El Fayoum is the easiest escape from Cairo that still feels like another country. Barely 90 minutes south-west of the capital, it is not a true oasis but a vast natural depression watered by a channel off the Nile — a green bowl of sugarcane, orchards and reed-fringed lakes dropped into the desert. The contrast does the work: one minute you are on a dusty highway, the next you are among waterwheels and birdlife, with the dun cliffs of the Sahara rising at the edges of the farmland and the light going soft over the water.

The landscape hides some of Egypt's strangest treasures. An hour out across the sand lies Wadi El Hitan, the Valley of the Whales — a UNESCO site where the fossilised skeletons of primitive whales lie half-exposed in the desert floor, proof that this ocean of dunes was once a literal ocean. Closer in, the twin cascades of the Wadi El Rayan Waterfalls spill between two desert lakes, and the Greco-Roman ruins of Karanis stand sentinel at Kom Aushim. Then there is Tunis Village on the shore of Lake Qarun, a hillside hamlet that reinvented itself as a colony of potters and artists, its studios open to anyone who wanders in.

The pleasures here are slow and elemental. Spend a night in a mudbrick agrilodge among the fields, or at one of Tunis Village's small inns like Zad El Mosafer or Lazib Inn, and the day winds down with clay-baked dinners and absolute quiet. Out at the Magic Lake, the dunes drop straight to the water and the local pastime is sandboarding down to a swim, then lingering for a sunset that ignites the whole basin. Birdwatchers come for the flamingos and migratory flocks on Lake Qarun; everyone leaves with a slower pulse and, usually, a pot or two.