Shabby resorts blight much of the Sinai coast, but this beachside lodge has stayed faithful to its boho spirit and eco-credentials
We are gliding over glittering Sharm el Sheikh, a once tiny village at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula that has sprawled into the desert, bloated with hotels and high-rise development. Our flight touches down at midnight. We drag our bags through the terminal pasted in advertising hoardings and luminous snorkelling photos. Outside, tourists are corralled into taxis and shiny rental cars bound for nearby resorts, until the road is quiet.
After 20 minutes, a minibus chugs towards us, paint peeling from the buckled wheel arches, and disgorges a befuddled driver and a puff of cigarette smoke. "Basata?"
We pass the city limits and hurtle into the darkness. For an hour and a half we speed north, tracing the eastern shores of the Sinai peninsula, in between dark mountain folds and through intermittent army checkpoints and one-shop villages. Occasional flashes of the moonlit Gulf of Aqaba break between the granite hills to our right, and on the other side of the water we can see the Saudi coast dotted with lights. Eventually, the minibus lurches from the road, wobbles violently downwards towards the sea, and stops.
An elderly man cloaked in white robes approaches with a torch, mutters to the driver in Arabic, and guides us across the sand. Our hut awaits: a little over 10 feet squared with walls of dried reed pinned by thick bamboo poles. Falling asleep on a wooden platform decked in rugs, we can see the stars through gaps where the roof doesn't quite reach the walls.
A disorientating night gives way to a brilliant morning. The Basata Ecolodge is a collection of 20 bamboo huts and beautiful adobe chalets scattered across the seashore and backed by mountains, 46 miles south of the Israeli border. The front porch of our hut, where multicoloured cotton rag rugs are laid under a straw veranda, is 10 paces from the water. The Gulf is laced with contours of blue: crystalline where the sun hits the pale golden sand; broody and dark where clumps of coral lie beneath. On the other side we can see the jagged Saudi mountains twisting along the coast until, at some point further north, they become Jordanian.
Around us, the camp is waking up; the doors and shuttered windows set into the curved walls of the chalets swing open. People have been visiting Basata for two decades. The camp was the brainchild of Sherif El-Ghamrawy, a construction engineer from Cairo who arrived in Sinai in 1982 – when Sharm was but a twinkle in a developer's eye – and built a ramshackle campsite for backpackers. For the first 15 years, Basata, which means "simplicity" in Arabic, was a handful of huts lining the sand. As visitor numbers increased, and his wife demanded a sturdier home for their children, Sherif employed local Bedouins to help him build the chalets – with bathrooms and proper beds – further into the bay, using sun-baked compost-and-sand bricks. Inadvertently, Sherif had built the Middle East's first ecolodge.
SOURCE : Guardian Weekly |
