New Stuff

We will be starting our journey in the footsteps of Rohlfs this December 2009 from Dakhla Oasis. Below is some information about the place.

Dakhla is among the most remote oases being far from both Cairo and Luxor. To get there from Cairo you drive south over 850km. Yet it retains a charm quite its own that makes journeying there well worth the expenditure in time and effort. You pass from Farafra along one of the loneliest stretches of road in Egypt. Once past the outlying villages of Abu Mingar there is nothing for 200km- just empty road, dunes on the right and the unending escarpment on the left. Anytime you stop- and you should stop because this modern road follows an ancient route through the desert- you will find stone tools scattered close to the road. You can stand by your silent car and hear nothing but the wind for ages, turning over the evidence of ancient man in your hands.

The road from Farafra then passes a few outlying patches of green and then a village. After that one has to wind up and over the great dunes blocking the entrance to the main part of the oasis. These dunes lie between a mountainous outpost- Gebel Edmondstone- named after the Victorian cartographer Archibald Edmondstone , the first European visitor to Dakhla since Roman times. He arrived in 1819. We will pass around Gebel Edmondstone on our way to Siwa through the Great Sand Sea.

But back on the road, once past Gebel Edmondstone you are surrounded by fields alternating with patches of rock and desert. You’ll know you’re in Dakhla because, unlike Farafra, everyone working wears a straw hat against the heat- which makes the place look vaguely Mexican!

Dakhla is considered to be one of the oldest inhabited places in Africa, or rather Mut, its main town is. Mut, which means mother in the Ancient Egyptian tongue, is really the mother of all dwelling places. Houses with organic remains carbon dated to 13,000 years ago have been unearthed there.

Qasr

Dakhla is home to many ancient remains, hot springs and towering over it – the escarpment which dominates the skyline on the northern side. In the oasis town of Qsar (like many of the Oases, the main town is called Qsar after the fortress) a Dutch lead team of locals have succeeded in almost completely rebuilding the dark mud walled old town. This place of narrow alleys and secret passages is one of the great sights of Dakhla. Lose yourself in an endless labyrinth which is like something out of Starwars or the Sheltering Sky. In one linked house lurks a blacksmith and his family- making knives, needles and sickles with their signature saw toothed edge. This design has been traced back to pre-dynastic times when the saw teeth were microliths of flint set in a curved wooden handle.

In the maze of streets you’ll easily get lost so take one of the unpaid guides and give him a tip- they are not at all pushy and really very helpful. There is also a small museum on the edge of the mudwalled town. Though Qasr was deserted for concrete dwellings in the early 1990s a few families have moved back- though the laying of a water main was controversial. In the past all water was brought in by hand- because the consequences of a flood would be disastrous- the dissolving of the very fabric of the town. Needless to say, no one ever leaves the tap running.

Deir El Haggar

A few kilometres before Qasr is the intriguing Roman ruin of Deir El Haggar. This place was once under sand- which helped preserve the paint on the carvings. There is something very recent about paint and to see some that is 2000 years old is quite amazing. One can compare oneself to the great explorer Rolhfs who signature can be seen quite clearly on a column in front the temple of Deir el Haggar. But he carved it when the sand was much higher. Now cleared away to reveal more of the temple, his graffiti is a good three metres above the ground. One is left standing far below, pondering the neat and exact way they carved their names in those days- compared to the slapdash way people scratch their signature these days.

Rohlfs started on his famous expedition to try and cross the Sahara to Libya from Dakhla. He failed and it wasn’t until the era of the motorcar that this feat was achieved by a European explorer. He did, of course, get to Siwa- and it is this 650 km journey we hope to emulate.

Across the way from this restored roman temple complex are conical hills full of tombs. Some have been excavated, some robbed but as you cast your eyes further there are many more similar looking hills spread throughout Dakhla. When people have been living somewhere continuously in such a dry climate for 13,000 years there are a lot of bodies to bury. You get a glimpse of how the whole oasis is one great archeological site.

Amheida Wall Paintings

Between Qasr and Mut lies the extensive Roman ruins of Amheida, perhaps one of the largest and most significant within the oasis of Dakhla. In Roman times it was a major city, relying for its wealth on the good farming in the oasis. The old city remains as sand buried buildings, a temple and over 3000 graves. Most recently a marvelous series of wall paintings have been unearthed. They depict in great detail scenes of Greek and Roman mythology in a large 15 room building dug from the sand by a Canadian team of archeolgists. These are the first wall paintings to be found in Dakhla and one of the main paintings tells the story of Perseus and Andromeda which supposedly occurred itself in the Western Desert.

