Camping in the Egyptian Sahara
It is unusual for me to go outside of Europe during an academic quarter of the year. This timely spring break stuck out at the end of January 2021. Amid the covid-19 pandemic and all those travel restrictions I decided to travel anyway. I thought that after spending most of the year indoors, I deserved this chance to grab my backpack and go solo somewhere far from home. I didn’t decide to go to Egypt directly, it was one of the only countries I could visit at that time. Once arrived, I enjoyed the warm welcoming of Egyptians and, of course, the pyramids, which took me several days to visit. But after some time in these crowded spaces I knew I needed to do something different. So I took my chances and started to find ways to get out of the tourist trail. I decided that I wanted to go to the Sahara Desert. Of course I could not go alone by any means. This would be a completely uncertain adventure since the embassies of Europe did not recommend doing so. Also my health insurance wouldn’t be happy if I had an accident in the middle of such an inhospitable area. There were a lot of questions on the table, starting from how to get to the middle of nowhere, how to get supplies, how to get someone who knew around, how to get someone with permissions, how to sneak through the military checkpoints, etc.
I started to gather information online and my search did not give me anything but fear and distress. From what I read, the border with Libya was a no-go, as well as some areas in Egypt where threats of terrorism, kidnappings, etc. were taking place. The travel advisory said that the Western desert including the oases of Bahariya, Bawati, Dakhla, Farafra and both the White desert and Black desert should be avoided by all means due to smuggling, terrorist activities, presence of armed groups and military operations. This was getting tougher since this limited the places I could go to. Most of the tour operators were closed due to the lack of tourists derived from the coronavirus pandemic. On the other hand, I found some contacts online of people who used to run a tour agency taking tourists to those inhospitable areas. These people were hard to find, but once I found them, they were willing to take me to the desert. They were Berbers from villages hundreds of kilometers away, some lived in those places in my black list. I asked an Egyptian friend of mine if it would be safe to travel to Bahariya (which was in the black list of do-not-travel). She told me it should be safe. I decided to go for it.
Bargaining the price wasn't easy but I had to keep in mind that I should not try to get a trip to the desert for a ridiculously cheap price. I am going to skip the reasons since they are more than obvious.
I trusted my trip to a guy whose name I didn’t even know by then. Later on I learned that his name was Alaa. He agreed to send a friend of his to pick me up in the outskirts of Giza the next day at 8:00am. I simply trusted the man. After the deal was settled over the phone I needed to find a way to withdraw the amount of cash he was asking. This was not an easy task, especially in the neighborhood I was staying in around Giza. I got lost in the area so I started to ask around.
For the locals it probably looked like a mobile ATM was looking for a physical ATM (you can guess which one of the two I was). After emptying one ATM from cash I managed to find another one. I headed home with a huge stack of bills that obviously didn’t fit in my wallet.
I trusted my trip to a guy whose name I didn’t even know by then. Later on I learned that his name was Alaa. He agreed to send a friend of his to pick me up in the outskirts of Giza the next day at 8:00am. I simply trusted the man. After the deal was settled over the phone I needed to find a way to withdraw the amount of cash he was asking. This was not an easy task, especially in the neighborhood I was staying in around Giza. I got lost in the area so I started to ask around. For the locals it probably looked like a mobile ATM was looking for a physical ATM (you can guess which one of the two I was). After emptying one ATM from cash I managed to find another one. I headed home with a huge stack of bills that obviously didn’t fit in my wallet.
That night I didn’t sleep well. I was nervous and already on alert. The next day I was about to get into someone’s car, heading inland into a foreign country, alone without knowing the language and most likely without cell connection for most of the trip. The plan was to go to Bahariya oasis, and from there meet a guy named Alaa who would drive me into the desert himself. Then we would camp there and come back the next day.
I woke up early in the morning, the sun was rising from above the dunes of the desert near Cairo. I sat down and had a coffee while watching the sunrise next to the pyramids. I double checked the batteries of my cameras and my watch, which had built in GPS. The night before I memorized the latitudes and longitudes of Egypt to be able to more or less know where things are. I went to have breakfast at the rooftop of this empty hostel. Before I was finished I was called by someone in broken English telling me that they were waiting for me downstairs.
I woke up early in the morning, the sun was rising from above the dunes of the desert near Cairo. I sat down and had a coffee while watching the sunrise next to the pyramids. I double checked the batteries of my cameras and my watch, which had built in GPS. The night before I memorized the latitudes and longitudes of Egypt to be able to more or less know where things are. I went to have breakfast at the rooftop of this empty hostel. Before I was finished I was called by someone in broken English telling me that they were waiting for me downstairs. The guy who was supposedly coming to pick me up arrived 25 minutes early. I finished what was left from my breakfast and I went to my room to grab my backpack. I went downstairs and there was a dark guy twice my size with a thin goatee and sunglasses. He took my backpack and gently placed it in the trunk. I introduced myself afterwards, he assented with his head and said nothing. Once in the car I realized that he did not speak English. Hesham and me communicated with signs, he smiled a lot and seemed like a nice guy. He told me that he will let me know when I have to put my face mask on through the military checkpoints. After this introductory talk we got out of the busy metropolitan area of Cairo and shortly we were on a road in the middle of a vast plain desert. Once in a while there were hitchhikers poorly dressed blazed by the hot sun.
