Siwa Oasis: the oracle, the salt lakes and the sand sea

Siwa sits in a depression in Egypt’s Western Desert, between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea, about 560 kilometres from Cairo and fifty from the border with Libya. It is nineteen metres below sea level, it gets about twelve millimetres of rain a year, and the people who live there are Siwi: they speak their own Berber language and have done for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians called it the Oasis of Amun-Ra after the god whose oracle stood here, and for centuries it was a place people travelled a long way to reach.

They still do. Siwa is not on the way to anywhere, which is exactly why the oasis has kept its own shape: mud and salt architecture, a lake of brine, springs in the palm groves, and a town on a hill that was abandoned within living memory. The nearest city of any size is Marsa Matrouh on the Mediterranean coast, roughly 300 kilometres north.

The oracle, and the man who asked

The temple of Amun at Aghurmi was one of the ancient world’s famous oracles, and its reputation rests on a single visit: in 331 BC Alexander the Great made the journey from the Nile to ask the god whether he was the son of Zeus-Ammon. He was told what he came to hear, and never told anyone what else he had asked. The temple still stands on its outcrop above the palm groves, roofless and stripped, with the remains of the temple of Umm Ubayd a short walk away.

The rest of the antiquities are mostly funerary and mostly on the Mountain of the Dead, a ridge of rock-cut tombs with painted ceilings, and a few surviving inscriptions in Greek and Siwi. Between them lie the springs: some fresh enough to swim in, others so salt-heavy you float without trying, which is the source of every photograph of Siwa that has ever been taken.

Shali, the town that melted

Shali is the old town, built on a mound in the middle of the oasis out of kershef, a mixture of mud, salt and stone. It had grown into a small fortified hill of houses stacked on each other when, in 1926, three days of rain fell on a place built to expect none: the salt in the walls dissolved, the structure slumped, and the town was abandoned for the lower ground. What is left is a melting brown hill with paths through it, which is one of the strangest walks in Egypt.

The road in, and what to bring

Getting to Siwa is the largest part of going there. The standard route is the desert road from Marsa Matrouh, which is a long, straight drive with few services; buses also run from Cairo and Alexandria, which makes for a very long day. There is an airstrip at the oasis, but scheduled flights are not a thing to plan around, so treat this as a road trip and break it up.

Pack for two climates in one day. Winter days in Siwa are mild and the nights are cold enough for a real jacket, and summer is one of the hottest places in Egypt with almost no shade. Cash matters more here than anywhere else on the usual circuit: take what you need, because a card machine in the oasis is a hopeful object rather than a reliable one.

Desert, water and the way of the place

West of the oasis begins the Great Sand Sea, an enormous field of dunes that runs to the Libyan border and beyond. The trip everyone ends up taking is a four by four into it, for a few hours or for a night under the stars, and it is worth arranging through a hotel that works with the same drivers year after year. Sandboarding, tea on a dune and the silence are the whole itinerary.

The oasis itself runs on a strict water arithmetic. The springs are fed from the desert aquifer, the palm groves are irrigated in turn by channels rather than all at once, and the great salt lake is the result of what is left over: drainage water that has evaporated down to brine. Swimming in it is a novelty; the fresh springs in the groves are the better afternoon, and they are usually free.

Siwa is conservative, and it is far from the institutions of the Nile valley. Dress modestly, ask before photographing people, and keep the desert trips with people your hotel can vouch for. None of that is unusual for rural Egypt; it simply applies with more force here, eight hours from the nearest hospital of any size.

Siwa rewards the journey precisely because the journey is inconvenient: an oracle that answered Alexander, a town that dissolved in the rain, salt you can float on and dunes that go on for a hundred kilometres. Give it three nights, take cash, and go between October and April.