Tih Press is a small editorial desk in El-Tor on the western coast of the Sinai peninsula. Since 2013 we have written, dated, and re-verified a single working reference covering the monasteries of the interior, the Bedouin routes of the Wilderness of Tih, the dive coast from Dahab to Taba, and the practical logistics of crossing in from Cairo, Hurghada, Eilat or Aqaba.
Each file is a maintained working reference — dated last-verified line, current ticket and access conditions, drive logistics from the nearest base, and a public change log. The seventh file (Taba border crossing) sits in the footer and is the one people open at the end of their planning, not the beginning.
A working Orthodox monastery in continuous use since the sixth century, holding what is by some measures the oldest active library in the world and the icon corpus that survived the Byzantine iconoclasm because the Sinai sat outside imperial reach.
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The mountain identified by the Christian and Islamic traditions as the Mount of Moses. Two routes up — the camel path and the Steps of Repentance. The 3am sunrise climb is the standard visitor pattern; we lay out the calmer alternatives.
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A narrow water-cut slot in layered sandstone north-west of Nuweiba, where iron oxidation in the rock walls produces the bands of red, orange, yellow and lavender that give the canyon its name. Three kilometres of slot, reachable only by 4×4 from the highway.
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A 130-metre submarine sinkhole in the fringing reef ten kilometres north of Dahab town. Recreational snorkellers see one of the most spectacular shallow reef walls in Egypt; technical divers attempt the Arch at 56 metres. We treat the safety record honestly.
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A 30-kilometre strand of small Bedouin-owned camps between Nuweiba town and Taba, offering reed-and-palm cabins on the beach, family meals around a fire, and a much quieter way of being on the Sinai coast than the dive-town infrastructure of Dahab.
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A 600-square-kilometre national protectorate north of Sharm El-Sheikh that holds Egypt's largest surviving mangrove stand, a small Bedouin fishing village, and the wreck of the Maria Schroeder grounded on the reef in 1956. Reached by 4×4 from the Sharm coastal highway.
Open the fileMost published English-language material on the Sinai is fifteen years old and reads it. The desk works to a defined editorial standard precisely because the alternative — recycling other people's blog posts — would put us in the same situation that we try to help our readers avoid.
An editor visits every covered location at least once per ninety days. The visit is paid for, never complimentary; complimentary trips distort the editorial record and we will not accept them.
Every published claim carries the date it was verified and the editor signature. Earlier dates appear as new entries in the change log; the log is append-only.
Arabic-language SCA Sinai inspectorate bulletins and the local-press reportage are translated by a bilingual editor before they go on the public file. The translation choices are recorded.
Every claim is checked against either the published academic literature on the site, the printed brochures of the national protectorate office, or the Greek-language records of the St Catherine monastic library where applicable.
The Sinai is a complicated jurisdiction — South Sinai Governorate is governed from El-Tor, the protected areas report to the Nature Conservation Sector in Cairo, the monastery has its own ecclesiastical autonomy under the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and the Taba border crossing answers to both military and tourism authorities. We talk to all of them every quarter so that the published files reflect the live situation, not the situation as it was the last time someone wrote a guidebook.
The notes below come from active subscribers quoted with permission. They give a fair picture of who the archive serves and who it does not.
The dated entries on Coloured Canyon access — particularly the closure notice that went up forty-eight hours after the SCA Nuweiba office issued it — saved me from booking an obviously failed trip. No other English source had it.
I plan small Christian heritage trips. The St Catherine file is the only English working reference I trust on opening hours, library access and the practicalities of the night arrival from Cairo.
The Bedouin-camps file at Nuweiba lists camps without a commission relationship. When the desk recommends a camp it actually means the editor stayed there. That is rare and worth paying for.
St Catherine and the Coloured Canyon are the two longest. Either is a fair test of whether the rest of the archive will be worth the monthly fee.