The road was mostly straight and it had two directions, where cars passed next to each other at elevated speeds. I was in good hands, there is probably no other driver in the world with better reflexes than an Egyptian behind the wheel, trust me on this one. We arrived at the first military checkpoint. Military men with AK-47s strapped to their bodies were holding the traffic and registering some arbitrary vehicles.
We passed the checkpoint straightaway without being asked to stop. After that we continued for 4 more hours. The last hour of the trip consisted of a ride through arid limestone and chalk hills eroded by wind. In the horizon some of those hills were covered by a black layer of rocks, apparently volcanic. This landscape was beautiful and the dimensions of this land was immense.
Military checkpoint in the desert.
A while later we arrived at the oasis, where we rode through the small streets of this village. The houses were made from clay and there were kids playing on the side of the roads who didn’t appear to care for the boiling heat of the sun. We finally arrived at the meeting point with Alaa. He was there and gave me a warm welcome. He was a tall and skinny dark guy in his early thirties with an unshaven mustache. He was wearing nice clothes, sand colored pants, white socks and sandals.
He took me inside and he left me on a table on the floor. He then joined the other table. Apparently this was the closest thing one can find to a restaurant.
It consisted of clay pillars supporting a wicker net. There were some people having their lunch there too. Next to this porch there was a small house where they cooked and prepared the food. Soon food started to show up. It was obvious that the amount of food was designed for two people. I did my best and ate as much as I could.
Once finished Alaa took me to his off-road car. We opened the trunk to put my backpack and it was filled with supplies. There were quite a bunch of water bottles, towels, batteries, sheets, tents, wood, etc. The guy was prepared to get into the desert. We departed, introduced ourselves again and started to talk. I was asking him about his personal life while we rode through long asphalt roads surrounded by mars-like terrain. He was married to a Bedouin woman and he had a young 3 year old daughter.
He told me he studied Computer Science in Cairo back when he was in his twenties. After that he came back to his hometown seeking for a completely different life than the city life. He has been going to the desert and doing these kind of expeditions for 16 years already. He liked nature and from the way he was describing the deserts around us I could see that he was in love with them. Then I started to relax and to enjoy the experience much more.
Once in a while the road was completely covered by a layer of sand perfectly shaped with its characteristic wind waves on it. After driving 45 minutes he made a right turn into a volcano-like mountain. He stopped and gave me instructions of how to get to the top. He pointed at what seemed like a trail by the side of this hill. It was hard to get up, but in 5 minutes I was already at the top. Once I arrived there I could see the magnificent views of these black hills in a red desert. It looked like an extraterrestrial landscape where no signs of life could be seen. The dark color of these mountains merged at the bottom with the orange sand of the desert. They looked like a big cluster of volcanoes in plain terrain. There was silence and I couldn’t see any civilization anywhere around me except Alaa at the bottom of the hill. I enjoyed the feeling of having that view all for myself.
Views of the Black Desert from the top of a hill.
A while later we finally went off road into the desert and we started to ride through sand in smaller sized versions of these black mountains. The more we got into the desert the more these hills lost their black color and whiter colors started to appear. He was going at tremendous speeds through these gravel surfaces. He controlled the vehicle like a bicycle and drifted through the sand at vertiginous speeds as if it was something completely ordinary. We stopped for 5 minutes next to a hill composed by smaller rocks.
He called this 5-meter-high hill the Crystal Mountain. It consisted of a calcite crystal rock formation with lots of finger-sized crystals. It was beautiful at a close look and one perhaps would have the temptation to sneak a couple of those precious rocks into their pocket. He quickly proposed to me to grab some as souvenirs. I rejected the offer. I told him if we all come around and grab a small rock, soon all this will be gone.
These rocks were here for millions of years and belonged there better than to my souvenir cabinet.
