Four channels, listed by how quickly we reply.
Email and the form on this page have the same reply window. Phone is answered during office hours by Mahmoud El-Naggar, who runs the desk. Postal mail is opened on Saturdays.
- Email. [email protected] — replied to inside one working day, English or Arabic.
- Phone. +20 65 3380 217 — Saturday to Thursday, 08:30–17:30 Cairo time (UTC+2). Closed Friday.
- Post. Saqalan Expeditions L.L.C., 34 Al-Mina Street, Quseir 84711, Red Sea Governorate, Egypt. Mail opened on Saturdays.
- In person. Office visits by appointment; the building is a working office on Al-Mina Street with no public reception. Email first.
Four short answers that save a round of email.
A significant share of the enquiries we receive fall under one of these four topics. If yours does, the short answer below may already cover it.
Will you book the operator and the hotel for me?
No. We do not handle bookings at any tier. We can recommend operators from the verified shortlist on the Desert Safari page; you contact them directly. The same is true for dive boats and hotels — we do not run booking infrastructure and we earn nothing on a booking made through anyone we recommend.
Can you arrange permits for restricted sites like the Sikait emerald mines?
We do not broker permits. We can tell you which SCA office handles the relevant permit, the typical reply window, and the documents they will ask for; Library and Field subscribers receive the contact sheet. We can also send the permit request under a desk-referral note, which sometimes shortens the local approval cycle by a few days, but the formal application still goes from you.
Can I reuse text or images from the field files?
Short factual reuse with citation is fine. Wholesale reuse of a page, or any use of photographs taken by the editors, requires a written licence from the desk. Educational use under a stated programme licence is granted at no charge; commercial reuse is quoted case by case.
Do you accept guest contributions?
Yes, by invitation. The two-person contributor bench rotates on a two-year cycle and new contributors are usually identified after a published academic piece on an Eastern Desert or Red Sea topic catches an editor's eye. Unsolicited pitches are read but seldom commissioned; the budget for speculative work is limited.
34 Al-Mina Street is 350 metres north of the Old Port.
Al-Mina is the seafront street that runs from the modern Quseir town centre north along the bay toward the Ottoman harbour. The office is a converted 1970s townhouse, second floor; the ground floor is a working sailmaker. There is no public reception. Visitors arrive by appointment and call the office line on arrival.
From Hurghada the drive south takes approximately two and a half hours on the coastal highway. From Marsa Alam the drive north takes approximately ninety minutes. The nearest commercial airport is Marsa Alam International (RMF), approximately one hour and forty-five minutes south; Hurghada International (HRG) is approximately two hours and twenty minutes north. The Quseir local airstrip is occasionally used by charter flights but does not handle scheduled service.
For visitors combining the office visit with the Old Port museum, the museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 09:00–14:00 in the summer schedule, with shorter hours in winter. The current opening times are on the Old Port file. The office and the museum can be combined comfortably in a single morning.