Breakfast inside the dining building. Scrambled eggs, oranges, naan, cucumbers, tomatoes, tea. Not bad. I like eating inside so much better!
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| Breakfast |
Humvee picks us up at 7:00 am for our
White Desert tour. We only bring with us what we will need for this day and night. Tomorrow we will return to Bahariya/International Hot Spring Hotel
. Drive through town. We drive through some pretty awesome scenery. The desert is beautiful.
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Driving through town to the White Desert
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| Building bricks |
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| Footprints in the sand |
We reach the
BLACK DESERT. Humvee tells us he will wait in the car for us if we want to walk around the base of a typical mountain here. We do this and it was very quiet, very peaceful.
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We walked around the base of this mountain
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| Returning to the car |
We stop at
AL HAYIZ where Humvee buys some wood and he will go to pray while we have
lunch. Also here I meet Ram, son of the India ambassador to Egypt. He's with his mom and dad. He tells me about how he could see the burning of the tires, etc. in Tahir Square during the revolution. He's bright, talkative, sweet. We are seated at low tables and sit on pillows. Lovely carpets/rugs. Our lunch consisted of hot mint tea, pita, tuna fish, cucumber, cheeses, dip with tomatoes in it. Coke, water. It was good. There's a narrow trough of water running through this building. I guess it cools the room?? Outside there is a tank of water for swimming.
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Lunch
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Humvee
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We've reached the
WHITE DESERT! There's a sign. Then we stop at
CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN. Called this because of the large quartz crystals in the rock. It's roped off probably to prevent people from taking pieces of the rock with them. We see very white rocks that look like snowfields. Then shapes like mushrooms, animals. The White Desert is made up of white chalk that was deposited in the calm, shallow sea that once covered this area during the Cretaceous period-about one million years ago. These chalk deposits consist of shells of microorganisms and microscopic single celled algae. When the water receded the deposited sediment was shaped by the wind. Natural weathering and heavy rainfall helped to shape the bizarre sculptures which we are seeing today. We make several stops to check out the shapes.
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| Sign |
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Crystal Mountain
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Humvee drives, finds a spot he likes. Sets up our
CAMP. He puts down several rugs and asks if we want to sleep inside a tent or under the stars. We opt for under the stars. He makes a curtain wall attached to the car. Clever. The wood is for a fire for cooking our
DINNER-BBQ chicken on the grill over the fire. A unique pot of potatoes, onions, tomatoes. Yummy. Rice. Apples. Mint tea. Maybe it's the desert atmosphere but dinner was simple but very delicious. We can hear Bedouin music from other camps. Humvee puts out a pan of water and some food leftovers. Shortly we see several bat eared desert foxes. Cool. The moon. So many stars. We use the sleeping bags as pillows. Blankets are all we need.
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| Bat eared desert fox |
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The moon
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