Day 2

Dakhla, Djedefre's Water Mountain, Sugar Loaf, and the Red Lion Yardangs

We left later than intended. Loading always seems to take longer than intended.

Over the service station wall as we filled with the last diesel that would come from a bowser we could see a really spectacular mesa ringing the oasis.

Dahkla is an unexpectedly prosperous little town - unexpected at least after the comparative poverty of Bahariya with its nasty white stone 'brick' buildings overtaking the lovely old mud brick, and the abject dust and poverty of Farafra. The Oasis Hotel had been pretty - built up a hill with domes on the square accommodation blocks, and the lighting at night was entrancing - perhaps more so than the harsh light of day.

We traveled north, then swung off the road and out into the desert. We were hoping to find Djedefre's Water Mountain - a cache for supplies and water discovered by Carlo Bergman and published in 2003. It was ringed with mystery. A similar site - Abu Ballus pottery trail - had been found earlier as evidence that Pharaonic Egypt DID stray away from the Nile. Documentary evidence of large groups of men sent after pigments and something - imhet - which is not identified today - are interesting and backed up by the large caches of water jars in pottery on the Abu Ballus site. Unfortunately most of the pottery has since been destroyed, and the area turned into a desert rubbish site after many generations of less than scrupulous campers, and we have decided not to go there.

The Water mountain has the mystery of the recently discovered. Many people claim to have the correct GPS location for it, and Alberto Siliotti, writer of the Egyptian Pocket Guides and many marvelous maps, is with us as the trailing car and has a set of 'accurate' location notes. His wife Yvonne is a Geologist and has worked with Ancient Egyptian use of pigments - so an interesting companion.

We started driving over loose sharp gibbers. This is slow going. Moving fast might puncture tyres. The gibbers form a thick and crunchy crust like a cream brulee. Break through and you sink to the axles in soft sand.

It is an odd area. There are rings of sharp rock that stick up through the sand, and look, perhaps because of their regularity, man-made. They obviously are not as there are just too many, and they go on for far too long. Sometimes it is just the very tips of pointed rocks in small circles, at other times they are high, wide and effusive, with black slabs seeming to fall over each other in haste to get out of the ground. Photography is near impossible in the jerking lurching process, and with a late start, and a long way to travel, everyone is concerned about our slow progress.

Driving was hard and erratic. Soft sand stretches meant a need for speed, with occasional dragging sensations as one side of the car dropped into a softer stretch of sand and slewed us briefly sideways. Then abrupt slowing as we hit more sharp stone. Through all of it there is a remorseless wind blowing, spinning sand in fog-like waves against the sides of the car.

I am in a car with Jean Daniel and Marita. Marita is in the front as she is easily carsick, and I am wondering how long she can hold out in progress like this. They are delightful - Swiss, and the most delightful of possible companions, both erudite and intelligent and with that marvelous ability to converse on all topics with ease.

We have a poor quality photocopy of an image of the water mountain - but no-one pointed out that the desert, by this time, is littered with identical shapes.

As we move west long crackles of white chalk - or is it gypsum? - appear in the rock and threading through the layers. As the wind blew, and the two leading cars, Mahmoud's and Alberto's, kick up clouds of sand, the fine white powder hanging in the air long after the sand has settled, leaving the cars trailing long plumes like jets.

We all pull up in front of an obvious tomb of unknown age. Probably old as there has been little or no travel in this area - there is no water nearby and nowhere to travel from! It is a lonely grave, but very beautiful.

The tracks of the cars are deep here in soft sand, and layer in beige and white and honey and rose, and sometimes a clear buttery yellow.

We found the Water Mountain. Somehow I suspect many of us thought it would not happen. It was one dark squat hill among many, but marked very distinctly by a festive white archaeologist's tent - which I avoided in the photo. Note the clearly cut away area which creates the terrace halfway up! There were deep-cut caches too for water or water in vessels.

I loved the painting of Djedefre smiting his enemies - the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt seemed to spend a lot of time doing just that.

