On The Road – TKH – Sinai Trail Part 1

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!