Photo : Roland Unger — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Marsa Alam & the Red Sea · Marsa Alam
Wadi el-Gemal National Park
Mountains, gravel plains and acacias south of Marsa Alam. Not a place for an ordinary car.
The park covers a band running from the shore up into the mountains south of Marsa Alam: valleys of sand and gravel, widely spaced acacias, granite massifs, and on the coast mangroves and low islands. The Ababda live here off their herds, and the valley's name comes from their camels, which browse those very acacias. Up in the hills the Romans worked the emerald mines of Sikait: mine shafts remain, temples cut into the rock, and a village of stone laid without mortar. The tracks are long and featureless; you travel them in a 4×4, with someone who knows the ground.
The extra bit
Run the day the other way round: the interior in the morning, while the rock is still readable and the air breathable, the coast and the water in the afternoon. Sikait's ruins are not open every day; if they are, the morning is the hour to be there.
Know before you go
A protected area: a ticket per person, often per vehicle too, and a warden's post at the entrance. There is no fuel, no water and no shade other than the acacias for tens of kilometres: you carry everything, and twice over. Phone signal becomes very unreliable once you leave the coast: do not count on it. Go through an operator in Marsa Alam who works with Ababda guides rather than driving in alone — this is not a waymarked walk, and a breakdown at the head of a wadi is not solved on foot.
