10-Day Cairo, White Desert & Nile Cruise — Private Round Trip
From $2,100 / person10 daysIncludes 3 h at this sight
Makadi Bay · Red Sea
Makadi desert & coast
Typical visit: 3 h
The gravel plain and low mountains behind Makadi Bay, where the quad and buggy safaris run — and the coast road back with the Red Sea on one side and desert on the other.
View on Google MapsAbout
Makadi Bay sits about 30 km south of Hurghada, and the desert starts almost at the back of the hotels. It is open gravel plain rather than dune sea — hard flat ground broken by shallow wadis, with the Red Sea Mountains standing up brown and grey a few kilometres inland. That surface is why the safaris run here: it takes a quad or a buggy at speed without the bogging-down that soft sand causes further west.
What the run is like
- A briefing and a few practice laps at the safari station before anyone goes anywhere
- Twenty to thirty kilometres out across the plain, usually with a stop on higher ground
- A Bedouin tent for mint tea, and often a short camel ride
- The last leg along the coast, desert on one side and the sea on the other
Practicalities
Cover your mouth and nose — the dust is the real story of a quad safari, not the speed. Take sunglasses or goggles, and closed shoes. Afternoon runs are cooler and the light is better; from November to March it gets genuinely cold once the sun drops.
History & background
The bay itself is new. Makadi was built as a resort strip from the 1990s onward, on a stretch of coast that had nothing on it but a track.
The desert behind it is not new at all. This is the northern end of the Eastern Desert, the range between the Nile and the Red Sea that supplied Egypt with gold for three thousand years and Rome with stone it could get almost nowhere else. The wadis the safaris cross are the same routes that carried that traffic — dry riverbeds are the only sensible way through this country, and they have been the roads here since the Old Kingdom.
The Ababda and Bishari people have grazed and travelled this desert for centuries and still do. The Bedouin camps the safaris visit are set up for visitors, but the families running them are from here.
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Recommended 3 h here — you can shorten it in the planner.
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