BootsnAll Travel Network



Deserts of Soot and Snow

I wrote this entry a few weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to post it online until now. Sorry. My current location: Rome, Italy.

Bahariyya Oasis is one of five major oases located in western Egypt’s vast deserts and, less than one week ago, it was our departure point for an overnight safari with a Bedouin guide named Mehur. (We spent a day and night in the oasis itself and were bored within an hour of wandering the streets—it was a too-simple, too-quiet town of concrete-block apartments, sand, and palm trees.) Upon learning our names, Mehur decided that “Taea” and “Matteo” were too complicated to pronounce and re-named us “Yasmin” and “Mohammed.” I, in turn, christened him “John.” And so we began our journey.

Our first stop was the Black Desert, where layers of black sand stretched for miles and freestanding, scorched-looking mountains rose from the earth. Gorgeous. Standing on top of one of the mountains, I looked down on an otherworldly landscape.

Leaving the Black Desert, we continued on to a cold spring. Along the way, I envisioned a clear pool of water in the sand, surrounded by palms and perhaps a thirsty camel or two. What I actually saw was a concrete box filled with water gushing from a large metal pipe, and yet another of my romantic dreams was crushed.

Our next stop, “Crystal Mountain” was decidedly more exciting. At the edge of a new stretch of desert, named the White Desert for its snow-white rocks, was an area filled with crystals on boulders and in millions of pieces on the sands. Gathering huge chunks of smooth, glittering clear crystals in my hands, I had a little girl princess moment and began giggling at my thoughts of being surrounded by “free diamonds.”

We stopped for lunch after we moved deeper into the desert, to a place filled with sand dunes. As Mehur prepared a delicious meal of mashed eggplant, cucumber and tomato salad, bread, feta cheese, and sweet mint tea, I wandered into the dunes and laid down to take a short nap on the warm, yellow-white sand, under the unbelievably blue sky.

After lunch, we continued on Agabat, a region of larger sand dunes and deep valleys punctuated by enormous free-standing rocks. We stopped our jeep at the top of one large dune to take photos and, lured by the emptiness and soft sand, Matteo and I (and a French-Canadian girl named Anna who had joined us on the safari) ran barefoot and arms-outstretched to the valley below.

As the sun began to dip towards the horizon, we entered the White Desert, where we would camp for the night. The landscape was, without a doubt, one of the most magical I’ve seen. Hundreds, if not thousands, of perfectly white rocks resembling animals and plants like chickens, camels, and mushrooms rose from white sands; traveling through them was like experiencing a harder, earthly version of watching clouds in the sky.

And it got better. As I mentioned before, our guide was a Bedouin man, and as he set up our campsite, it quickly became clear that the Bedouin know how to camp in the desert in style. First, Mehur stretched out a large canvas screen decorated with colorful designs. Then, within these “walls,” we laid down several woven rugs on the sand and topped them with a low wooden table and mattresses covered with thick blankets. A few feet away, our fire pit warmed a kettle of tea and cooked kofta and tomato stew.

After dinner, the four of us sat around the fire, talking and drinking endless cups of tea. Mehur’s knowledge of English was limited, which created several amusing moments. I tried to describe the importance of scary stories on camping trips to Mehur, for instance, but he didn’t know the words for “scary” and “story.” As I mimed “scary” and pointing to the dark landscape, he began laughing and teasingly asked, “Oh, Yasmin, you scared of the desert?!?” Then, lured by the smell of kofta, a desert fox entered our campsite. When Anna asked Mehur if the fox was dangerous, Mehur told a scary story of his own—no, he said, the fox won’t eat you, but, he continued in halting English and mimed gestures, it may claw your face and chew your arm. Oh, ok. (And, later, we asked him if he was going to sleep with us outside. No, he replied—I’m going to sleep in the car.)

Luckily, I was able to put aside fears of being clawed by a fox and snuggled comfortably into a warm pile of thick blankets, for a night under a sky filled with so many stars that it looked more white than black.

The next morning, after watching the sunrise (well, after Matteo and Anna did—I periodically squinted at the rays from my pile of blankets), we broke camp, drove out of the White Desert, and entered the Western Desert, where more dunes and an immense valley reminiscent of a lunar landscape awaited us. More photos, more gawking, more running barefoot through the warm sand. And then we returned from the desert to the urban streets of Cairo, where we would wrap up our trip in Egypt and head off to new adventures on a new continent.



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0 responses to “Deserts of Soot and Snow”

  1. susanica says:

    dude Taea, when I first saw the tease in my feed (yes i subscribe to your blog), I read “deserts of roots and sorrow” and hurredly clicked on it…i don’t know why i read wrong sometimes. not to say that the real title isn’t interesting as well. xoxo.

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