About me

I’ve been walking the Sinai for about a decade. I first visited on a weekend out of Cairo, where I had moved from London a few months earlier. I climbed Mount Sinai and watched dawn break from the top and from the first time I saw the Sinai I loved it. I came back whenever I could and after a few years moved to the mountain town of St Katherine. Mountains were the focus of the first journeys but over the years I came to love travelling with the Bedouin as something in itself, wherever we went. I’ve walked about 10,000 kilometres with the Bedouin of the Sinai now. Every part of the landscape is overlaid with meaning and memories for me and I have spent the last five years of my life trying to build something that can make a difference to a place I love. The Sinai has suffered more than any part of Egypt in the country’s disastrous tourism crash and already-marginalised communities have lost livelihoods all over. With my knowledge of the Sinai I have tried to build initiatives that give economic support and challenge perceptions of a misunderstood region, creating a counter narrative to the bad news. 

In 2014 I wrote Trailblazer’s Sinai: The Trekking Guide. It was highly commended at the OWPG awards the same year. I also co-founded the Sinai Trail – Egypt’s first long distance hiking trail – in 2014 with the leaders of three Bedouin tribes and oversaw every aspect of its development to the present. It was voted Best New Tourism Project in the Wider World at the BGTW Tourism Awards in 2016 and Wanderlust and Outside magazines rated it one of the best new trails in the world in 2017 and 2018. It has now doubled in length and eight tribes collaborate on the route across the region. In 2015 I founded the Three Peaks Egypt Challenge: a 38km mountain challenge traversing three of the Sinai’s highest and most iconic summits. Both initiatives are about boosting tourism to create economic support in hard times. Most of all, it’s about creating a special kind of work through which the Bedouin can remain in the desert and mountains – rather than moving to the towns – through which the Sinai’s traditional knowledge, skills and heritage can be kept alive. 

Alongside my work as a trail developer I am the founder of the Sinai is Safe Initiative, which aims to create a counter current to the bad news. It is about introducing an alternative point of view to the debate and showing another side of the region through the eyes of the Bedouin leaders who know it better than anybody. 

When I’m back home in England – usually most summers – the Sinai remains a big part of my life and I’m usually working on something to do with it. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and  a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers. This blog is nothing more than a few quickly written notes I jotted a few years ago and I have not kept it up to date. Nevertheless, I have kept it online hoping it might show a different side of the Sinai and encourage you to visit one day. If you ever want to get in touch drop me a line. I’m not always around, but I’ll reply when I can.