Cartouche and hieroglyphs

Alberto at the site on the terrace

Lunch was being prepared for us while we walked, and we came back to the cars to find tuna salad - rough chopped and crunchy with red onion and mayonnaise - and fresh brown bread, hard yellow cheese, tomato and cucumber in tahini, and a bit of the eggplant left from the day before. Guavas followed. The smell in the car seems to get stronger each day and I am starting to think I will be glad when we finish them.

As we leave the Water Mountain Alberto is stuck in the sand. That is no big deal. However, as we dig and push it becomes obvious that his four wheel drive was not working - the car can only operate in two wheel drive. This is potentially a problem as we venture into more difficult driving conditions.

Late in the evening as the sun is starting to drop and the light becoming richer and golden we reach the first sand dunes. Mahmoud as lead driver pulls onto the sharp crest at the top and sinks to his axles. He signals Alberto in - and Alberto does not even get to the top of the crest before sinking. One by one the other cars all line up - ours included - and all bogged in very deep soft sand.

There is a funny thing about sand dunes. Sitting in a car on top of them - and I have realised you always sit for a few seconds at the top - they look UNBELIEVABLY steep. They look as if the car will just roll end over end if you dare to drop the front wheels down onto that slope. Sitting there and looking at it I felt all my old fear of heights well up and choke me. I got out and walked down - there was no rush as it would take time to get the cars free.

From the bottom it was just a gentle slope - but I NEVER got over that moment of sheer terror at the top - and the clutch bars above the windows have been named the "O Shit! bars' for good reason.
We lost eggs with the first descent

So our nice young army officer, Mohamed, carried the rest, sliding down the slope.

We set up camp in the wind - a wind that fought our attempts to put up our tents. First the cars are pulled into a three-sides-of-a-square formation.

Then the frames and main shelters go up.

Dinner was vegetable soup followed by grilled chicken and rice with vermicelli.

Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat - the Trip of a Lifetime

Bear with me - there is so much to tell. I have done so many other things since I last wrote. I have taught in Bangkok in Thailand, stood on top of a mountain of ten million ounces of gold down near Marsa Alam at Sukari - the Centamin gold mine, been to teach at the mecca of quilters - Quilt Festival at Houston in Texas, and now I have done something I have been burning to do since I came to Egypt.

Gilf Kebir was made famous by the book and movie, The English Patient. In an opening scene a Bedouin wanders into a cave and is spellbound by the images on the walls. Later the hero takes the heroine there too, and it is here that she dies, surrounded by images of Swimmers. From the moment I realised that the Cave of the Swimmers existed, and was in Egypt, I have wanted to go there.

Now I have been. Of all the things I saw the only thing that was a real disappointment was the Cave of the Swimmers - but more later on that. Blame Hollywood for going for evocative imagery rather than the truth!

Day One

On 10th November a group of three Swiss, two Germans, and one Australian left the International Hot Springs Hotel to go to Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat. With us went a guide, and two other drivers, and a young Captain from the Egyptian Army, and two Italians in their own vehicle. We faced fourteen days of travel, twelve in the desert with desert camps, not toilets or showers for twelve days. Wet Ones, I was quietly told, were the secret of desert hygiene. I stocked up in Houston - or rather, two friends bought them for me. We had agreed over Texas barbecue in Goodes that panti-liners might be good too, as we were only allowed one small bag each and a small rucksack for stuff that needed to be with us in the cars. I packed camera equipment, watercolours, in hope, and a small diary.

Meet Marita, Jean Daniel, Irene, Helena, Heide, Mahmoud, our guide, Peter and Miharu, the organisers from the Hot Spring International Hotel (who did not come) and me. Alberto and Yvonne must have been packing their car and will appear later.

From my diary.

Dipping into the first drop into the Bahariya Oasis we left the sun above us and while it still picked out the gilded tops of the mesas above us our world dropped into mauves and lilacs with the abruptness of diving underwater.

Diary.

In a car redolent with the heavy perfume of guava, the light freshness of orange rinds and the orange leaves which are crushed under the green gold fruit we left for Dakhla. The desert seems featureless and pale, washed clean and over-bleached. Shadows of the white wind-formed shapes in the desert are coppery on the sand dunes, and and indigo against the cobalt winter sky. Fingers of pale sand have crept across the road, and can be a jolt like an abrupt road hump if you hit them unexpectantly.

