The Desert (and Oasis)

Christ, I left Cairo for only three days, and, thanks to the gracious gift of a school-free Sunday, missed no class. Yet somehow I spent the next three days catching up. I thought AUC was supposed to be easy, but between paper writing (yet another essay on why the World Bank should be scolded for imposing austerity and neoliberalism), Arabic studying (I now look at English plurals with a new-found appreciation for its ease and commonsensical nature), and researching (albeit this was for Ashoka, to which I volunteered to surrender my time and thus have no right to complain), I am losing grasp of my ability to enjoy Cairo--perhaps to the point where I've considered dropping a class. I'd still be a full-time student, and I don't need the credits to graduate. More to ponder.

Anyway, before I sidetracked myself with my characteristic complaining, I was saying that I left this weekend. And that's where the story begins.

After staying in (and staying up) on a Thursday night (i.e. weekend) trying to buy airline tickets and write a Model UN position paper on emissions trading (so much for an escape from Carleton), I slept for two hours and awoke at the ungodly hour of 5:30 AM to board a bus for Bawati, the main town in the Bahariyya Oasis approximately five hours' drive from Cairo. The bus was chartered and more of a 15-passenger van, of which was completely full. If you've met me, you can probably imagine how well I comfortably fit in any sort of transportation situation, let alone a cramped non-American conversion van for five hours. My knees are still quite bruised from their continuous collisions with the seat back (read: bar) in front of me. I sort of wish someone videotaped me trying to sleep.

I always imagined an oasis much differently. Unexplainably lavish in the middle of a desert, I had perceived that this accident of nature would seep into the culture of the oasis’s residents, contributing to a sense of lawlessness and excess. My imagined conceptions of oases almost always included belly dancers shimmering off into a mirage-induced haze. Bawati didn't confirm my mental depiction: its culture was overwhelmingly conservative, at least within the main town, its dwellings and roads were more dilapidated than Cairo's (a feat not easily achieved), and its residents (save for the tour guides) are autonomous from the desert; it only serves as an incredibly large buffer between their small world of Bawati and the mega-city of Cairo.

But the shattering of my stereotype aside, Bawati was pleasant enough, though I suppose given the bus ride which had preceded our arrival, I would have been fine with a dim and lifeless room with a repungently feckid scent. However, Bawati isn't really a part of this account; it was only a starting point where we met our four Bedouin tour guides, the head of whom was Osman.

Osman drove the Land Rover I rode in for the next three days. He's from Bawati, and has been leading tourists (mainly Americans, Germans, and Japanese) out into the desert for 20 years. He's unfazable and, as he admits, not the most devout of Muslims. He knows the desert by rote, and he claims to have never gotten lost, either by himself or with a tour group. To be honest, being a Bedouin tour guide wouldn't be too terrible of a career. You drive around, set up camp for those richer than you, cook them food, show them some sights, and get paid a princely sum.

After piling in Osman's candy apple red, early 1990s Toyota Land Rover, he quickly sped us around in a tour of the oasis, which I will present with pictures.

Graham walks down a path surrounded by date palms. Dates are the primary export/trade of Bahrarriya; the palms are fed by underwater hot and cold springs.


A farmer growls at my camera as he collects dates on his donkey. Little industrial agriculture was evident in the oasis; almost all work was done by the donkey, the plow, and the humans who shimmy up palm trees.


Our transport throughout the vast Sahara.


The pyramid in the background (to the right of me) is called Pyramid Mountain, for it's naturally shaped by the wind into something which looks uncannily (not to mention ironically) like a tomb of a pharaoh.


It looks less like a pyramid from close up.


Dave and I ascended the top of the "pyramid" which was little more than loose boulders, some schist (maybe?), and lots of sand. We're totally badass. This is the view.

So after journeying all around the oasis and its surrounding desert, we set up camp in the middle of the Sahara in an area surrounded by sand dunes. Luckily, one of my travelmates brought an innertube so we could slide down (a la American winter) the wind-shaped hills. Unluckily, the hills were too steep, and all attempts at innertubing resulted in immediately being thrown from the tube and propelled into a sort of roll down the dune. While we frolicked, the Bedouins did their job, setting up our camp and cooking rice, potatoes, bread, and meat, which we would eat for the next six meals.


Our camp.


Sunset in the desert.


My roommate savors his last cigarette. Who said smoking was no longer sexy?


Ahh, look! A trail! To the designated bathroom area!

The next day, we piled into our respective Land Rovers towards our destination of the White Desert. However, we had several stops throughout the day, including a visit to another sand dune (the Bedouins must have known how little we cared about sightseeing and how much we enjoyed dizzingly rolling down the soft dunes), a cold spring (read: sewer) which we swam in (it turned our skin a putrid yellow), and a hike up a mountain which gave us a "panoramic view" of the Black Desert. And you know what panoramic views mean, right? PHOTO SHOOT.


The three of us which were suckered into buying the Bedouin scarfs (We were told they would be of much use in the desert. They weren't.) pose for a picture. I think we were trying to look like militant Palestinians; how culturally sensitive of us.


You know, just working out on Crystal Mountain. No big deal.

So after spending close to an hour in the car (mind you, not on a road), Osman suddenly slammed on the breaks right before we sped over a 9% grade sand hill. This was the view:



I climbed up higher to get a better view of...the same thing. But I had to take a picture to prove that I went the extra effort to see the same thing from 500 feet higher.


This is probably one of the most famous rock formations in the entire world. It's in the White Desert, which was eponymously named for this and other formations. I think they're mostly talc and gypsum, for they crumble easily and are so malleable.


I think Graham was shocked with my climbing abilities. Not that I was trying to scale one of the world's most famous rocks, of which this is most definitely the most frail.

That night, we camped in the White Desert. As you can imagine, there's not much to do after the sun sets at 6 PM except tell stories [I was appointed the story teller, so I crafted an international relations and National Treasure (yes, the movie)-inspired tale of Princess Sophia, the daughter of an Assistant to the Regional Sultan]. However, after the story had successfully put the majority of our group to sleep, myself and three others decided to embark on a bit of an adventure.

I'm ambitious, I'll admit it. I have more than a few life goals. I'm forward-looking. But, I'm proud to report that one of my life goals was completed last weekend, albeit a lesser one. Yes, I hiked through the Sahara. Naked. Check it off the list, moving on now.

I returned to Osman trying to woo one of our group members into his sleeping bag by calling out to her as the "Desert Fox." Creepy. I don't think she got much sleep that night (out of fear, not from Osman's continuous smooth talking).


The sunrise the next morning overlooking the White Desert.

Well, I'm off to Istanbul in about half an hour, which will inevitably be the feature in an upcoming blog post. However, the much-respected "When In Egypt..." will be returning, as will continual updates (that is, complaints) about my life at AUC. Enjoy.