Volume Six

An Account of the Crazy Eight Trip to the Western Desert of Egypt



On Wednesday October 6th eight teachers met up around 7am to go to the desert for a 3 night camping trip. It was a holiday in Egypt and so there was not a whole lot going on in the city. It was roughly 365km from Cairo to Bahariya (Ba-ha-ray-a) on a desolate desert road in a cramped 14 passenger van/bus. We had our ornery driver and the obligatory Tourist Police officer who accompanies foreigners on trips outside Cairo (especially American tourists it seems). He of course has his 30 round semi-automatic gun underneath his suit. Here are the players in the ‘Crazy Eight’:

Kim (aka Twitch) – Canadian in her second year at AIS, fun loving, boisterous leader of the group.

Jessica and Kristy (aka The Dutch Oven twins) – Also Canadians in their second year at AIS. They are both counterparts of Kim and though they stir up $hit they tend to act innocent. Good pair to have around.

Joanne (aka Chicken Choker) – Canadian in her first year in Egypt. Goofy girl who loves to laugh and can wolf down anything the Bedouins can cook up.

Jona (aka The Jizz Factor) – American girl who’s gentle demeanor can hide her humorous and sometimes subversive side.

Cory (aka Drive-By) – Jona’s Husband, loves Bob and Doug Mackenzie and anything else that makes fun of Canada. Has a tendency towards framing others for passing wind but is quite knowledgeable on geology, which came in handy.

Paula (aka Pussy Paula) – Named for her love of cats (?) and is clearly just being exploited for her kindness and we love her for it.

Grant (aka The Sharter) – I also was eating the Bedouin food with a vengeance and the vengeance was so great that I earned my name, not that I ‘sharted.’

Suffice it to say that the weekend was full of laughs and debauchery unbecoming educators but fittingly well placed for tourists in the desert.

We stopped only once on the way there to pick up petrified wood from the middle of the desert. Also there were shells that could be found with little effort and it turns out that the desert was once a large sea that included the current Mediterranean sea.

We arrived in Bahariya to a small dodgy looking town around noon. We rolled through wondering where in this town could there possibly be a hotel we could live with. As it turned out the hotel was passable although the hot spring for which it is named is more like tomato soup with the amount of iron in the water. It was clean, had beer and food so we were OK for one night. We had lunch of salad (which in Egypt means cucumbers and tomatoes), chick peas, potato soup and spaghetti. The spaghetti was unappetizing for many of us (not me however) because of questionable cheese and strange sauce.

The owner of the hotel, Peter, is a German fellow with an unmistakable and hilariously imitatable voice/accent. He was very nice and helpful to us and was very concerned that we were happy, always a nice touch.

Wednesday afternoon was spent seeing the ‘sights’ of Bahariya. There were Tombs discovered there and mummies recovered in the area that were dubbed the golden mummies because of their gilded wooden death masks that were amazingly well preserved. We saw two tombs and actually if you look here: http://www.crystalinks.com/bahariya.html
you can scroll through the pictures that we couldn’t take. We saw a temple of Alexander the Great which the guide books accurately described as having undergone a terrible restoration in recent years. Overall the sights were as impressive as the town but it wasn’t what we were there for.

The whole trip was like a continuous geology lesson. The Bahariya valley was created by volcanic activity that created a depression in the land and threw up a lot of volcanic rock. There are millions of tiny pebbles all across the surface of the sand making it look black, hence the name the Black Desert. There are large pieces of the volcanic rock which we collected here and there throughout the journey. We loaded our gear up on Thursday morning onto two Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4s with our two Bedouin guides; Awam and Mohammed. So we were rolling along the same desert road that brought us to the town when suddenly we veered into the black dusted sand on vaguely visible tire tracks from a previous journey (probably by our guides) and they drove out and around a large sand mountain and then we spontaneously drive up onto part of it, or at least we tried it was three attempts before our truck got up. This was just the tip of the iceberg as far as fun driving.

