T A B L E_T A L K Beautiful Ireland, but the weather sucks. Discuss in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Neglected Classics By Pete Hamill Erico Verissimo's extraordinary "Mexico" deserves to be republished (01/26/98) Mondo Weirdo By Tim Wall Bad trip: The pilots locked themselves out of the cockpit! (01/23/98) Passages By Christopher Hunt Waiting for Fidel (01/22/98) How to buy a Turkish rug By Laura Billings A priceless encounter (01/21/98) First descent By Steve Van Beek Rafting where no human has been before (01/20/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Passages archives		___________p_a_r_a_d_i_s_e _Fo_u_n_d_ ___________SIWA IS STILL AN UNSPOILED OASIS IN ___________THE EGYPTIAN DESERT -- BUT YOU SHOULD ___________GET THERE BEFORE THE BIG HOTELS DO. BY TRACY JOHNSTON | Now that I'm an adventure traveler who likes being pampered, I've come to appreciate the comfortable but eccentric remote-outpost hotel -- a quiet place in some odd, forgotten backwater that's classy enough to provide fresh fruit juice and clean sheets. The best hotels are small and built using native materials, and they have a common place for eavesdropping, a place for getting local news and gossip. The owners, often expats, should live on the premises, because who they are and how they run the place are part of the experience. I'm not interested in their cockamamie political ideas or their mysterious pasts, but getting to know them and their hotel is often the best way to learn about the exotic world in which they run a business. I always try to find out how the hotel works: How does it fit into the community? What do the local people think of it? What are its biggest problems? The culture of the hotel may be a hybrid, but it often has its own integrity and charm. I found just such a hotel recently, and am moved to write about it because it also has a truly amazing setting: an ancient Egyptian city in an isolated desert oasis just a few miles from the border of Libya. The name of the hotel goes right over the top: the Siwa Safari Paradise Resort. The owners are an upper-middle-class Egyptian couple who started coming to Siwa because they love the desert. Mustapha Abdal Azid is an elegant, passionate man -- a retired diplomat and banana farmer who was part of the junta of young army officers who overthrew King Farouk. His wife, Zakia, is a creamy-skinned Scandinavian woman he met 35 years ago in Italy. They say they don't quite know how the resort got started: It just grew from a plan to build a compound for their extended family. Mustapha says he got caught up in what Egyptians call "Umbrella Architecture" -- drawing lines with the point of an umbrella in the sand. He demonstrates this by following, with a pointed finger, the sinuous path that winds through a group of bungalows. "You know why I kept going?" he says. "I figured out how to build this many cottages without cutting down a single tree." I'm tempted to say that the very best thing about the hotel is its delicious food and especially its desserts, but in truth it's the setting -- the oasis of Siwa's extraordinary place in time. Siwa was an important center for both the ancient Greek and Egyptian worlds around 500 B.C. Later it was populated by a tribe of Berbers who migrated from the western Sahara and stayed isolated from the rest of the world for 13 centuries. And now its growing population of 23,000 people is about to make perhaps the most dramatic change: the transition to the modern world. It won't be long until Siwa's history will have to be roped off and managed for tourists, but right now you can go to the Oracle of Amoun -- where Alexander the Great came with an army of men and horses to find out if he was the son of Zeus -- and stand amid a pile of stones and carvings just lying around in the sand. And unlike other tourist spots in Egypt, you can walk around town without being hassled for money. Siwans, who speak their own unique language, exist with foreigners peacefully. At the same time, traditions persist: Women in Siwa get married at age 14 and afterwards practice a form of Purdah so extreme that no man other than a relative may ever see them. Olive oil in Siwa is still made for export by crushing olives with a grinding stone turned by a donkey. Last winter, my husband, step-daughter and I left Cairo for Siwa early in the morning (before rush hour) and drove north to the Mediterranean and then west along the coast, passing some of the world's most beautiful beaches. We didn't stop much because what had happened to those beaches was pretty depressing: Thousands and thousands of half-built, architecturally undistinguished vacation apartments and condos were lined up like Lego structures on the sand. We were happy to reach the turn-off to Siwa and even happier when all signs of human habitation stopped. We drove the last 200 miles across a desert that seemed to have no geographical features. Although we were within shouting distance of one of America's prime bogeyman -- Moammar Gadhafi -- we cruised through a land of stillness and light in a peaceful, happy trance. We saw the first signs of civilization in the glow of a sunset and, in the far distance, a mirage: a huge lake, or even an ocean, shimmering on the horizon. By the side of the road were a few treeless mud and concrete buildings. If this was Siwa, we said, where were the springs? The palm trees? Almost without warning, we came to a bustling town square, with men and children riding around in donkey carts. Overlooking the square was the ruin of a 12th century mud fortress; we had indeed traveled back in time. N E X T+P A G E | Gorgeous backpackers and a hairy mummy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOGRAPH BY TRACY JOHNSTON