In late 2013 a meeting in the El-Tor governorate building brought together three editorial workers — one from the St Catherine monastic office, one a long-time desert guide based in Dahab, and a former South Sinai protectorate ranger from the Nabq station. The conversation circled around the same recurring frustration: the published English-language reference material on the Sinai peninsula was out of date by between five and fifteen years, in some cases longer, and there was no working desk anywhere keeping it current. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism Arabic-language bulletins existed; the academic literature on St Catherine existed; the Bedouin operator network had its own informal communication. The English visitor-facing layer was thin and stale.
The proposal that came out of that meeting was modest. A single maintained reference for the Sinai peninsula, written in English, updated quarterly, with a visible last-verified date on every page and a public change log. No advertising, no tour resale. The first version went online in March 2014 under the working name Sinai Notes. We renamed to Tih Press in 2017 when the company was registered formally in El-Tor and the scope expanded to include the border-crossing logistics at Taba.
The original editorial standard from 2013 is the one we still use. Every site page is built on a chain of dated field notes signed by an editor, cross-checked against published Arabic-language SCA bulletins, the monastic ecclesiastical record where relevant, and the academic literature. Nothing on the public pages is unsourced. Subscribers can request the underlying photograph for any factual claim and the date it was taken.
The three editors below cover the peninsula geographically between them. Each is responsible for the field verification cycle of their assigned files and for the bilingual translation of any SCA bulletin that falls inside their patch.
Bilingual Greek-Arabic editor, twelve years working in the St Catherine monastic publication office before the desk was founded. Edits the St Catherine and Mount Sinai files and is the standing correspondent for the monastic library.
Working dive instructor in Dahab from 2002 to 2013. Mohamed edits the Dahab and Nabq files and is the practical contact for visitors planning a dive-coast week from Sharm or Hurghada.
Native of the Tarabin Bedouin community of north-east Sinai. Edits the Nuweiba Bedouin-camps file and the Coloured Canyon file. He is the practical contact for any visitor planning an off-track interior trip.
The bench rotates every two years. Each contributor is paid a fixed stipend out of subscription revenue and writes between two and four signed pieces for the archive during their term.
Theological Academy of Athens. Specialist on the manuscript collection of the St Catherine library. Two-year term through 2027; contributes the patristic-sources supplements to the St Catherine file.
South Sinai Environmental Studies Programme. Two-year term through 2027; contributes the reef-conditions sections of the Dahab and Nabq files, including annual coral health reports.
| Year | What changed |
|---|---|
| 2013 | Project launched under the working name Sinai Notes. Three files at start: St Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, Dahab. |
| 2014 | First quarterly edition published. The Coloured Canyon file added after a winter field cycle. |
| 2017 | Renamed Tih Press. Registered as L.L.C. in El-Tor. First Reader subscription tier opened. |
| 2019 | Bilingual edition launched. Every public file now carries an Arabic-language précis. Nuweiba Bedouin-camps file added after eighteen months of on-site work with the Tarabin community. |
| 2021 | Nabq protectorate file added. South Sinai Nature Conservation Sector formal cooperation agreement signed. |
| 2023 | Taba border crossing file added to the footer, addressing the recurring question about the Egypt-Israel crossing at Taba. |
| 2024 | The site moves to its current domain at visit-egypt.xyz. Public change log becomes visible at the foot of every file. |
| 2026 | Two-year contributor bench formalised with Prof. Lambropoulos and Dr. Said-Ibrahim. |
The funding mix is the single most important reason the desk can write what it does. If we earned a commission on bookings made through listed operators, we would have an incentive to keep operators on the list past their point of failure. We have chosen a structure that removes that incentive entirely.
"Verified" is overused on travel-content sites and almost meaningless on most of them. On the Tih Press files the word has a defined meaning, set out in writing in our internal style guide since 2014, and worth restating here for any reader who is making a decision about whether the subscription is worth their money.
A claim on these pages is verified when an editor has personally observed it on the ground in the previous ninety days, has dated and signed the field note in the bound notebook held at the El-Tor office, and has reconciled it against any standing public statement issued by the relevant authority. For St Catherine, the relevant authority is the monastic community and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem; for the protected areas, the Nature Conservation Sector at the South Sinai office; for the dive sites, the Hyperbaric Medical Centre at Sharm El-Sheikh; for the border crossing, the Egyptian General Authority for Land Ports and the Israeli equivalent. A claim with one source is published as provisional with the source named openly. A claim sourced only to commercial third-party guidebooks is not published at all.
If we cannot defend it in writing on a Wednesday morning, it does not go on the page.
The change log at the foot of every Sinai file records every published revision with the date, the editor signature, and a one-sentence note describing what changed. The log is append-only. Corrections appear as new dated entries; the previous entries remain visible. This is the single most important structural difference between this desk and a content-marketing site that updates pages silently and hopes nobody notices.
Subscribers at the Library and Field tiers can request the underlying dated photograph or the field-notebook scan for any single published claim on any file. The request is answered inside two working days. We have honoured every such request that has come in since the policy was introduced in 2019, and the cumulative count to date is 217.
The St Catherine file and the Mount Sinai trek file are the two longest. Either is a fair test of whether the editorial standard is what we say it is.