Travel: Siwa Oasis

IF you construct your house from mud bricks, and the mud contains salt, you’re going to have a problem when it rains: the salt will start dissolving and the house will collapse.

Of course, in the middle of the Sahara desert, that’s not so much of a problem. The old Egyptian fortress town of Shali, a high-rising metropolis of mud constructions piled one on top of the other above the palms of the Siwa oasis, stood for centuries since the area was settled by Berber tribes in medieval times.

A century ago, however, the once-in-a-millenium rains came and the town melted to rubble. The deserted remains still overlook the present town of Siwa. They form a higgledy-piggledy heap of ruins that, beautifully floodlit by night, are both a throwback to the town’s ancient origins and a reminder of the fragile transience of life lived amidst the Saharan dust.

ISLAND OF FECUNDITY

The inhabitants of Siwa still build their houses the same way, mixing mud from the nearby Great Saltwater Lake with wood from the thousands of palm trees that grow around this island of fecundity in the sand dunes, and provide the finest dates and olives in North Africa.

Siwa is an intoxicating place, partly – perhaps particularly – because of its isolation. Deep in the Egypt’s western desert, just 50km from the Libyan border, it’s a world away from the sightseeing playgrounds of Egyptian antiquity, overrun as they are by peddlers of every kind of tourist tat to every kind of tourist.

Until just 40 years ago Siwa’s population had little interaction with the outside world. They still speak their own dialect, along with Arabic, mostly get around by brightly-painted carts pulled by donkeys, and keep their women hidden away from prying eyes.

Siwa is still hard to reach by modern standards. A cab from Cairo takes the best part of 10 hours and comes at a price (I paid US$400 return) - the bus journey is considerably cheaper but can take even longer. However you travel, the 21st century sprawls inexorably beside the road for the first 100 miles: giant billboards exhort you to buy anything from hair gel to real estate, lonely advertising that seems utterly surreal deep in the desert wastes. After sundown another type of strangeness quickly gripped me; the trance induced by mile after endless mile of road disappearing into night.

I thought I'd be pleased when I finally arrived at Siwa's Adrère Amellal eco lodge; but I was surprised by its disturbing magic instead. The moon bathed what appeared to be a ghost town in an eery silver light. Had I not known I was staying here I'd have believed it deserted. Not a single light shone, the windows were black and the heavy silence was unnerving.

A man padded out of the shadows into the moonlight, courteously showed me my candlelit room and vanished. Knackered, I slugged on a bottle of duty-free vodka, crept into bed and blew the candles out feeling, it must be said, nonplussed.

Morning was revelatory. My doubts dissolved in dazzling sunshine that revealed a warren of traditional village houses that hugged the base of the high rock face that gave the eco lodge its name. Adrère Amellal is Siwi for White Mountain - although that's a little inflationary. Mont Blanc it is not. It is, however, a marvellous layer-cake of a cliff that looms above the scattering of buildings below. . . .

Dr Mounir Neamatalla and his company, the Cairo-based Environmental Quality International, created the lodge as part of a bigger scheme to preserve both Siwan tradition and the fragile ecosystem. Since 1997, EQI has invested heavily in four local objectives: eco lodging, traditional artisanship, organic agriculture and renewable energy.

The initiatives are already having an impact. Most of the local population are smallholders who haven't always found the best deals for their produce. EQI champions the use of organic farming methods and pre-purchases their crops at a fair market price as well as providing micro-finance schemes. They're currently experimenting with a biofeeder to create a natural source of cooking gas and organic fertiliser, and have set up a large olive factory, built from the ubiquitous kershef.

But it's their work with local women that deserves special mention. Women are all but invisible to outsiders in Siwa; they live in a strictly conservative society, even by Egyptian standards. Gradually EQI is encouraging their economic self-sufficiency and empowerment through a women's artisanship initiative. You can buy their exquisite embroideries in the lodge.