The desert is one of the mysterious places on earth where normal rules about living are suspended and even inverted. There is no water- yet we need water for life. There are no crops and trees and yet these are essential to make shelter and food. More like the sea than any comparable landmass the desert stretches away to the horizon blinking as if it is its opposite- a giant lake- but of course this is just a mirage.
The desert is where monastics and religious folk have traveled since the beginning of history to get away from distractions of life to find a communion between man and the natural world in all its awe, wonder and vastness. Some of those ancient monasteries are still inhabited in the Egyptian desert- still far from ‘civilisation’.
The desert is above all a clean place- there are, once you leave the oases, no mosquitoes and no flies, and the ground is as clean as antiseptic- when a Bedouin cuts his foot he will rub sand in the wound to hasten healing as sand in the deep desert is as clean and bacteria free as things get.
The sheer variety of the Egyptian Sahara is staggering. It is the most varied desert on the planet. Unlike the endless gravel plains of Libya, the Egyptian desert landscape can change abruptly from steep lines of seif dune to rocky canyons to vertiginous escarpments to plains dotted with strange conical hills to sand sheets that seem to stretch for ever only to end in a confusion of star dunes after ten kilometres. The variety is endless which is why walking is always fascinating in the Egyptian desert. At first the very LACK of anything apparent causes one to FOCUS and open up. In our busy modern lives we are so busy we spend much of the time closed to that which impacts on us as a survival method, a way of retaining our sanity from a thousand bombardments- but in the desert we return to our primeval state where every rock, flower and flying bird is of vital interest. Then, after a while, you begin to see that desert isn’t a dead world, an empty world at all- it is overflowing with things to find and look at: fossils, flint scrapers, lizards, beetles, diminutive fennec foxes with their huge ears, falcons, petrified wood, stone axes and spear heads left behind from when the entire desert was a wetter savannah; grinding stones, ostrich egg shells, 5000 year old rock art paintings and carvings, old camel route markers, Roman pottery, acacia trees clinging to life, ochre deposits, pre-historic shark’s remains- the list goes on- the desert is a place of marvels just waiting to be found.
At night in winter the desert can be as cold as 0 degrees Celsius. By day it will be a pleasant 25 degrees. In the summer it can be 40 degrees by day and 15 degrees by night- though it will feel colder by comparison. But even on the hottest days in the summer there is usually a breeze in the desert- which makes it bearable. As long as you have enough water you can visit and enjoy the desert year round – though for longer trips it is advisable to visit during the months from October to April.
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