You Can Now Hike the Red Sea Mountain Trail in Egypt
Following the success of the award-winning Sinai Trail that opened in 2015, a new hiking route called the Red Sea Mountain Trail has just been unveiled. The 170km-long route, the first long-distance trail in mainland Egypt, highlights the little-visited rugged mountainscapes outside the beachside resort town of Hurghada and heralds the arrival of a new type of tourism in the region: authentic cultural immersion with local Bedouin tribes.
Although the trail is called ‘new’, it’s actually a network of ancient routes that local Bedouin have used for centuries for trading and hunting, and today it’s still the tribes in the area who helped create and maintain it. The Red Sea Mountain Trail is a community tourism project, meaning that it’s wholly owned by local Maaza tribe and seeks to create jobs and preserve Bedouin culture, and it stands in stark contrast to the huge resorts and package tourism usually found along Egypt’s Red Sea coast.