Having taken just about all that we could of Cairo, it was with a sense of excitement (and renewed hope on my part) that we headed into the Western desert for a little adventure, including a night camping. Our three day get away began in the oasis town of Baharia in the Hot Springs resort (complete with pool filled with water from a natural hot spring), run and owned by a Mr Peter Wirth who had moved to Egypt from Germany some twenty years earlier. I would like to say that as soon as we arrived we were bowled over by the beauty of the oasis, the serenity of the surroundings, the simple yet wonderful accommodation and the gentle caress of the hot spring. Unfortunately this was not the case. In reality, the oasis was basically a forest of not very remarkable trees (maybe I do not do justice to the concept of a green oasis which has sprung up in a desert, but neither one of us was particularly inspired by what we saw), the accommodation was grubby and depressing and the hot spring filled pool...well that was empty of course! I will not dwell any longer on the disappointment we felt that night, suffice to say we got on with it (me on bug watch after Matt had already removed one enormous flying creature which appeared through the plug hole) and started to look ahead (with more renewed hope!) to the camping trip in the White desert the following night.
I should at this point just mention Peter Wirth, who had not only booked us in at his resort and arranged the camping trip, but had also arranged the rest of the tour taking us to a hotel in Dahkla Oasis before going on to Luxor. He is a very jovial German man who has fully embraced the Egyptian culture, including the attire of long shirt dress, and sounds like he's doing an impression of a gestapo officer from 'allo 'allo! By the end of our briefing with him, that morning after our first night, we were both a little bit freaked out!
So off we set. Me, Matt and our bedouin (to share his local knowledge, although what with his English being limited and our Arabic non-existent we weren't entirely convinced this would be successful), in a four-wheel drive with a toilet role and a black bin liner...need I say more?!
We saw some amazing things that day. We climbed to the top of the Black Mountain getting incredible desert views at the top – easier going up than coming down! We visited Crystal Mountain where we saw what looks like crystalised rock faces (I'm not a geologist!) and then we ended up in the white desert where we were camping that night. It is hard to really describe and do justice to the landscape we saw, it is just so vast and there are these white chalk rock formations in unimaginable shapes and sizes protruding everywhere. And it's so silent, we could hear the silence. Our bedouin took us to find what he calls rock flowers that are beautifully formed rocks, in the shape of flowers! There are also fossils of shells and plants in some of these rocks.
Our bedouin picked a spot for us to camp in – no tents, just sleeping bags – and started to cook dinner. It wasn't long before another bedouin turned up (our one's brother apparently but we are still to discover the true meaning of this word when used in other cultures) with an italian couple, Paulo and Stephania. We all had supper together and had a really wonderful night, relaxing, laughing, chatting and communicating despite three different language barriers. Little desert foxes kept coming up and sniffing around and when Matt and I got back to our sleeping bags they'd chewed the laces of our shoes! We spent the night under the stars, surrounded by silence.
After some off road driving in the four wheel drive (more fun for Matt than me – incredibly bumpy if you know what I mean!) we were dropped in a tiny little village to wait for our public mini bus to take us to Dahkla Oasis. I am not going to go into too much detail on the tail end of our desert adventure, suffice to say it was a fairly unpleasant reality check after our idyllic time in the white desert. The 11 person, non AC mini bus went all the way to Dahkla carrying 17 Egyptians and us. Now I'm not one to pass judgement, but there were some people on that bus who hadn't had a wash for a while and after three hours of it, we were really looking forward to getting off and into the comfort of our hotel. Well, we should have known better by now, shouldn't we? I'd be surprised if there'd been more than ten guests passing through those doors in the whole year and there certainly wasn't anyone there but us that night. The dark, drab, souless interior of our room, complete with giant ant infested bathroom, was topped off by a dinner of salt water soup, potatoes and rice and what looked like cremated, anorexic chickens. Waking up with ants crawling all over me was the final straw and we could not wait to get up and on our way to Luxor. After making it through the somewhat disconcerting police checks at each town border, and even being escorted at one point (see TRAVEL NOTES – Cultural Learnings), we eventually arrived in Luxor. By this stage you have probably already read our account of Luxor so, having cut our Egypt leg of the tour short, we were off to Jordan next...