We rode deeper in the desert as these hills around us were growing in size. Until the point that they were the size of a ten story building. These were the canyons (although not formed by the erosion of a river). These rocks erected from the desert sand and elevated tens of meters in height. These vertical orange rocky walls were a product of erosion through the course of millions of years. The contrast of the sand with these krasts was beautiful. The thin sand of the floor was probably meters deep before hard stone. I hiked around and managed to climb one of these mountains thanks to a long trail of a sand dune. At the top I could see the whole landscape from a completely different point of view. It was gorgeous to be alone at the top of that place seeing all the dry vast territory around me. Once more, no signs of vegetation nor animal life were present. The whole world has been busy spinning while calm and silence dominated this place. I looked at the floor and it was filled with thumb-sized metallic rocks resembling the shape of meteorites. I returned to the vehicle just to see that Alaa was deflating the tires. He told me we were going to need lower pressure to avoid extra bumps and to increase grip to the terrain.
Sandy dunes merge with rocky formations.
Around twenty minutes later we reached a depression surrounded by mountains. The size was enormous. A small city could fit inside this crater. We rode to the top of a dune and I sand boarded with an improvised board to the bottom of the dune. After that we drove more into the desert and at this point Alaa was already tired of how many times I relished the landscape.
Half an hour later we stopped next to a hill to enjoy the views. This time the landscape was governed by sandstone small hills. It looked like the soil had goosebumps. It was the perfect place for a kid to play hide and seek. It was around 17:00 when the sun was already starting to fall. Driving further in the desert we stopped because there was a car with two government officials who claimed I had to pay a fee to be there. It was around 90 Egyptian pounds. After that we kept going. We stopped again, this time in what is called The White Desert and then Alaa asked me if I wanted to camp near some other people camping or to go somewhere else. I told him that I would like to go somewhere far away where no other people were around. Apparently there was a group of people camping in that part of the desert too. This was not a time to get wasted by the bonfire with some strangers. It was a time to enjoy the silence, loneliness and isolation of the desert.
Past 15 minutes driving at high speeds through the white desert we stopped to set the camp. The sun was about to set. The orange color of the sun illuminated all those white formations of the desert. The floor was a plain white rock with some layers of thin sand. The white rock was filled with seashells and worm fossils. It was very reflective and it reflected the blue color of the sky and afterwards the orange color of the dusk. Being there watching the sunset in absolute silence made me realize how much I needed this experience. After the sun was set I offered my help to Alaa, who was busy building a tent and offloading supplies from the truck. None of his movements were premeditated, he was fully rehearsed and it was clear that he has done this dozens of times.
He covered the side of the vehicle with a sheet and made 3 walls and an improvised ceiling. After that he started a bonfire in front of it. He started to bring cooking equipment and started to make dinner. In the meanwhile I enjoyed the slow shift from blue to orange and finally, at 18:30, pitch black. At 19:00 the milky way was completely visible.
A thick fog of stars of different colors formed a train from one side of the sky to the other. Millions of stars shined above me like never before. Surrounded by silence, the sense of complete insignificance subjugated me. It is at that moment when all living human beings under the same circumstances would look up and say: “How would it be possible to be alone in the universe?”. I asked myself the same question.
This experience suddenly shifted all my “daily problems'' from back home and put them in a different perspective, reducing them to quotidian casual things that happen in a much wider context. At that moment I started to think and to take out things from my life that did not make sense. Also I sensed how I was skipping on the important things in life. Also how money brought me here and how much I was wasting back home. I asked myself what have I been doing all this time since I was born if I didn’t see this up until now. How could this secret night sky be hidden from me all my life? How much more was there to discover? What does it take to see these wonders of the Earth? It was simply fascinating to be able to sit on a rock in the Sahara desert contemplating those millions of stars around me.
Night sky in the desert.
Alaa finished cooking and he called me to the tent. We ate soup as a starter, rice, vegetables with potatoes and roasted chicken. The chicken was cooked in the bonfire for around one hour. It was all delicious and I ate so much. Once in a while we received visits from little desert mice. According to Alaa, these mice do not need to drink water to survive, which is surprising. After dinner I helped him to clean off the plates and the cooking utilities.
When we were done we sat by the bonfire and had a nice life profound talk until past midnight. I knew he was tired so we called it a day. I knew I would be so tired the next day but I stayed up watching the night sky until one in the morning. I set my alarm to 6:00 in the morning and I fell asleep under those camel skin sheets thinking what would be next in my life.
Landscape during sunrise.
The alarm rang and in less than a minute I was already out of the tent. I was wide awake, and I did not want to miss the opportunity of being alone in that extreme silence watching the dawn. I grabbed my camera, and I left my phone back at the tent. I looked back and Alaa was still sleeping in his tent. After walking for 5 minutes, I chose a high rock where I sat down, and I waited. There was no wind, no car sounds, no birds, no planes and the only sound I could hear was my breath. The dark colors of the sky dimmed into blue and then orange. According to my watch the sun would be up in around an hour.
