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Published: January 10th 2008
Rock formations in the White Desert
The scenery was so amaing we couldn't stop snapping photos. It was even harder trying to pick favorites!Did we forget to mention that we don't have a truck? When we arrived in Egypt we were supposed to connect with another Dragoman truck that had been shipped from Mombasa. The truck made it to Suez where it remains stuck in customs while the co-driver is negotiating with the minister of tourism to release it. Rather than wait in Cairo, we set off on our intended desert oasis route in a mini-van and spent the night at Baharia oasis. From there we took 4x4 jeeps out into the Western Desert.
There is no way that we would have seen everything that we did had we been travelling on the Dragoman truck. The 4x4's flew across soft sand that we would have been digging and matting across with the truck. It is amazing how much the desert landscape changes over a few hundred kilometers. After crossing the Sahara in Mauritania we figured we'd seen all there had to be seen in a desert. We were so wrong! The first major stop was the "black desert" characterised by mounds of black rocks - you can see my geology background really coming out in this post...I don't have one. We climbed one
of the larger mounds to get a great view.
A few kilometers down the road, the landscape changed and the desert was more neutral coloured. We stopped at what is known as crystal mountain. This is due to the calcite crystals in the soil (I learned that one from the sign).
By far the highlight of the Western Desert was the "white desert". Once again several kilometers down the road all of a sudden brilliant chalky white rocks started appearing in the sand. It's really difficult to describe in words, so we took 300+ pictures of it instead! We won't subject everyone to all of them, but it was tough picking favorites. We set up camp in the white desert at sunset and watched as the colours turned from white, to orange, to red, to purple. Stunning! Sunrise was equally beautiful and the rock formations that have been eroded by the wind look so different from every angle. It really looked like it had snowed in the desert. The only disappointment is that there was no moon that night so instead of cool night shots of the formations we got brillant views of the stars instead; life's tough!
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mego
non-member comment
wonderfull
how wonderfull