My Story
Origins
Born in Wimbledon around the tennis championships, my parents were convinced I’d grow up to be the Egyptian version of Boris Becker.
I didn’t.
I had a terrible backhand, and at seven years old, became severely asthmatic. I woke up every night gasping for air.
Doctors told me never to exhaust myself. One day, a different doctor prescribed sports. Desperate, I began running at 6am every morning before school. Within a few weeks, I stopped using my inhalers. Months later, I won the school’s 800m race after finishing 7th exactly one year before.
It was a defining lesson for me: we can change the cards we’re dealt in life through hard work and perseverance.
Summit One
At 15, a summer camp and mountain climb in Switzerland changed everything.
It was the first time I saw snow. On the summit, I found a small logbook. I looked through the pages to realize I was the only Egyptian. My entry: Omar Sherif Samra. Egypt. The book was neat until I took up a whole page drawing the pyramids.
I felt pride. But, more than that, a feeling of doing something greater than myself.
On the way down, an idea began to form. How amazing would it be to climb the highest mountain on earth!
The Corporate Chapter
After graduating with a BA in Economics, I began working at an investment bank in London. On paper, life looked perfect: career, friends, security. But a quiet unease kept whispering. When my friend Dennis told me about his cycling across Europe, something clicked!
Months later, I was alone on a bicycle in southern Spain, pedaling across Andalusia under the blazing summer sun. After cycling uphill for days, I came onto a 37km descent, finally taking my foot off the pedal for the first time. Somewhere between exhaustion and euphoria, I understood what it meant to feel alive !
Backpacking for 370 Days
When I got back to work I could no longer relate. Everything felt alien and heavy. I began planning my exit.
At 24, I quit my job, shouldered a backpack, and set off on a solo journey across Asia and Latin America. Fourteen countries, endless adventure, and my climbing apprenticeship.
The journey taught me to appreciate the simplest things in life, that freedom was currency, discomfort was my teacher, and that a meaning in life was the only fortune worth the finding.
By the end , I was broke. So, I returned to the bank and used every chance I got to travel and climb bigger and harder routes in the Andes and Alps mountain ranges.
Eventually, I could no longer take it. I quit then enrolled at London Business School for an MBA where I’d focus on retooling for a new career path after university.
Mount Everest
In university, I made myself a promise to focus on my studies and job hunting: No climbing! Fate had a different plan.
Days into the program, a fellow student - Ben Stephens - announced he wanted to climb Everest and was looking for a team.
I immediately joined. Victoria James and Greg Maud did too. For two years, we trained and prepared relentlessly.
At 28, after a greulling 60-day climb, I reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the first Egyptian and youngest Arab to do so.
I had accomplished my childhood dream. I felt elated but there was something else. A void. A gnawing feeling lingered, asking, What now?
Wild Guanabana - Life Changing Journeys
I returned to a hero’s welcome in Egypt which I wasn’t expecting! Two months and tens of media interviews and talks later, I decided to turn down the job I’d worked so hard to get in London, and stayed in Egypt, working in Private Equity to pay the bills.
Two years later, in 2009, I realized I had to marry my work and passion. I founded Wild Guanabana, the Middle East’s first hiking and climbing tour company to help connect people with nature and themselves.
The company has since guided thousands of people on life changing journeys.
Marwa ❤️
Somewhere along that path, I met Marwa. With her, life widened and softened at the same time. She brought warmth, humor, and a deep steadiness that grounded all my restlessness. I was finally home.
We built a life shaped by curiosity, adventure, and a shared dream, one that held space for both ambition and tenderness.
Marwa believed in the journeys I was drawn to, often more than I did myself, and reminded me that adventure wasn’t only found on mountains or distant horizons, but in how we showed up for each other, day after day.
The Seven Summits
With Everest (2007) under my belt, I set my eyesight on climbing the highest mountain on every continent. I climbed Kilimanjaro (2008), Elbrus (2009), Carstenz Pyramid (2009), Aconcagua (2011), Vinson (2012), and Denali (2013) on the 2nd attempt.
I became the first Egyptian to complete the Seven Summits. I truly felt like I was on top of the world.
I returned from Alaska to Miami to unite with my beautiful wife Marwa, and welcome our new baby girl into the world.
Loss and Becoming
For months I couldn’t talk about what had happened. One day, I met Brandon Stanton from Humans of New York. He shared my story on facebook over a series of five emotional posts. When I saw it had gone viral I panicked.
Then through receiving thousands of messages and comments, I experienced an incredible outpour of love and empathy that showed me how grief, loss and vulnerability connects us all.
The experience made me realize that it was time for me to take the stage to tell my own story.
Our daughter, Teela, was born on June 17, 2013. She’s named after a heroine from the cartoons I grew up watching, a warrior and a sorcerer. We chose the name knowing she would grow up fierce, and carry a quiet kind of magic within her.
