A three week journey around Egypt. I wrote a full
account of the trip, to record both the memories I want to keep and the
historic facts I want to remember.
| Bahariya Oasis |
In the morning of our 3rd day in Egypt we took a minibus from Cairo to the Bahariya oasis, where we arrived in the early afternoon and met up with the team of drivers that would take us through the Western Desert by jeep over the next 4 days. They immediately took us on a tour of the Bahariya Oasis.
Bahariya
In Europe we usually picture an oasis as a little group of trees around a spring. In reality an oasis is typically an area the size of a province that has several villages with thousands of inhabitants each. Besides lush green parts with cultivated land or palm forests as dense as a jungle, it also has dry sandy parts where only some bushes grow.
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Salty lake
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In the early evening we went to a big lake in the oasis to watch the sunset. The drivers said the lake was too dangerous to swim, but their only reason was that the bottom of the lake is uneven and muddy and you can get stuck in it. No problemo, I wanted to swim not walk. In the end Danny and me went in while the rest stayed on the beach.
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The water was so salty that we could float on it easily, it was almost like the Dead Sea, really cool. I asked Danny if he fancied trying to swim across the lake. It was about a kilometer wide and I wouldn't have tried it on my own, but he was in for it so off we went.
The salt turned out to be a big problem; whenever we got water in our eyes it hurt like hell and we had to stop swimming to rub them. Then near halfway the lake got so undeep that our legs scratched the rocks on the bottom all the time. A bit later we simply couldn't swim on anymore, but we also couldn't walk because the bottom was indeed too weak to stand on.
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I felt guilty because this had been my idea and I figured Danny was feeling sorry he came along by now, so I asked if he wanted to go back, but instead he replied "we came this far already, I rather crawl all the way to the other side on my belly than turn back now". What a perfect answer!
So crawl we did, on elbows and knees, but soon the water got deep enough to swim again. Another 15 minutes later we finally reached the opposite shore. We shook hands over a job well done and rested on the beach a while before swimming back. This had been fun!
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Nature Camp
We spent the night in a place with cute little wooden cabins that was cheesily called Nature Camp.
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| Desert Day 1 |
The next morning we set out from Bahariya for a four day trek through the Western Desert by jeep. The entire Egyptian territory west of the Nile is called the Western or Lybian Desert, but it has geologically very diverse areas and on this first day we'd see the most spectacular of them.
The Black Desert
Just south of Bahariya lies the Black Desert, named after its volcanic rocks. Much of it is covered by sand, but on the hills the black rock shines through.
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Pit stop
After the Black Desert we stopped at a little concrete cabin to have lunch. Between noon and 4pm it was always too hot to drive (the sand would scorch the tyres and the engines would overheat) so after lunch we just had to wait a few more hours. Outside the wind was like a gigantic hairdryer, even in the shade the heat was terrible.
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The group members dozed off one after the other. Being an insomniac I wasn`t even gonna try to sleep, so I took a picture of the sleeping beauties and then joined Danny and the drivers who were having a smoke inside the cabin. We passed the hours chatting and drinking tea.
We asked the drivers a lot of questions about their life and their job. They work 8 months per year, from September to April. From May to August the desert is just too hot to travel through so then they have an extended vacation. This was their first trip of the new season.
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Besides driving tourists like us around, they also do occasional reconnaissance trips to look for interesting places and routes. All of them obviously liked their relaxed life in the oases and the desert. Ashraf had been to Germany once, the others had never been outside Egypt.
We really liked these guys, they were nice to just hang out with. We'd also come to respect their driving skills; they steered the jeeps through rocky places that you'd never think a car could cross, and let them slide precisely around the obstacles in the sand even at high speeds. It was a lot like rally car racing. Khaled and Mohammed 1 actually did race each other for kicks all the time. Noone ever wore a safety belt. When we asked about that they just laughed and said "if God wants us to die we'll die, nothing we can do about that".
At about 3pm Ashraf suddenly started praying. We weren't sure how to react since we'd just been talking to him, so we just sat there silently. When he was done we asked if we should've left but he said it didn't matter, we could dance and sing while he was praying, he wouldn't notice.
The Crystal Mountain
After lunch we drove on the road for a while and passed a place called the Crystal Mountain because of the quartz crystals in the rocks.
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Beyond The Clouds
After the Crystal Mountain we went off-road again and drove through some fantastic desert landscapes.
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The Magic Spring
The Magic Spring lies in the middle of the desert, hence its name. Around it grow a few palm trees, so it looks just like what I'd always imagined an oasis to be.
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The White Desert
In the evening we arrived in a most beautiful place called the White Desert, a desert full of weirdly shaped white chalkstone rocks. The whole place looked surrealistic, like a Salvator Dali painting come to life. The rocks gave me all kinds of ideas for funny pictures.
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We spent the night between some big white rocks. I'd had a great day but was feeling miserable. Drinking hot water all day had made me feel sick, but if I'd stop drinking my tongue and lips would dry up completely within minutes and stick to my teeth, making it hard to speak. My throat was so dry that I couldn't swallow anything, so I hardly ate.
I was craving for a real drink and when we saw falling stars, I cried out loud that my wish was for a cold coke. Cathy suggested I needed sugar so I ate the packs of sugar I'd brought from the plane, yummy! A bit later my wish was half fulfilled; the drivers turned out to have 1 bottle of coke and we all got half a glass. It was hot so we it mixed it with some less hot water, but it still felt good!
In the morning I felt like a wreck because I was having insomnia since arriving in Egypt and this night had been the worst. I still couldn't eat either.
