Sarah Osman

I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants who named me after a city they missed. I trained as a doctor at Georgetown, practiced internal medicine in D.C. for six years, and then took a sabbatical that was supposed to last three months. It has now been twelve years.

Medicine gave me a way of reading the world in systems, causes, and consequences. Travel gave me somewhere to use it. Egypt, it turns out, is the most interesting patient I have ever encountered. A civilization that invented surgery, mapped the stars, built structures we still cannot fully explain, and then got layered over by Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and colonial histories, each leaving its own sediment. You spend a career trying to understand it and you are still only at the surface.

Moving to Cairo felt like coming home to a place I had only ever known from the inside of other people's stories. I cycled the length of the Nile from Cairo to Aswan in 2019, a journey that took six weeks and changed how I understand this country at ground level. I have slept in Nubian guesthouses, argued about Ibn Khaldun in a Sufi lodge in Old Cairo, memorized verses by Ahmed Shawqi while sitting at Karnak at dawn. I carry a notebook everywhere. I read poetry on trains.

Gilded Sands is my attempt to give travelers the kind of depth that usually takes years to find on your own. I write about what places actually feel like, what they cost right now, what the crowds are doing, and what most guides get wrong.