... mud domes, smokey taupe against the pale sky, and the sky afloat with black crows, seven then nine. 'Seven for a secret that will never be told', but I cannot remember nine.... The Farafra Oasis wraps more along the road that Bahariya with sudden stretches of vegetation, more vegetables and market gardens, and less dates. There are farmers with donkey carts, children with donkeys, farmers with hand carts - all type of carts, pulled by people or animals or other vehicles. There are bright ochre box-shaped houses with bright green doors tucked under eucalyptus so green and perfect that they could not possibly be growing in Australia where insects chew every second leaf.

There are men with guns, in galabeyiahs, and in police and army uniform. We pull up before the checkpoint and the drivers hand out the licences, IDs and permission slips for the desert.

There is a hitch. The drivers pull the cars to the shade of the trees and wander inside the small check point office. We are supposed to have our escorting officer, but have arranged to collect him in Dakhla and they do not like it.

Our driver, Hani, comes out and starts the car and whirls into the small and dusty township of Farafra. We are puzzled as the others have not joined us. He jumps from the car, moving from one shop to another. He is asking for something but shopkeepers are all shaking their heads. He drives the car further along and starts the same thing, We are puzzled but decide while he is hopping to climb out and buy cigarette lighters. None of us smoke but it seems that we need to carry a plastic bag for used toilet paper and wet ones (how basic can you get?), which we keep till the end of the day then burn. We have all agreed that a lighter would work better than matches in a breezy desert landscape.

While asking at one shop for our lighters Hani rushes past and says "I come back', then took off in a cloud of dust. This is really odd and we cannot work out what is going on. We stand uneasily at the side of the road and after about five minutes later he returns and the tale unfolds.

Mahmoud, our guide, has had his licence confiscated. In many countries this would mean an immediate halt to the expedition. Here, he pays 20 pounds Egyptian for a piece of paper to cover him for one week. In fact we will be in the desert for twelve days, but that is a problem for later.

The officer checking the paperwork had asked for tea. Mahmoud politely told him that we had some but that it was at the bottom of all the packing and he was sorry, but it was too hard to get it out. The officer said he was willing to wait while they unpacked. Mahmoud said he was not willing to unpack or to keep the group waiting. The officer said that he was willing to wait and that he could keep the group waiting anyway. Then the officer said it was a pity then that he had too much on top of his car. In fact - the other cars were all packed higher! Mahmoud made the mistake of pointing out three other vehicles that had just gone through the checkpoint with much higher loads.

It was at this point that Hani had rushed out saying he would find tea. The officer only gave him ten minutes and the town was three minutes drive away - and the town was, it seems, out of tea.

So - Mahmoud's licence was taken. Hani was muttering under his breathe as we left the oasis and I recognised 'sharmouta' - very rude in Arabic, and basically meaning slut! It is quite a popular name for female cats.

We had lunch under date palms somewhere past Farafra. The drivers flipped a striped rug out on the ground and set up thick sliced tomato - it is incredible in Egypt - with salty white cheese spread on it, and stuffed cabbage leaves with a spiced rice filling, small eggplants fried whole and split and spread with a pounded mix of peppers, both hot and the capsicum variety, and garlic, with lemon and oil and salt and pepper. With it we had rough brown oasis bread - it was a feast. It was followed by sliced guava which we also ate with the bread.

By the time we drove into Dakla it was night and dozens - hundreds probably - of donkeys were trip-trapping home. Loads varied - huge loads of fodder reached from one side of the road almost to another with cars squeezing past and a driver perched on top, and loads of wood caught against the oncoming headlights like a lattice of black lace. A trailer, badly loaded and driven, veered from side to side, effectively blocking the road. I once, in Africa, faced an angry male elephant with a similar sway, but he was facing us. Our driver squeezed past with some risk to both the trailer and our vehicle and got a rude sign from the driver - funny how those are almost universal. And Hani again shouted 'Sharmouta'.

We checked into the Oasis Hotel and Camp and it was the last night in a room, with a shower, or with a toilet. Dinner was in the restaurant of the hotel - with the small disadvantage that my legs were seen as a smorgasbord for about twenty hungry mosquitoes.

I washed my hair very well next morning knowing it was the last time for twelve days.