The Sahara
This is the long-delayed post about our dessert-camping experience from November.
Unlike the car that was supposed to take us to the pyramids but never materialized, our guide for the Sahara camping trip arrived slightly early. His name was Hani (or something that sounded a lot like that) and he spoke English fluently, which put us all at ease. He'd brought along somebody else to drive the van, which initially seemed inefficient until I realized that this specialization of duties was quite effective; the driver zipped along at close to 150 mph while Hani was free to answer our numerous questions about the Sahara. In fact, we even picked up a police officer and gave him a ride to the police checkpoint in the dessert, which facilitated getting us through it without any hassle.
Once we were in the dessert, we stopped at the El Bahriya oasis and switched to a land rover that allowed us to roll down sand dunes without much ado. I was soon mesmerized by the sheer quantity of sand surrounding us; there was often nothing else to see in any direction! The first time we stopped to take photographs of the sand dunes, we struck the clichéd "walk like an Egyptian" pose, only to have Hani inform us that Egyptians no longer walk like that. I'd always assumed the pose was entirely fabricated for dramatic effect but he went on to explain that it was once used during religious ceremonies in ancient Egypt.
At lunch time we ate in a rest stop while surrounded by flies. I hate flies so much. After lunch Hani took us down a road built by the Brits during WWII to see the black sands formed by volcanic ashes. We even saw the flat-topped dormant volcanoes that had once spewed all this ash. Next we went to the "white dessert", which is composed of chalk. There were some very odd chalk formations that usually resembled mushrooms, although one of them actually looked like a chicken. This is where we set up camp for the night.
Hani and the driver cooked us a fine dinner of BBQ chicken and potato stew over a fire that also kept us warm once the cold dessert night set in. After eating, we slept under camel fur blankets. Although we'd been hoping to see stars, the full moon pretty much crowded them out. Aware that it is made of cheese, Don tried to eat it but to no avail.
Our second day in the Sahara devolved into a hellish amount of driving. But first we had to sit around for a long time at the oasis while the seats in the land rover were replaced. We killed some time by wandering around in some Coptic ruins from the 7th century. The Egyptians weren't too excited about those because they were "only 1300 years old", a sentiment only possible amongst people whose recorded history goes back for millennia.
With the new seats finally in place, we headed off in search of the Valley of the Whales. Unfortunately, Hani got a bit lost and we could not find the valley before nightfall so we just camped in the white dessert again. Such is the downside of navigating via old tyre tracks instead of GPS. On the plus side, this time we were able to see more stars before the moon came out in force.
In the morning we finally made it to the valley, which was dotted with fossils and striated rock formations, having once been a sea some 40 million yeas ago. Finding sea shells in the Sahara dessert is truly an eye-opening experience. Once we'd had our fill of this oddity, Hani took us to see a massive artificial lake that had been created from treated agricultural runoff and is now stocked with fish. That too was a bit surreal.
It was then time to leave the dessert, although we stopped at Imhotep's step pyramid on the way back to Cairo to see the first pyramid ever built. Unshockingly, it was far less impressive than the great ones at Giza and in a far worse state of disrepair. More interestingly, I noticed that there was an enormous difference in the quality of walls used to build dwellings for the pyramid workers VS the temple, although both were built by the same people at around the same time.
Once in Egypt, we needed to take a cab to the airport. Dave assumed that the cabbies would all speak English but after getting into one, we discovered that he thought we wanted to go to the Sheraton! I tried miming an airport but it only left him bewildered. Fortunately, he had the resourcefulness to take us to a police station where somebody could translate and we then headed for the airport.
