Bawiti
Nov 10–11, 2009 in Egypt ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C
After a night camped under the stars in the spectacular White Desert, it was time to hit the "road" again, but not before a bit of fun in the sand. Rolling sand dunes connect, and surround, some of the largest limestone peaks, and our guides wanted to demonstrate their 4x4 skills while they had a chance. It wasn't long before this led to the rest of us needing to demonstrate our digging skills, as the 4x4's were promptly bogged in the soft sand. With the fun (and digging) over, we rejoined the "highway", and continued on our northerly bearing.
It was clear that the bearing was more important than sticking to the actual road, and there were a few reasons for this. Firstly, the shifting sands of the desert reclaimed large sections of the highway, so there was little difference between driving in the dunes and driving on the bitumen. Secondly, the pesky government roadblocks were an irritation that our drivers were happy to avoid, and the vast nothingness made it easy to detour around them. After an hour or two of emulating our own stage of the Dakar Rally, our drivers brought us upon an area of the desert that was a bizarre inversion of what we had left behind that morning.
Looking like we had crossed some kind of geographic chess board, we were now surrounded by the surreal peaks of the BLACK Desert. Apparently, these volcano-shaped mounds are actually made up of a variety of different rocks, but are typically capped with a basalt tip, which gives them their characteristic black colour.
Despite being winter, the days were still quite warm, so our guides found us a perfect roadside cafe for lunch. This retreat came complete with an external, and INTERNAL, water trough to cool us down. So, we dipped our feet in the water, while sampling more delicious Egyptian food.
With our energy replenished, we continued on until we reached our overnight stop in Bawiti. As with our earlier stop in Dakhla, this one was in another oasis, which included the first trees that we'd seen in days. We relaxed in our hotel's rooftop beer garden (beerless for any muslim locals), then had dinner at the modestly named "Popular" restaurant. Tomorrow we would be heading even further into the Desert...Read more