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Bahariyya Oasis is a teardrop-shaped cluster of date palms, rock, hot springs and flowers about 400 kilometers southwest of Cairo. It’s linked by a slender little wedge of green to Farafra Oasis, and surrounding all of this are massive sheets of desert stretching for hours on all sides.
The main “city” in Bahariyya is called Bawiti, a bright, ancient, eerily peaceful little town, which is the place towards which, several weeks ago, my friends and I found ourselves barreling on a rickety Egyptian bus, to go camping and hiking in the desert for 4 days. The ride took 5 dusty hours, which wasn’t actually so bad. Once we arrived, we met a Bedouin man called Gareeb who had agreed to take us into the desert. He was pretty young, as it turned out. I had him pegged for mid-thirties, which was apparently about a decade above the mark. The desert, it seems, ages people like lightening. He and our few other guides all had faces that were creased and leathery from the sand and wind and sun, their bodies wiry from walking and the limited food of desert travel. I’m sure they were all years younger than they seemed. But
their eyes! Dark and bright and clever eyes in every face, glowing in bizarre contrast to their weathered backdrops. I began to see it in not only our guides (Gareeb, Mahmoud, Igaazi, and Youssef) but when I talked to any of the other Bedouin we met along the way, especially those in the massive caravan we passed of hundreds of camels.
Bedouin, by the way, is just a term that refers to desert-dwellers, historically nomads or pastoralists. Like most things that people often falsely and romantically assume to be frozen in history, the lifestyles of nomads have evolved along with the centuries just like everybody else, adding jeeps and propane tank stoves and cell phones to their traditional repertoire of drums and camels and charcoal fires.
One of the interesting things for me was to see which of their traditions continued on like time had never happened, and which had faded away. I was surprised to see how many of their perennial habits had so much sticking power that they’d become second nature. The way they drink tea, for example, is unique and hasn’t really changed much. [It’s drunk in three rounds: the first, loose tea leaves are
boiled in water for 20 or so minutes, at which point about a hundred pounds of sugar are stirred in. It’s drunk from small glasses (actually they were shot glasses, ironically enough). The second round uses the same leaves, boiled again, this time with mint. The third time just involves even more sugar.] And even though now the Bedouin have the ability to go to cities with the help of cars and quicker transportation, some learned-behavior seems too reflexive to shake. Our first day in Bahariyya, we ate lunch in Bawiti, and as soon as Gareeb got his 8-ish ounce glass of tea, he immediately dumped 2/3 of it into the nearest plant. “Bedouin,” he explained to my puzzled expression, “drink small glasses of tea. Why to drink so much all at once?” Later I asked more in-depth about towns versus desert, and most of them much prefer the desert.
I could see why. While I’m not foolish enough to start such a swoon-fest at the beauty and simplicity of the desert that I am suddenly constructing fantasies of buying myself a camel and revoking all oh my materialistic, worldly goods and sleeping on sand for the rest of
my life - because it is indeed a harsh life - but settling into this dusty rhythm of things is indeed magnetic.
The romance of it lies in the gravity that sort of life holds despite that it is balanced so precariously between its harshness and its beauty. A waspish northern wind whipping sand under your eyelids and causing your cheeks to burn like wildfire is hellish. But the incredible, natural perfection of the angles of a sand dune is breathtaking. Having upwards of 200 flies swarming all over my mouth, eyes, hair, hands, nose, feet, camel, and food made me want to barf. But sand draped in lazy, perfect slants, piling up sassily into a slash of dune lumbering its way across the desert like raised scar made me want to go and high-five Fibonacci. The stark cragginess of tall, rusty mountains, layered with zigzag sedimentary nonsense like a wedge of a cake, made me stare endlessly, and the hard, paper-thin slash of shiny black lava rock slicing its way through softer calcite - so much more quickly eroded by the sand and wind, leaving raised threads of black onyx whispering across the flaky purple shale ground -
fascinated me. The black, desolate ribbon of a single highway snaking its way through the sand thrilled me, and the sharp changes from ghostly, fantastical rock formations in the White Desert (leftover from prehistoric times when the desert was underwater,) to scrubby brush and gravel punctuated by clean white camel skeletons, to huge black mountains surrounded by even blacker sand in the Black Desert, to the solitary and vastness of the landscape at night unsettled me. Seeing all of this from the back of a slowly-lumbering camel was humbling and allowed all the time in the world to become saturated in the landscapes. (Realizing that, as your only transportation is a camel, if something should go wrong you literally in the middle of nowhere, first provokes a brief wave of hysteria, which is - thank God - quickly followed by a pleasant sort of hyper-aware resignedness). And climbing the mountains at night, with no gear and only the light of the moon, was (aside from being monumentally stupid) exhilarating.
But then, the relentless sun beating down on me made me sympathize with hot dogs left on the grill too long, and riding a camel for 8 hours a day
gave me welts in places I didn’t know I had. Chewing through sand became second-nature, and the marrow-deep fatigue from sun and sand absorbing into you and baking you from the inside out leaves you at night to a death-like sleep that even desert foxes nibbling on your toes wouldn’t rouse you from. And while there’s something liberating about squatting, bare-arsed, behind a not-quite-big-enough-to-shield-me rock to relieve myself (leaving me seething with jealousy for my male companions able to simply turn their backs and do their business), it’s a little nerve-wracking. Sand is less comfortable for sleeping than one might think, and a man could lose his mind with no company but for his thoughts and his camel.
But company makes all the difference, and Gareeb, Youssef and Igaazi were born into it. I learned a bit about ways of entertaining one’s self in the desert, and realized that an endless supply of sand, cigarettes and fire coals afford a lot more entertainment than you might think. Different checkers-type games, card games, and a surprisingly difficult game of sticking a cigarette into the sand an arm’s length away, being on your knees and sitting back on your feet, arms
behind your back, and trying to lean forward and pick up the cigarette in your mouth (I’ll have you know I was a champion in this) are just a few.
I was also a huge fan of my camel - a little too sassy for her own good sometimes, but we had an understanding. Apparently every single one of our camels was pregnant (so, even though we paid for 5, we TECHNICALLY got 10 camels. Hah!) but mine was the pregnantest of them all, and therefore the queen. She semed to think so too. Her name was Carmella, and she was tall, elegant, long-lashed, and the crankiest pregnant lady I’d ever seen. She liked to snap at you, with a hilarious-sounding camel snarl, if you tried to pet her too much. I maintain that she was misunderstood. But her massive pregnant-ness was one of the best parts of her - I would kick my shoes off as we rode, and then placed the soles of my feet on either side of her warm, gently swaying belly and could actually feel the baby inside. My companions thought I was being a creep, but I thought it was great. I’m sure
Carmella appreciated it too.
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Ann Hughes
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Desert Experience
Nancy: You write beautifully, your descriptions are evoking and wonderful. Maybe your should be an Author one day and fascinate th world with your tales. I love the humour too, you sound like your Mother.