In the Desert...

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Absolute full credit to those explorers who trekked through the desert exploring and mapping! It's really really hot, really really dusty and sandy and very hard work. And I did it in a truck!

The heat wave has continued here, and we've just spend three nights and four days in the Western Desert. It's been absolutely amazing. Stunning scenery, distant horizons and more types of rock formations than I thought I would ever be interested in.

The first night was camping out in the Western Desert about five hours drive out of Cairo. No need for tents, it doesn't exactly rain a lot out there, so it was an amazing night sleepin gon the sand under the stars. While the stars are unfamiliar here, with no Southern Cross to orient myself, it's an amazing experience waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the full moon and half the galaxy twinkling down on us.

Up with the sun of course (not my usual style, as you will all know) and driving off through the black desert. The sand and rock is still the normal beige colour, but it looks like someone has sprinkled peppercorns all over it, there are black rocks and pebbles covering the ground. And it goes on forever...

We did stop in an oasis town to get some supplies, including chicken for that night's stew. As in, pick out the (live) chickens we want from the cage, and they get prepared into segments. You can imagine the details. Oasis towns aren't the lush, palm tree shaded lakes you see in cartoons, they are half-finished mudbrick buildings lining the streets, with dust, dirt, people and general random stuff everywhere. Still, a fresh made falafel pita from the street vendor went down quite nicely for morning tea. Then back out into the desert...

But then we went deep into the white desert... Now that also is stunning, but in a different way. Photos just can't capture it. Some giant hand at some stage appears to have poured an mix of plaster of paris and chalk all over the desert, creating big sculpted shapes and layers of hard but brittle white sheets of rock on the sand. Another night under the stars, and we even had an appearance from a desert fox! Very cute and quite interested in our chicken stew smells... And at least it cools down at night, thank goodness.

Day three was en route to the Dahkla oasis. We skirted the edge of the Sahara, the great sand sea. And it really does look like that! Flat brown haziness as far as the horizon. Stopped off at an amazing artist's gallery - he does pretty much every form of art and is fantastic at all of them. That night we managed a soak in a hot spring to get clean just in time to get caught in a sandstorm. So it really was a full desert experience! OUr night sleeping on an oasis rooftop looking at the stars turned into a night on an oasis rooftop huddling in sleeping bags trying to avoid eating as much sand as possible and stop everything from blowing away. Mostly successful, we only lost a few things to the wind!

However unlikely it may seem, I have now gone an caught a head cold (I know, in the heat of the desert, go figure) so our 12 hour truck drive into Luxor today has gone by in a haze of tissues and headache. But we are back to civilization! A real shower and a bed, luxury.

So the desert experience has been truly amazing, albeit hard work! I'm looking forward now to some sights around history and people rather than lots of rock and sand. I'll let you know how it goes!

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