Egypt’s Papertrails Turns Arab Landscapes Into Writing Studios

Everyone claims to “love to travel.” Yet for all its promises of expansion, few acts have been so easily emptied of meaning. Between airports and itineraries, travel can become a kind of choreography, performed and perfected for other eyes. Philosopher Agnes Callard once called it “the traveller’s delusion,” our tendency to confuse transposition with transformation.

But what if travel could be reclaimed as a practice of attention rather than escape? In the highlands of Sinai and the deserts of Jordan, Menna Abdel Rahman is trying to do just that. Through her Egyptian initiative Papertrails, she leads small groups into the wilderness, pairing long hikes with guided creative-writing sessions. “This is anything but a writing workshop,” she says from a Greek island, where she’s has led another group outdoors. “It’s about creating together and responding to what the land gives you, in whatever form that takes.”

Majoring in economics, Abdel Rahman began on the corporate track while her “time off” became a second education in the outdoors. Long-distance treks and rock climbing pulled her from operations desks to expedition logistics. By 2019, she was guiding hikes and later serving as head of operations at Life Happens Outdoors, leading seasons across Nepal, Peru, Kilimanjaro, and the Alps. In 2020, she piloted Papertrails in St. Catherine, a small, prompt-led writing retreat braided with hiking. After stepping away from full-time work, she revived it with a deeper focus on creative practice in writing, curation, and film photography.

At St. Catherine, where the mountains rise like folded parchment and Bedouin guides know every fig tree by heart, each morning begins at sunrise: tea, notebooks, and the crunch of gravel. Hikers receive a prompt, perhaps a line about erosion or rewilding, and write in silence until Abdel Rahman calls them back. Later, at camp, they read aloud what the land made them think of. “When you write outdoors, you just respond to nature around you,” she says. “The writing is mostly fragments: verse, letters to oneself, imagined dialogues, even poems. We’ve had teachers, photographers, children’s authors, anyone who really needs to disconnect.”

Mornings are for movement, afternoons for stillness. They walk until the heat thickens, rest beneath olive trees, and share fruit plucked straight from the branches where lunch is communal. Abdel Rahman, a certified climbing instructor, teaches participants to pitch tents, use trekking poles, and trust their bodies on uneven ground. “Most of us live cut off from our physical selves,” she says. “When you walk, you start to hear your own pulse again. The writing grows out of that.”

As dusk falls, the group gathers in a circle of lamplight. One night, they sat inside an ancient olive grove, the trees closing around them like guardians. The day’s prompt was erosion, both geological and emotional. They read a passage about rewilding, about returning land to itself, then began to write about what must fall apart before anything can grow. “It felt like the trees were listening,” Abdel Rahman says. “There was that sense of being held by each other, by the place.”

Stillness, she admits, requires unlearning. Phones lose signal; routines lose urgency. “You learn to sit inside the slowness.” The experience is, in the end, profoundly human. “When you start sitting in your own calm,” she says, “you start noticing what is interesting.”

Each retreat hosts only a handful of participants, selected through a short application process. By the final night, the group often feels less like strangers and more like collaborators. After the most recent retreat, members met again in Cairo and Dubai to share their work. “It’s a certain kind of person who signs up,” Abdel Rahman says. “They’re looking for something that doesn’t fit on social media, something that can’t be measured in steps or views.”

The next edition of Papertrails will take place in Ghazala desert, a stretch of desert oasis west of Sinai. Abdel Rahman dreams of expanding to other Arab landscapes: the Western Desert, the Hejaz, perhaps Lebanon’s cedar trails. Each season, she experiments with new creative forms like sketching, photography, and movement. She imagines future editions as moving art residencies, spaces where artists and non-artists can create together. “We always talk about travelling abroad,” she says, “but there’s so much here we haven’t really looked at. I want to build bodies of work by Arab artists connected to land and landscape. I want to say: our stories are rooted here.”