The Itinerary
7 days. Giza at the front, three nights of Zamna in the middle, the Red Sea to put you back together.
LAND CAIRO · PYRAMIDS, SPHINX, INSIDE A PYRAMID
Land in Cairo in the morning and drop your bags at a hotel that looks straight out at the Giza plateau. Then we go and stand under the last surviving wonder of the ancient world. The three pyramids, the Great Sphinx, and a descent into a pyramid, which is a narrow and steep climb down into the burial chambers and takes about thirty minutes. Evening is the Grand Egyptian Museum, where Tutankhamun's full burial collection sits together for the first time in a century. Dinner is fatteh, and then a cafe in Khan el-Khalili that has been standing since 1486, once a refugee shelter, once a princess's house, with a crypt underneath it from the fight against the French occupation in 1798. We do not name our secret spots.
FLY TO SHARM EL SHEIKH · ZAMNA, NIGHT ONE
Khoroum Valley, filmed by the venue. This is the desert amphitheatre you walk into on night one. Our batch is there for Nov 20, 21 and 22.
A slow morning with the pyramids in front of you and coffee in your hand, then an hour in Khan el-Khalili where everyone picks one perfume, on Team OJ. Midday flight from Cairo to Sharm El Sheikh, an hour in the air. Check in, sleep in the afternoon, and take it seriously, because tonight runs late. Gates open at Khoroum Valley at 8:30 PM and night one of Zamna starts in a natural rock valley in the Sinai desert.
RED SEA BOAT DAY · ZAMNA, NIGHT TWO
Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nobody is getting up early and the day is built around that. Late breakfast, then a boat out to Ras Mohammed, where the reef wall drops off into deep blue and the visibility is so absurd that your photos will look edited. Snorkel, swim, eat lunch on the deck, sleep in the sun. Back by five, shower, and out again for night two.
SLOW DAY IN SHARM · ZAMNA, CLOSING NIGHT
A genuinely slow day, and by now you will want one. Brunch, then Naama Bay and the Old Market at your own speed, shisha, fresh mango juice, a nap, whatever your body is asking for. Then the closing night. Sasha and John Digweed play this one out, and if you know anything about the last thirty years of dance music, you already understand why that matters.
SCUBA DAY · BEDOUIN DINNER IN THE SINAI
Recovery, by seawater. Two dives on the Sharm reefs, in the same water the Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara diving scene was shot in. If you have never dived before, this is the right place to start, the instructors here are among the best trained anywhere. In the evening we drive out into the Sinai desert to a Bedouin camp, where dinner is cooked in the sand, there is no phone signal, and the sky has more stars in it than you have seen in years.
DAHAB · THE BLUE HOLE AND THE LAZIEST TOWN IN EGYPT
Two hours up the coast to Dahab, an old Bedouin fishing village that never quite agreed to grow up. The Blue Hole is here, a sinkhole in the reef about 130 metres deep that you can snorkel into straight from the shore. Lunch is on cushions with your feet almost in the water, in a town where nobody has been in a hurry since 1980. Back to Sharm in the evening for a last dinner together.
DEPART SHARM EL SHEIKH
Breakfast, a last swim if your flight is late enough, then the transfer to Sharm El Sheikh airport. You leave with sand in your bag, a ring in your ears, and the fairly specific feeling of having danced in a desert that has been watching people dance for five thousand years.