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| Desert Day 2 |
This 2nd day in the desert would be far less interesting than the first. After breakfast we broke up camp and drove out of the White Desert to the Farafra oasis.
Farafra Oasis
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Once in the oasis we drove straight to a spring to wash up; we hadn't seen clean water since leaving Bahariya. Afterwards we drove to Qasr al-Farafra, the oasis' only real village, to get a drink and visit the museum of a local artist.
The village's pub had fresh cold mango juice and after all the hot water that really gave me a kick, so I skipped the museum, which didn't interest me, and kept ordering more of it. Even the loud prayers on the pub's radio couldn't disturb my bliss.
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When the group returned from the museum we went to one of the oasis' hotels to have lunch and wait out the hottest hours of the day. Being a vegetarian I got some almost dry pasta instead of real food, but we all got a little salad of tomatoes and beans on the side. Most of us didn't eat raw vegetables in Egypt because they probably got washed with unboiled water which makes weak Europeans sick (you certainly can't drink it). However, by now my primary concern was to get some food in me though, so I ate my salad and it felt so good that I ended up eating half the group's salads and slurping the tomato juice from all the plates too. Aaaaaaaah, vitamines! After the mango juice and this I was feeling a lot better already.
During lunch we discovered that we were gonna get a police escort: a yuppie wearing a pink shirt and a gun. He looked like his rich daddy landed him this job and behaved very haughtily when we said we didn't want an escort. First impressions can be false though; he'd help out loading and unloading the jeeps a lot, and by the 4th day he was buying us cookies.
The Sahara
When the worst heat was over we left Farafra with our new passenger and drove into the Great Sand Sea, the sand desert that stretches all across the north of the African continent. In Europe we call it the Sahara but that's just the Arabic word for desert.
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We raced through the sand at top speed for hours with few stops. We were behind schedule apparently, and when the green jeep blew a tyre we lost more time, but just as night fell we arrived at the spot the drivers had wanted to reach. It was a sort of circular valley in the sand; about 1km wide and 10m deep. It provided great shelter against the wind and was a perfect place to spend the night. How they found it in this endless sand sea is a mistery to me.
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| Desert Day 3 |
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This day it was our turn to sit in the green jeep, which had a bad suspension and side benches, so we were driving sideways and getting shook up all the time. To compensate, this jeep had a cooling box so if we could buy cold bottles, it would take a bit longer before they got hot.
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The Rocky Desert
We were unlucky coz just on this day we drove on the most bumpy rock bottom of the entire trip. This is where the landcruisers got through places that I'd never imagine cars could pass. I asked Ashraf what the name of this place was. It was something Arabic that I couldn't repeat right, so in the end he just said "it's called Rocky Desert". So let's call it that :)
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Al Qasr (Dakhla Oasis)
We drove on to the Dakhla Oasis where we visited the medieval town Al-Qasr. A local man led us through the maze of small streets in the mostly abaondoned oldest part of the city. It was a very charming place, full of partly ruined little buildings dating from the 10th-12th century: houses, workshops, a court house, a prison, a mosque, ... . Very charming place. We went upstairs in many of the buildings, carefully stepping over the many holes in the floors.
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Going East
We had lunch in Al-Qasr and waited out the hot hours again before going back into the desert, this time heading east. The desert got sandy again here.
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The Last Night in the Desert
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As night fell we arrived at a fort west of the Kharga oasis, but it was too dark already to have a good look. The wind was blowing quite hard but the drivers couldn't find a spot that would give us shelter. In the end we set up camp at the base of a sand dune about 2km from the fort.
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The wind became stronger and stronger, but the cook still managed to get a fire going and make something of a dinner, which was quite an accomplishment. While we were eating the sparks from the fire were blowing all around and against us so we ate quickly :)
That third night in the desert was to be quite an experience, because the wind grew into something of a sand storm. Our arms and faces had a layer of sand on them, our ears and noses and the corners of our eyes got full of sand, and if you opened your mouth you got sand in there too. It wasn't painful or anything, just most uncomfortable. Noone ever whined though, respec'!
We retired to our sleeping spots soon because there wasn't anything you could do in this whirl of sand anyway. While lying down I caught Tom's blanket and mattress mid-air when they blew my way all across the camp, nice catch I think :) I didn't sleep at all that night, even with a sleeping pill, so I was still awake when the wind finally subsided at 4am.
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| Desert Day 4 |
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Fort Umm el-Dabadib
In the morning Danny and I skipped breakfast to go check out the fort, which is called Umm el-Dabadib and dates from the 3th-5th century, i.e. Egypt's christian times. In those days the fort was the center of a well-populated settlement.
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Fort Umm Labakha
After breakfast we first drove to Umm Labakha, another fort near the Kharga oasis, 30 km from Umm el-Dabadib. This one was built by the Romans so it was even older, but there was little left of it and it had no surrounding buildings, so it was less interesting.
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Cemetery of al-Bagawat (Kharga Oasis)
We then drove into the Kharga oasis, the largest in the Western Desert. We first visited the temple of Hibis, a small temple in pharaonic style which was built in the 6th century BC, when Egypt was under Persian rule. It was interesting and relatively intact, but mostly covered due to being restaurated, so I didn't get a picture.
Our final stop was at the cemetery of al-Bagawat, a christian necropolis with 263 tombs and 120 chapels dating from the 4th to 6th century AD.
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To Luxor
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Mohammed 1 made us a final meal, and then we said a warm goodbye to the drivers. A minibus took us to Luxor, which was a long ride. The minibus driver had no clue where our hotel was so we got to see all of Luxor before finally checking in. We'd been in Egypt for 1 week now.
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