bedouin eat called “lebba”. This is always made fresh right before it is consumed. We saw two way of preparing it. In Section 1 of our hike the guide made a fire, prepared the dough and shaped it into a disk of about 1 inch thickness. The coals and ashes were moved aside and the disk was placed on the hot sand and then covered first with ashes and then coals. After 10-15 min when the disc sounded “right” when beaten with a stick, the disc was removed from the coals, banged with a stick and/or banged on a flat rock to remove all ashes stuck to the bread. Sometimes some blackened areas were scraped off with a knife.
Later in the track the guides used a “pan” made from the top of an oil drum with a welded-on handle as shown in this picture. I first saw this way of baking the bread in an area where there was a lot of granite. When granite blocks disintegrate they form “sand” with a grain size of maybe a quarter inch or 3/16th. I figured that this would not lead to as a good a heat transfer than obtained with the fine sand we had hiked on in Section 1. However, later on, while we’re hiking through fine sand again, lebba was made on a pan regardless. So the way the bread is baked may just be a question of custom that individual tribes follow.
The bread was broken up into pieces of the size of the palm of a hand. You take one of these pieces, split it horizontally, add whatever salad you desire and start eating. Delicious!
Princess
Yum!
Betty
Human ingenuity. Sounds like a fascinating adventure.
BretH
Love, love, love this travelogue! Thank you SO much for sharing. Can’t wait for the next part/s.
Anyway
Wow, what an adventure. Did you see solar energy being used in the desert? I’m thinking of the iconic pictures of solar panels on the backs of camels..
ETA Yum to flatbreads
OzarkHillbilly
Jealous, I am. My backpacking days are well behind me and that is a part of the world I have long yearned to see.
That is one of my favorite ways to eat, just dip and chew. Quick and easy with little clean up after.
Thanx, TKH.
Manyakitty
This looks fantastic, and I love the idea of supporting the Bedouins.
pb3550
Agree with Betty – fascinating adventure! A great glimpse of a culture about which I know almost nothing. Thanks.
Geo Wilcox
Your trip sounds like one my girl friend took in the Australia outback. Not quite as exciting as her trip to Nepal in the middle of the rainy season where she was in a mudslide or when she was a nurse in Somalia during the Black Hawk Down time frame. She was also in Israel when Oct. 6th happened. I swear almost every where she goes, shit happens.
Albatrossity
Amazing trip! And Biblical! 48 days wandering in the Sinai Desert sounds familiar somehow…
I’m impressed that they could find enough firewood to make this sort of group trip possible. From what one can see in the pictures, firewood would indeed be a precious resource.
Thanks for this, and I’m sure we will learn more in the next installments!
Spanish Moss
What a fantastic experience you had, I love the food pictures and meal details. Thanks for sharing!
MountainBoy
Wow-such an adventure in an unexpected location. Looking forward to learning and seeing more.
pieceofpeace
I look forward to coming chapters of this adventure. The adaptation of what we in the USA consider everyday routines, procurement and eating, sleeping, walking, plus more unmentioned, are of interest. Wondering about your personal prep for this trip, which I see as living in simplicity, a ‘lifestyle’ idea I’m earnestly gravitating to most days and one I’m imagining you’d experience while adventuring to remote places in Egypt.
Appreciate the map, too.
cope
Thank you for showing us your pictures and filling in the details. It sounds like an amazing trip.
We lived in Saudi Arabia in the mid to late ’50s and, even though I was a little kid, I still developed an affinity for the bedouin people and the clean beauty of the desert.
Thanks again, I’m looking forward to more, especially the turquoise mine.
stinger
I had no idea such a trip was possible. So interesting, especially the food!
TKH
@Anyway: The Egyptian government is installing cell phone towers throughout Sinai, one system for ordinary Joes and one for the security apparatus. These all run off solar. There were some solar panels running the pumps that supply settlements with water from the the wells higher up in the wadis.
Two of us carried smaller panels to get power for phones and cameras and the guides borrowed those for their gear. The rumor had it that it was difficult for Egyptians to import portable panels.
TKH
@cope: one could see the mountains of Saudi Arabia “across the bay” from Nueiba. The Englishman who got the Sinai trail going in the beginning is working on a similar endeavor in Saudi Arabia. There is also a route starting in Jordan that takes in part of the Sinai trail, then crosses the Gulf of Suez and continues on to Luxor (Asia to Africa, so to speak). While the plan stands, there is little cooperation from the government and the security forces.
TKH
@Albatrossity: This took up a good fraction of the day of the support crew. I brought up the question of sustainability of their custom, asking how they intended to deal with this if the trail were to become popular. This question was met with utter incomprehension.
I think that they will be moving on to charcoal or to propane burners which the jeep support crews already use occasionally.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Thank you, amazing to learn all this and what a hike, wow!