Five days later, Marwa faced unexpected complications and was rushed to the ICU. She passed away soon after in my arms.
The days, weeks and months that followed were full of darkness. Sometimes I would scream so loud just to drown the voices in my head.
The South and North Poles
In 2014, I skied to the South Pole, then to the North Pole in 2015, completing the polar leg of the Explorers Grand Slam as the first Egyptian, and the 30th person in history ever to do so.
But the journey was never really about firsts or finishes. It was about silence, repetition, and exposure—to cold, to doubt, to myself. Days unfolded in white nothingness, stripped of comfort and distraction, where progress was measured one step at a time. Somewhere between the monotony and the extremity, the poles stopped being the ends of the Earth and became an inner reckoning: learning how to endure, how to let go, and how to stay honest when there was nowhere left to hide.
The TEDxBend
Turning Point
Finally, in 2016, I got to step onto the stage in front of 1400 people to share my story. It was one of the hardest and scariest things I had ever done, but also one of the most beautiful. That day, we all wept and healed together.
This wasn’t a talk about mountains or endurance. It was an opportunity to honor Marwa, our story together, and mine. I learned what it meant to be both strong and vulnerable that day.
The experience shifted something in me. When I walked off that stage, I felt more proud than I had ever done in my life. More than climbing any mountain.
Rowing the Atlantic Ocean
In 2017, I set out with my friend Omar Nour to row 5500km across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to Antigua in the Carribean.
After a slow start, sea sickness, and exhaustion, day 9 dawned in a 45-knot gale storm, 8 meter waves, 1000km from shore. A rogue wave capsized the boat and threw us into the freezing cold waters. The life raft didn’t open.
We spent 13 perilous hours facing the possibility of never seeing our families again. What followed was a dramatic rescue that tested our every resolve.
The journey became the award-winning documentary Beyond the Raging Sea, which tells our story, and using clever juxtaposition, sheds light on the plight of refugees crossing dangerous seas in search for safety and a better life.
The documentary first screened at Cannes Film Festival to wide acclaim, and has since had a cinema release in the Middle East, UK, and the USA. Now, available to stream.
Space, the Final Frontier
At age 7, I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. In 2013, I won a global space competition to go to sub-orbital space on XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx Mark II space craft. After completing all my space training, in 2017, the company filed for bankruptcy.
I decided that if I couldn’t go to space, then I’d do everything in my power to inspire the next generation to do so. So in 2016, I launched Make Space Yours, Egypt’s first space competition for schools and universities. That same year, I qualified as a citizen-science astronaut candidate with Project PoSSUM.
And in 2018, I trained as an analogue astronaut, serving as Vice-Commander of the Lunares III Moon Mission, a 15-day mission to research human habitability on the moon.
I may have not made it yet, but my dream of going to space still lives on!
The Lost Years
My defeat in the ocean, and loss of the space dream forced me to revisit everything. I began to question my motivations and why I still do what I do. I threw myself into work and projects as I tried to make sense of my world. But, everything felt different.
It wasn’t all hard. During this time, I found love again, and I finally succeeded in getting my daughter to live with me. I felt lucky to have been given another chance at life. But, then COVID came and my business went to zero, and a few weeks later, I lost both my sisters, one month apart. And here I was once again, faced once again with extreme loss, exactly seven years after Marwa’s.
So, after years of chasing business, summits, oceans, and space, I found myself feeling empty. But, I was also finally still, and for the first time in a very long time, something else was slowly allowed to take form.
Then my marriage began to fall part. I knew it was time to put myself back together again.
The Darkness Retreat
In summer of 2024, I finally made it to a darkness retreat in Oregon that I had booked over a year prior. The goal was to spend several days alone, and in total darkness.
A deep curiosity brought me to the retreat. Looking back, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Moments before the experience began I found out that my marriage was over. I resisted following through with retreat, but finally I acknowledged that this was my medicine and leaned in.
In the cave, there was no escape, no aim, and nothing to overcome. In the stillness, I I met what I had once tried to outrun, the unfinished conversations, the buried grief, and emotion.
What emerged wasn’t a revelation or a peak experience that I had often chased, it was a quiet, deep knowing of myself beyond masks and shadows. And finally, there was peace. Not eternal, perhaps fleeting.. but I now knew it had been there all along.
From Warrior to Artist archetype
Today, my work reflects all these life experiences and transformation.
In business, through WG and Ala Keifak, we create pathways back to nature, and through it, back to ourselves. One moves through journeys and experience, the other through place, hospitality, and care for the land. Different forms, same intention: reconnection with the earth, and with what feels true and authentic beneath it all.
Through my personal brand, my purpose is once again, crystal clear. To use everything I’ve learned to help others live authentically, reconnect with nature, and rediscover what it truly means to be human.
Now, I live a slow life close to nature by the Red Sea in Egypt with my daughter. I spend most of my time communicating what I believe through creative projects like writing, speaking, and film.