Follow this link to see pictures from our trip. They are from a friend’s digital camera.

http://share.shutterfly.com/osi.jsp?i=EeMN27du4bORg

We stopped for lunch in a ‘village’ which is more a collection of mud brick homes and has a large family living in it. Lunch was tuna, salad, onions, cheese and bread. We also had to stop for 2 ½ hours because the guides don’t drive during the hottest part of the day. So we sat and relaxed on some blankets and chatted, read guide books or snoozed. We set off around 2 P.M and were once again jumping over hills and barreling through the desert. The scenery was incredible as you can see in the pictures. We stopped after climbing to a look out of sorts and we saw our first taste of the white desert. We could see a ‘mushroom’ of sorts where the stone has been worn away around the bottom and it is very white and the shape begins to look like a mushroom. We set off and were in our campsite by 5:30 and the sunset was at 5:45 which was amazing. Our baptism by sand was to take place throughout the next couple of days.

As we were in the desert you can imagine the availability of toilet facilities (read: none). We were camped atop a mound of sand roughly 50ft in diameter with a flatter side to the south, this became the ‘ladies’ room’ and the men went anywhere with the wind. Our guides asked us if we wanted tents set up and the consensus was to sleep under the stars. The trucks were placed nose to nose in an ‘L’ with us facing the southwest. They put up material attached to poles for walls and put carpets and mats around the ‘L’ for seating. They had picked up firewood along the way and they set about making a fire and dinner. We clowned around for a couple of hours having some libations and making the most of our vacation until dinner was served. The hotel food hadn’t been the greatest fare and the fire grilled chicken, potatoes and rice that we were served in the darkness of the desert tasted amazing. I had seconds of the chicken.

Being roughly 400km from the nearest thing resembling civilization you can imagine what the sky looked like. I was hoping to see some planets but the sky was a carpet of stars with the Milky Way a prominent white stripe stretching from one horizon to the other. The moon didn’t rise until the early morning hours so it was spectacular to see nothing but the stars.

The next morning we broke camp and were traveling across a part of the desert that Kim rightly dubbed ‘the surface of the moon.’ We crawled along all morning with intermittent bursts of speed. The ground was unusually rocky in the area we were traveling in and the Bedouins were careful to not carry any speed here so they wouldn’t puncture a tire. It was the low point of the trip but I guess guys who are comfortable flying across dunes are not accustomed to driving on rocks. We stopped at a couple of natural springs that were used in Roman times as places to set up farming. One of them had recently been made into a bricked pool and had a number of people visiting it. The last thing we wanted to see was a bunch of other tourists on our safari so we moved on as quickly as we could. The next spring we went to was less popular but it had some remnants of pottery lying about so I grabbed a couple of pieces thinking that they might be really old, who knows? Close to one of the springs was a tomb of sorts that had three ‘mummies’ in it, it was all very sketchy and informal but you can see the skeletons in the pictures I posted. We have no way of knowing how old they are but we were told that they were Romans so that would make them roughly 2400 years old I think.

Back in the trucks we crawled alond a little while longer until we eventually came into the large white windblown limestone forms that ranged from 5ft to 300ft tall and varied in width and length also. The ground was strewn with pieces of iron pyrite, a black crystalline rock that formed inside the limestone as the sea life was settling millions of years ago. This was to be our lunch/midday rest spot. The scenery was amazing and Joanna, Cory and I played Bocce ball in the sand before lunch. Lunch was foul (pronounced ‘fool’) which are beans, salad, cheese and bread. (Anyone noticing a trend?) It was hot and yummy and I ate my share. After lunch some relaxed while some explored the area. We picked up the best crystalline rocks we could find as well as anything else interesting like fossils and such. Cory attempted to climb up a rather high embankment with little success. Later we went up another mound that was equally high though easier to ascend. We were about 200ft high and had a spectacular view (see the picture with me and Cory posing together).

Still writing the end....