The Black part of the Western (Libyan) Desert

  Bahariyya Oasis and beyond, Egypt
Sunday, February 19, 2006

With a tear in the eye I saw Mystery off at the airport - it had been great travelling as a team for the past two weeks and now I'd be on my lonesome again, heading off into the Western (Libyan) Desert to an unknown fate.

My intended destination was Bahariyya Oasis, a small bedouin community 330km south west of Cairo and well into the 'Black' part of the greater Libyan Desert which stretches for hundreds of kilometres westwards into the country bearing the same name. Apparently beautiful country but I didn't see much on the way out - the bus left Cairo at 6pm, making the perilous crossing in the dark of the night. At least the stars were magnificent to look at the rest stop we made.



So it was only the next morning that I saw my first real desert oasis. And in the end it was a little disappointing. Certainly not the handful of tall palms around a cool, crystal clear pond with endless sand all around. More a smudge of greenness on the horizon and as you got closer, a shambling collection of decrepit mudbrick dwellings amongst it all. The main street didn't inspire much confidence so I was happy to be whisked away in a laden 4WD that same morning.



The main tourist business here is trekking into the Black and White sections of the Western Desert for overnight camps. It certainly beats the old way of bumping around in the heat on a camel, and the diverse scenery and excellent four wheel driving terrain make it a superb trip out. Just check some of the pictures below!



The black desert is apparently an ancient sea bed that was at the time strewn with underwater volcanoes. These erupted regularly and deposited chunks of black metallic rock all over the place for hundreds of square kilometres, permanently giving the whole landscape a black coating (hence the name). The environment is very stable, the wind doesn't move things about much so all of this has stayed pretty much exactly the same for the past millions of years.



There are patches where the terrain changes - a massive sand dune here or a small oasis emerging out of the dust over there. The black pebbles are constantly around but their perch changes regularly as you cruise on by.



We stopped for lunch at a site featuring a lot of quartz crystal structures, which struck me as odd if the ancient sea-bed and volcano theory was to ring true. Quartz swirls in the sand looked very much like fossilized tree stumps in some places and some of the other black rocks around seemed to feature tiny flower or fern leaf fossils. Maybe this area was a sea shore, next to the ancient sea? Who knows, it looked good anyway.



Onwards we headed into the afternoon. Spectacular scenery hove into view around each new corner - in particular one area that looked very much like pictures of the desert and canyon areas of the USA that I've seen. Immense sand dunes complimented layers of chalk and limestone to very pleasing effect and Makhmud the driver enjoyed sliding the car's back-end out and leaning us precariously sideways along uneven tracks as we trucked along.



A little farther on we crossed some very uneven land and then made for a small clump of palms more in tune with my imaginings of what an oasis should look like. Just an outcrop of foliage in the sandy desert around, this continues to be a working stop for the camel drivers and nomads that pass through the area. The spring has been piped and artificially pooled for convenience but it still looks very quaint on the horizon.



Late in the afternoon very distinctive white forms appeared on the horizon, like giant marshmellows in the sand. We had come a couple of hundred kilometres further southwest from Bahariyya towards Farafra Oasis, and these chalk features marked a corner of the White Desert - a truly spectacular environment that you're going to have to wait until next entry to read about. Stay tuned!

Next entry -> Marshmellows in the white desert

Technotrekker Travel Technologies - HTML editing

Building travel blogs with images weaved in requires a little basic HTML, the basic language that allows web pages to be displayed on the Internet.

Many software tools can generate HTML for you these days, but they create messy, bloated HTML that takes longer for people to download and hence read (or worse - that can't be read in some web browsers!). So I just do it by hand, using a few HTML 'tags' to display images, hyperlinks and formatted (bold, italics and underlined) text. Then you copy and paste the results into Travelpod's add entry page and viola - a new entry with lots of pretty pictures to ooh and ahh at.

You can use Microsoft's Notepad app to do this, which is available on any Windows PC (there's probably and equivalent on Macs too), but coders around the world use a great little application called Textpad by Helios Software. In general it just makes managing all text-based files easier with colour coding of the code (to show errors), better Indenting and Word Wrapping and nice Search/Replace features.

It may or may not be of use to you, but I use it almost every day, so should be included in my Travel Technology bag.