Bahariya is the friendliest doorway to Egypt's wild west. Closest of the Western Desert oases to Cairo, it is a working palm town — Bawiti at its heart — wrapped around hot springs and date gardens, with black basalt hills brooding on the horizon. People come not so much for the oasis itself as for what lies beyond it: this is the staging post, the place where you meet your guide, load the 4x4 and trade tarmac for sand on the way to two of the most surreal landscapes in the country.

Drive south and the desert starts performing. First comes the Black Desert, where low volcanic cones are scattered with dark ironstone that scorches the dunes a charred brown. Then Crystal Mountain, a ridge shot through with glittering quartz you can hold up to the light. And finally the White Desert National Park, where wind and sand have carved the chalk plateau into a gallery of blinding white sculptures — mushrooms, towers, sphinxes — that glow lilac at dusk and ghostly under a full moon. Back in Bawiti, the small Golden Mummies Museum displays gilded Greco-Roman burials unearthed nearby, a reminder that this lonely place was once a Roman crossroads.

But the real Bahariya experience happens after dark, in the open. The classic trip is an overnight camp in the White Desert: a fire, a Bedouin dinner, the silence broken only by desert foxes nosing at the embers, and a sky so thick with stars it feels close enough to touch. By day you can soak the dust off in the warm sulphur waters of Bir el-Ghaba, climb the Black Mountain for a panorama over the whole basin, or wander Bawiti's salt lake and palm groves before the next run into the dunes. El Beshmo Lodge and its Western Desert restaurant make a comfortable base between safaris.