Experience the best of Bawiti

Bawiti is the main town of Bahariya Oasis, a depression in Egypt's Western Desert ringed by dark, flat-topped hills. Palm groves, olive trees and small farms fill the valley floor, watered by springs, some of them hot. The local museum shows finds from the Valley of the Golden Mummies, a Greco-Roman cemetery whose gilded mummies were found by chance in the 1990s.

Beyond the oasis, the Black Desert's cones of dark rock sit on pale sand, Crystal Mountain glitters with quartz beside the road, and farther south the chalk pinnacles of the White Desert look like pale sculptures left on the sand. Desert tracks lead to camping spots under clear skies, and the road onward leads to the oasis of Farafra.

Dates, olives and citrus are grown here, and meals revolve around rice, flatbread, vegetable stews and sweet tea. Nights in the desert are cold under extremely clear skies, and the stars are thick overhead. Summers are fiercely hot; the comfortable season runs from about October to April.