El Qasr

On Monday morning we woke up early, bundled into a minivan, and set out into the vast nothingness of the Sahara Desert. Once you leave the narrow sliver of green that flanks the Nile River, there's not much to see until you reach the Atlantic Coast...or so I thought.

We were on the only road for miles, and the monotony of the sand was only broken by the occasional pile of rocks. Thankfully the driver was pushing the minivan to the limit (obviously, because he was Egyptian), so that meant we would at least arrive early to the middle of nowhere. Then, after about 250km into the desert, we reached a random patch of green, then another.

Thanks to western TV I had always imagined an oasis to be a small pool of water with a palm tree or two. But the Kharga Oasis sits in a depression that is about 160km long, and supports a string of settlements totalling almost 70,000 people. We stopped in El-Kharga for lunch, and got mobbed by school kids. In Australia this would only happen if we were giving away free iPhones, but here the kids were all just curious to see the pale foreigners.

After a chance to stretch our legs and have something to eat, we jumped back into our minivan and continued deeper into the desert. A few hours later we arrived in the Dakhla Oasis, which would be our rest stop for the night. It was quite a pretty town, and was definitely not something that I expected to see out here in the desert. From the roof of our hotel we could see a patchwork quilt of various crops, stretching for kilometres out into the desert. It provided a really striking contrast to the barren wasteland surrounding it.

The next morning we set off for the medieval mud brick city of El-Qasr. We were still on the only road westward, following the old caravan routes that connect the oases like a sparse desert web. El-Qasr was an fascinating place. Apparently, it has been inhabited since the Roman times, but the mud brick ruins that we were seeing originated from the Ottoman Empire about 500 years ago. It was amazing to see multi-storey buildings made out of mud, including the 21m tall minaret of the Nasr El-Din Mosque.
After a few hours of exploring, we returned to our trusty minivan for the final leg to the Farafra Oasis. Here we were transferred to serious looking 4WDs, and we collected an equally-serious looking armed guard...things were getting real...Leggi altro