At the gateway to the Great Sand Sea, David Wroe is enchanted by a remote Berber oasis that time (almost) forgot.
The long drive south from the Mediterranean coast to Siwa, Egypt's farthest-flung oasis, is bleak but beautiful - at least in the late afternoon. The desert is flat and toasted brown, with sparse tufts of grass that shine pink at sunset. A few dirt roads snake towards distant oilfields but otherwise it is featureless. With each kilometre it becomes harder to imagine there could be anything at the end of the road.
Then the oasis appears on the horizon. Siwa positively sprouts from the desert floor, the most verdant thing you've ever seen. When an Egyptian friend in Cairo told me that visiting Siwa is like travelling back 200 years, I responded with a sceptical nod. Now, as we drive through the date palm forests and see the abandoned mudbrick citadel that still dominates the centre of the town, my only quibble is that my friend might have left off a zero. It looks biblical.
Siwa is deep in the north-western desert near Egypt's border with Libya. The march of modern life was thwarted for decades by Siwa's natural buffer of hundreds of kilometres of desert on all sides. Only when the road was sealed 20 years ago did the world begin to penetrate its defences. The bustling township now has hotels, tourist shops and tour companies running trips to the sand dunes to the south. For the moment, though, Siwa still has enough of its ancient charm to be enchanting.
Until the sealed road was opened from Mersa Matrouh on the coast, you needed a four-wheel-drive or a camel to get here. It's still a nine-hour drive from Cairo but more travellers are making the journey. Donkeys and carts remain the dominant mode of transport in the town.
Siwa is in that peculiar phase where it has one foot in the old world and the other in the new.
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