Desert Log Part 1

Returned yesterday from a nine day trip, seven nights of which were spent camping in Egypt’s western desert. I filled up my memory card with photos, so will present them and the “Desert Log” in four sections. Luckily, I was forced to erase a myriad of rock pictures as new sights demanded space on the card. So you’ll be spared my awe and wonder at the variations the deset rock: after days of staring at beige, beige, beige, you start to get really good at distinguishing rosy beige from golden beige from toasted beige. And you want to photograph it. But beige, of any shade, rarely shows up well in photos.

Going Out
In two four-by-fours Uncle Bob, Aunt Myriam and I drove from the outskirts of Cairo through the chaos of downtown Giza. The first photo shows our view as we crossed the Nile, approached and passed the pyramids.
We crossed the first few hours of desert and spent the night at a lodge at the Bahariyya Oasis. Uncle Bob and Aunt Myriam had brought Bob’s sister, my Aunt Terry to the same lodge; apparently in the five weeks since, the lodge had its grounds entirely redone to include an odd-looking fountain, flagstone walkways, etc. They commented on new or expanded tourist facilities in this and other oases we saw at the end of the trip. The Bahariyya Oasis is still fairly poor, though hopefully the increased money from tourism will benefit the community as a whole. The second photo shows a man and his son whom I asked for a photograph near our lodge. After I took their photo and boy asked me to take a photo of him, and then asked for money. (I told him, truthfully, that I didn’t have any.) As a whole, people in Egypt generally seemed more accustomed to tourists than people I met in Oman and Yemen. I had the sense that most people preferred that I not take photographs of them, (except those that wanted to be paid for it), while my experience in the Gulf had been indifference or excitement towards my camera.
We left the oasis and soon turned off the road into the sand—and immediately got stuck. After digging sand away and placing sand-plates in front of the tires, we were on our way. Uncle Bob and Aunt Myriam, seasoned desert drivers, were mortified to have gotten stuck so quickly and hoped that no one would pass. (Someone did.) But we soon made up for it, as the terrain our first two days consisted of hard flat sand, a “sand sheet” on which we could drive 80km an hour. Though we did get stuck twice more: once we had to replace the sandplates about seven times, inching the car forwards until the sand finally became firm enough to support it.
The third photo was taken when we stopped for lunch on the first day. I don’t know any of the minerals over which we rolled, but at that moment the sand held patches of extremely thin, brittle rock. The photo shows this rock, and my henna, which sadly disappeared quickly in the extreme dryness and sun.
We stopped to make camp every day at 3pm in order to have enough light to set up two tents and prepare dinner and a fire. And 3pm on our first day found us among buttes and football-sized rocks. The fourth photo shows our first desert sunset, and the fifth our second night’s camp. After a delicious dinner a la Myriam, we went to bed every night around 8:30, or the amount of time that our fire, lit at sunset, could keep us warm before the wind drove us into our tents. Temperatures at night approached freezing, and the wind blew almost constantly.
We woke every morning soon after sunrise, usually listening to the BBC’s world news on the little transistor radio over breakfast. After breaking camp sometimes we’d “shower”. Ok, I’ll admit; Aunt Myriam showered every day, Uncle Bob and I every other day. Showers were actually lovely though; taking a bottle of warm water, a cloth and fresh clothes, and finding a private dune or bluff. Being completely naked in a vast empty space, in the sun and standing on the sand, no sound but the wind and no sight but the sky, the sun, and the desert. Still, despite it’s charms, showering was time-consuming and tricky, (hard to keep the soap from getting sandy), and so I kept my showers to every other day.
The sixth photo shows our descent from the sand sheet plateau on the third day. I had been driving, but Aunt Myriam took over, as our car carried six jerry cans of fuel on the roof and an uneasy tap on the break pedal would have caused the car to roll. So I acted as photographer.
We spent our third night camped on a “darb” or an ancient trade route. Although I sometimes had trouble distinguishing the camel and donkey paths of the darb from erosion ruts, this, the Darb Taweel ("long darb") was a clear stretch of pathways littered with cairns, (piles of rocks, as in the seventh picture), pottery shards, and camel bones. The Darb Taweel was first used at the time of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, before camels were introduced, (they came around 0 AD). The eighth picture shows part of the skeleton of one these later traversers of the darb. The skeleton included the skull, something that they had not found intact before. We also found bits of blown glass, probably from Roman times. Also bits of pottery with glaze, pieces of handles, as well as the cylindrical tops of amphorae. A hand-smithed iron hook of unidentifiable use, maybe to hold a pot over a fire. And artifacts from later periods, such as an ancient can of fuel with Arabic script. After three days of seeing nothing but sand, rocks, the very rare stick and even rarer bug, these bits of humanity seemed true treasures. This was one of the most interesting aspects of being in the desert; for the first time in my life I welcomed the marks of humans upon nature rather than resented them. The cairns and traces of the Darb became our only guide across treacherous terrain, and the bits of remnants from another time were not only interesting in themselves, but a connection to humanity. I had never experienced such complete isolation. Walking away from camp to take a shower or to stretch my legs I would quickly be out of earshot of the others, and if I went too far in hilly country it was easy to become disoriented. A new feeling, exciting.