Desert safari & Bedouin dinner

An afternoon and evening in the Eastern Desert, the range of dry mountains between the Nile and the Red Sea. Most trips run out by quad bike or 4×4 to a Bedouin camp an hour or so inland, arriving in time for sunset and staying through dinner.

What the evening usually holds

• A drive through wadis and open gravel plain, with a stop on high ground as the light goes
• A short camel ride, and often a demonstration of feteer or flatbread baked directly on hot sand and embers
• Bedouin tea — strong, sweet, and usually flavoured with habak, a desert mint
• Grilled dinner under an open roof, music, and stargazing once the fires burn down

Practicalities

It gets genuinely cold after dark from November to March — bring a jacket, however warm the afternoon was. Cover your mouth and nose on the quads, and take goggles or sunglasses. Closed shoes; the sand holds heat and the gravel is sharp.

The Eastern Desert is not empty, and it never was. It was Egypt's mining frontier for three thousand years — the source of the gold that made the pharaohs rich, and later of stone the Romans wanted badly enough to run an empire's worth of logistics into the middle of nowhere to get it.

At Mons Porphyrites, in the mountains inland from Hurghada, the Romans quarried imperial porphyry — a deep purple stone found in usable quantity almost nowhere else on earth, reserved by law for the emperor. Columns cut here were dragged to the Nile and shipped to Rome and Constantinople, and you can still find them in St Mark's in Venice and in Istanbul. Further south, at Mons Smaragdus, they mined emeralds.

Roads, wells and small fortified way-stations were built across this desert to supply the quarries, and their ruins are still out there.

The people who live here

The Bedouin communities of the Eastern Desert — principally the Ababda and Bishari — have moved through this landscape for centuries, navigating by star and landmark and reading dry watercourses for grazing after rain. Camp evenings are a modern arrangement, but the bread in the sand, the tea, and the way a fire is built are not.

Why the stars are so good

An hour inland the light of the coast drops away, the air is exceptionally dry, and there is no humidity to scatter what little glow remains. On a moonless night the Milky Way is plainly visible, and in winter you will pick out Orion, the Pleiades and often Andromeda with the naked eye.