At some point I was impatient and cold, but I realized that in reality I wasn't waiting for the sun to come up. I was there to enjoy the wait, the environment and being patient. I learned to enjoy the process of waiting as well. After an hour I could start to see the first sun rays. I could feel my body warming up by this newborn African sun. Once the sun was a bit higher, I went for a walk alone around the desert. I wrote down the coordinates of the camp in my hand just in case and I took off while Alaa was still sleeping.
It was fascinating to see so many fossils in the ground. It was surprising to see seashells and sea worms in the middle of Africa. Also, the floor was filled with black small rocks that looked like meteorites. The white floor stone had some interesting properties. When I threw a rock on it, it vibrated and sounded like a stone falling on a frozen lake. There was that characteristic echo coming back from somewhere underground. Would there be something underneath that sandstone? Where was that distant echo coming from? I took a bunch of these peculiar black stones with the purpose of investigating their origin back home.
When I went back to the camp Alaa was already awake and made breakfast. We sat down and I ate most of it. We packed everything and he checked everything one last time. He took an air pump and inflated the tires a little bit more. He got in the car, I looked back and saw that empty and beautiful scene one last time. In my head I was thinking that I might not ever see something like this again. "Will I miss this place?" I thought.
Going at high speeds through this desert seemed safer than over the sand soil. The white rock of this desert held the car much better and this time no drifts were necessary. We did not talk that much going back to the Oasis. The only thing he would hear from me was that all this scenario was beautiful.
We made a stop in a remote village where Alaa said there were some thermal waters coming from the soil. The village had no more than twenty houses and looked so poor. He told me that in this village they lived without electricity. They were made from clay and stones. As soon as the engine of the car killed the silence of the village, some curious kids took off to the mud streets. Alaa stopped the car and I got out of the car. Suddenly all the kids ran away. They were scared of whoever might come to their village. There was a fountain where water was being pumped out. It was a hot spring. I touched the water and indeed it was quite warm. I looked around and thought that no problems of the world reached this village. They stayed behind, hundreds of kilometers away from this point. The quietness of the village was absolute. I wondered whether these kids were very lucky or very unlucky to be there. I reached the conclusion that they were very lucky because they are probably happy in that remote village. That is what matters.
It took us around an hour and a half to reach the oasis. When we arrived there Alaa took me to his house. He told me that he was inviting me over for lunch. He had a very nicely decorated guests’ room where I sat waiting for his lunch. A while later a 3-year-old kid showed her head through a door on the other side of the corridor. It was Alaa's daughter. When I smiled at her she covered half of her face behind the door. Her mother called her and she disappeared. Shortly after the food arrived and I ate quite a lot. I finished the food and Alaa stayed with me for some minutes. He told me that his friend, Hesham, was already waiting for me outside. This was the same guy that picked me up at the hostel in Giza. He was taking me back to Cairo. They were old friends and were business partners. I spent couple of minutes to say goodbye to Alaa. I told him should he ever visit Europe, he will be welcome in my house. We shook hands and I departed with his friend with Cairo as our destination.
Street in El-Wahat el-Bahariya Oasis.
Shortly after getting out of Bahariya Oasis, we were surprised by a sand storm. There was a thick cloud of sand that moved perpendicular to us. It was hard to see the vehicle in front of us. It dimmed out shortly after and we were back at the inhospitable middle of nowhere in a predominantly straight road.
Hours later, the extreme environment of the desert started to turn into civilization. It was the sign that Cairo was near. It took us around an hour and a half to get from the suburbs to the city center. There was a huge traffic jam and we got stuck in the middle of it. On the highway nobody was patient. Everyone was trying their best to get to wherever they were heading to.
Some people were transporting animals in their cars. Someone even had a cow in the back of a pickup truck. It called my eye the number of minibuses filled with ordinary people. They were packed like sardines and their faces showed an expression of anguish and by the look on their eyes you could tell they were not happy. All these people were workers coming back home after a hard day of work. Some were even younger than me. I was lucky to be in that car with AC having the luxury of being able to travel and see the world.
Before arriving at the city center, we passed through a very poor part of the city. There is only one word that came to my head to describe what I saw: misery. In this part of the city having a glass window was a luxury. The dense mesh of tall cement buildings rose above crowded messy streets under a thick layer of pollution. Hesham, the driver, pointed at a building.
He said that it was his faculty and Alaa's faculty too. From his looks I could tell that he did not miss that place. He was anxious to get back to the oasis. He dropped me off near Tahrir Square, the iconic center of Egypt. Then he headed back to the oasis.
Getting used to the cars, people and pollution was not easy. I missed being far away in nature. I do not think I have seen both worlds in such a short period of time. The contrast was enormous. I liked the experience and it was so rewarding to be able to see that beautiful part of the world. I discovered a little bit of the Bedouin life and saw beautiful secret places. I also learned that some people live a simple life and are happier.
I hope in the future I find places like these and meet people who can teach me valuable lessons as the ones I learned during this expedition.
