I could tell from the look on the face of the concierge that my fantastic idea wasn’t going to happen. “I’m just worried for your safety,” he replied apologetically. “If they see you, the police will want to know what you’re doing and it may mean trouble for you,” he went on. Plan A had looked to be a relatively simple one, and yet there it lay, twitching in the dust like a dying beast. And to think all I wanted to do was walk to the west for perhaps no more than a mile, to a place where I could get a clear view of the mountains and point my camera at them in the golden hour. “Which side road should I take for a good view?” was all I’d asked. The answer was none of them. Stay in the hotel and forget your crazy notions. Unless you want to spend a night or two in an Egyptian jail waiting for the British consul to arrive. Go and have another pina colada by the pool. He didn’t say all of this of course. He didn't need to.
Remember those harmless British plane spotters in Greece who received prison sentences for espionage when all they’d wanted to do was jot down a few numbers? I sighed, thanked the concierge for his concern over my welfare and reluctantly put the idea to bed. By now we’d drawn a small crowd of equally worried looking reception staff. I told them I was going to climb Mount Sinai at sunrise on Monday and watched their faces fall towards the polished marble floor of the hotel reception area. “But on an organised trip!” I quickly added as I watched a small tidal wave of relief wash across the front desk. I probably wasn’t going to end up in prison and we could all move on with our mornings.
You can probably understand how frustrating the news was. Our hotel was on the seafront, while a few miles behind us to the west lay the southern corner of the Sinai mountain range. In between stood a mile of shops, hotels, houses and mosques, a huge concrete barrier obliterating all but the hulking shoulders and summits. From the balcony outside our front door we could see them beginning to glow against the setting sun each day, but there was nowhere within easy range to get a clean shot. It was like looking at the tantalising glint from a gold bar beneath the grille of a storm drain that had rusted over and refused to move. So very close, but yet so annoyingly elusive. Plan B? Well there was a backup solution. Not a very satisfactory one, but it would have to do because Plan C was non-existent. We’d already booked the Dune Buggy safari and that would put us right in among the mountains at sunset. Hopefully I’d find five minutes to grab a few shots in between the camel ride and the Bedouin show. No time for any of your considered compositions here.
At the safari centre we were given our instructions by a cheerful Mahmoud, fitted with crash helmets and covered from head to toe in protective scarves to prevent us from ingesting clouds of dust all afternoon. And then we commenced our drive into the desert in a game of follow the leader, quad bikes first, dune buggies at the back, each vehicle staying five metres from the one in front, or at least as well as we could manage to. I’m sure ours had a few less horsepower than the one we were immediately behind. Around us, other groups came towards us from the front, or joined us from the sides, like a network of trains on these desert tracks. We could have been shooting scenes for the next Mad Max blockbuster. Local Bedouins raced past in white trucks and battered old cars, throwing up a desert storm as they left us in their wake. It was pretty regimented with no going off piste, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t enormous fun. Even my reluctant partner seemed to be enjoying herself. Every few minutes, the official photographer would appear on the back of an SUV, slowing down to wave at us and fire his camera in burst mode as we went past.
All the while, the guides on their quad bikes buzzed around us like flies on horses, weaving in and out of the train, grinning, thumbs aloft, standing nonchalantly on their running boards, with one hand on their steering columns. Without the protection we tourists were wearing, we speculated on how many cubic metres of dust these young men must swallow each year. We’d grin back at them and return the thumbs to confirm that yes, we were indeed having a splendid time. It was their job to make sure we were smiling underneath our face coverings, and most importantly of all that we would return to our hotels later in possession of the same number of limbs we’d arrived here with. One woman had braked too hard at one point, fallen off her quad bike, and was hobbling onto the minibus afterwards, much to Mahmoud’s annoyance. “We told her,” he complained to the rest of us, “but she didn’t listen and it causes a problem for us.” Who was right or wrong, I cannot say, but everyone else appeared to have survived the adventure intact.
Later, after the briefest of camel rides, from which it transpired that one hundred Egyptian pounds may not have been the most generous trip our Bedouin herders had ever received, we were led up a short steep slope to a place where we could witness the sun setting behind the mountains. In fact it had already disappeared behind clouds, but this was my only chance to get anything at all. I had about ten minutes to grab my shots and hope for the best. The young photographer cooed with excitement when he saw me taking my shots. A kindred spirit with a camera rather than a mobile phone. He cooed again when I showed him some of my photos on the way back down the slope to the open air theatre. All I could find in a hurry on my phone were the ones I had printed on my 2023 calendar. “That’s Iceland,” I told him as I scrolled to September and the black church of Budir under a swirling pink sky. He cooed some more. Whether he’d ever seen a picture from Iceland before I’ve really no idea. It reminded me how lucky I’ve been to have spent time in some incredible places where I could take as many pictures as I liked without being arrested and dragged off the local clink. Not everyone can travel as freely as we do. “You must be a professional,” he gushed. I laughed and told him how good you lot are at taking photos. He’s too busy trying to earn a modest living taking shots of tourists on quad bikes to have any time to photograph the landscape. The next day, in return for the twenty dollars I’d given him, I received a pack of photos of us waving back at him from our dune buggy as we clattered along the desert tracks. He’d done an excellent job. I thanked him and told him so. As for my own efforts, I just did what I could in a hurry. Plan B wasn’t ideal, but it was better than no plan at all. And the dune buggy beano had been a blast.
