The White Desert

One of the things I had really wanted to see in Egypt was the White Desert. A few phone calls on Thursday and it was sorted – a private tour – for Friday morning. A long featureless bus journey through the desert took me Baharia Oasis, where I was met by my team – two guys, a land cruiser and not much English. First stop was the police station where I had to register my presence and chose to sign a statement confirming that I had turned down the offer of police protection for my journey. Surely I could trust these lads I'd known for three and a half minutes? Anyway, all the tourist police I've met so far have seemed far dodgier, grumpier or sleazier than my guides. So off I went, throwing trepidation out of the window of the shabbily spacious interior of the vehicle as we sped out of town. I leaned back in the low-slung, laid back seat and enjoyed the contradiction of heat and wind in my face.

It wasn’t long before we veered off the road and across the packed sandy gritty stuff, then shot up the side of a small sand dune, thumping to a halt just as we seemed ready to take off. I got out for a wander on the dune and enjoyed the views beyond. The flat pan I looked down on was a curvy maze of tyre tracks, where the sand showed through the black grit and I wondered if this was one of those places where the tracks are never blown away. It looked like it.

The journey continued, on and off road, the detours taking us to various viewpoints and interesting features where I hopped out to explore and photograph. The desert got blacker and we stopped at the foot of a volcano, its solid black plug giving a good indication of where the black desert got its sand. There were lots of these little volcanoes and the mixture of colours gave the desert and its hills a wonderful depth and texture.

At a small oasis village we stopped at a cafe for a lunch of flies with salad, bread and flies, and fly tea. The guys began teaching me Arabic and conversation flowed like porridge, although porridge isn't generally so amusing.

Beyond the black desert was more sand-coloured desert. The off-road was high in “wheee” factor at times, with some big ups and downs, including one long steep up that took us seven attempts, zooming back down and looping round at high speed on the flat before gunning for the top again. This one was to reach a small crawl-through cave-like structure. Inside the walls were chock with crystals and outside some superb specimens lay around. I picked up a diamond-like lump, as long as my thumb, and held it up to see the sun shining through its smooth translucent surface.

Crystal Mountain had a similar abundance of crystals, although mountain was something of an overstatement. It had layers of crystals, reddish sedimentary rock and something volcanic on top and a natural rock arch, some organ-pipe effects, white powdery chalk which could even have been talc, and probably anything else you care to think of. This was a baby mountain gone crazy in a geological pick’n’mix.

Agabet was stunning, huge sandstone lumps, mountain-like but not mountain shaped, rising up like islands out of the sand. We perched at the top of a rise and looked down at it spreading out into the distance before us, then whooshed down the sand and drove between these things and back to the road.

We joined the road again, and soon enough white things began to appear in the sand. The white desert! We left the road and headed into an area known as The Tents because the rocks look like, well, tents. Actually, I thought they looked like buns and loaves dropped in the sand, with the odd ball of ice-cream, slightly melted at its base. They were densely packed at first and we wove our way between them in the golden pre-sunset. Then there were mushrooms, more blobs and the occasional phallus. There was a chicken shaped rock and a pretty good rabbit. In some areas the white rock was flat-sided and lumps of edgy icebergs seemed to drift in the sand, in other places there were series of similar rocks sweeping in line like waves. Some blobs were peeling their outer layers and flakes dropped at my touch or crunched underfoot. I haven’t done my research but this must have all been chalk, firm but brittle, and pretty good at leaving its mark on my clothes.

While the guys set up our little camp, I watched the sun go down and listened to the silence. It’s a good place to get a perspective on the world, on your own insignificance. So much space, so much sky, the nearly full moon well risen already. The same desert I had walked and slept in on the other side of this continent. A lot of sand, a lot of space. A beautiful world, some of which we haven’t spoiled yet.

Our camp consisted of a windbreak, some rugs, a table and three mattresses. Anything fancier could never have been so perfect. In the evening, a desert fox came to visit us and later a rather nice mouse. Presumably a desert mouse. Abdul cooked up some pretty good stuff over the fire and the evening passed quickly, eating, drinking tea, smoking shisha and talking. It was warm and windless so we all slept out on the rug under the Saharan sky. My general life plan doesn’t normally include sleeping in the middle of a desert with two strange men, having inhaled strange substances, but I really wasn’t in the mood to worry. And of course, my judgement was as good as their intentions, the tobacco innocent and appley. At about four o’clock I woke up to see that the moon had gone and the sky was absolutely bejeweled. I had to keep forcing my eyes open against sleep just to see it; and now it could almost have been a dream. Was the sky really blue-black? Were there really more stars than I’ve ever seen before? Were they really bigger and brighter and closer? I don’t want to know. I can still see that sky in my mind’s eye.

I was up in the pre-sunrise light, gazing, still stupefied by my surroundings. The White Desert is mind-boggling, beautiful and serene. It could be another planet; it could restore your faith in this one.

Wishing I had a couple more days, we packed up and headed straight back to Baharia. In the car I felt fit to explode with happiness, joy even. I was high from the desert trip, but it wasn’t just that. It was like the culmination something that’s been growing and bubbling up inside since I got here. Unfortunately there were no crazy off-road dune excursions, so my whoops and wheees may have seemed rather peculiar to Abdul and Romario.

The bus back from Baharia took forever but I was still flying when it dumped me, six hours worth of mosque music still echoing in my ears, in some godforsaken corner of Cairo nowhere near the bus station. I merrily hopped to and fro across six lanes of traffic in search of drinks and snacks and then set to finding a taxi. I soon had to drop my policy of only waving down cabs that looked vaguely roadworthy or uncrashed and realized that beggars couldn’t be choosers when no driver had heard of the district where Rick and Kate live. As soon as I got a glimmer of recognition, I hopped in and ended up having a grand old time directing the driver, whose English was even worse than my Arabic (and that’s saying something), round the ring road navigating by the “hmmm, this might be familiar” method. It’s particularly invigorating to use this method while having to deliver directions with great authority and make split-second decisions at high speed in the wrong lane. I arrived well chuffed with my unexpected navigational brilliance.