Biking in Mut

To see all the antquities in Dakhla you can ride in the back of a pick up, take a taxi or hitch lifts. Better, probably, is to hire a pedal bike. You can hire bicycles in all the oases. Mut is no exception- though with its wide largely empty roads it makes for some of the best on-road cycling in Egypt. You can hire bikes at several places and it is a cheap and easy way to get around.

Final fact: Desert raiders originating in Chad attacked Dakhla up until the 19^th century using iron boomerangs. These are not so different in design to the boomerangs used by the Ancient Egyptians to catch small birds.

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.

After a long layoff and a number of projects that were cancelled due to Robert Twigger suffering eye trauma (not desert related), and undergoing three operations, which fortunately succeeded. Anyway- we are now back in business. We’re still standing! The big one this year is the complete re-enactment of the Rohlf’s expedition. With camels! By Egyptian desert standards this is a huge expedition. It’s planned for late December 2009/January 2010. The total length of time will be about 30-34 days. We will set off from Dakhla on Dec 27th across the bands of dunes to Regenfield and aim to arrive in Siwa, having crossed the entire sand sea, by Jan 30th. This is an absolute one-off journey. To our knowledge it has only been done on camel a couple of times since Rohlf’s expedition in 1874. So for anyone interested in camels this is the ultimate camel trip in the world! Right now we have only seven places for this expedition and obviously we want the right kind of people. You’ll need to be enthusiastic, good humored and able to walk or ride or walk/ride 25km a day every day with one rest day every seven days out. You’ll need to be able to raise sponsorship to pay for the trip (it won’t be cheap- around 3400 euros) or have enough money to pay for it yourself. If you want to apply send us an email.

 When people think about desert driving they usually think about getting stuck in the sand.  But actually in the desert you can spend as much time driving over gravel, rocks, and vegetation albeit sparse vegetation as you do driving over sand. Hard tyres are fine for hard surfaces but if your tyres are too hard then you will sink when you do finally hit the sand. On the other hand, if they don’t have enough air in them then you are likely to get a puncture when you weave your way through an area of sharp rocks. Many people carry a small compressor to reinflate tyres. A foot pump is not very good because it will get sand in it and chances are it will eventually break. In Germany and France you can get quite effective handpumps which though there are time consuming you can refill the air in a tyre. One of the advantages of driving with a wide tyre such as Pirelli scorpions 10.5 inchx15 tyres such as I use is that you can let a lot of air out of them without there being a significant collapse on the side wall. I often only reinflate my tyres when I am at an Oasis having driven 100 or more road km on tyres at 20PSI. In four years and 30,000km on the same tyres I’ve suffered only one sidewall blow out on tarmac. I’ve driven extensively on sand and on rocky surfaces that are quite sharp and not suffered many punctures. People with narrower tyres than mine, such as 7.5 inchX16 have in my experience suffered more punctures.

Basic equipment you will need.

You will need a jack. Conventional wisdom suggests either a highlift jack or an airjack. Highlift jacks are unavailable in Egypt or very difficult to find, they are very heavy to bring through customs and they also suffer from being dangerous if you jack on a sweaty hot day without paying much attention, or with someone else using the jack which is quite common and you have it resting on soft sand. An airbag jack will therefore work better but airbag jacks take up space in the car and they can damage pipe work underneath the car. An airbag jack is very useful if the car rolls as you can use the jack to progressively lift the car. Having said that I have discovered through trial and error that the best jack is the mechanic’s long arm lifting jack the so-called hydraulic jack; but not the small model used by motorists because in the desert situation you need a much higher lifting capacity. You need to be prepared for the car being so embedded that the differentials are resting on the sand and the wheels can get no grip at at all. You then use the hydraulic jack to raise the suspension so much that the wheel lifts up and sand can be shoveled underneath it. So you need the big size of hydraulic jack. Not the 6 foot hydraulic jack but the 3 foot hydraulic jack. This will take up space and it weighs more than a highlift jack but it’s much safer and much easier to use. Next you will need sand plates. You can get by with two full-sized sand plates. That is a piece of aluminium with holes in it about four ½ feet long. If you get really stuck four sand plates are better. Don’t cut them in half as they will bend more easily and the sharp edges will snag on things.

Basic skills

You have to develop an instinct about what to do when you get stuck. You can feel the car digging in you can feel the wheels turning up sand; your instinct is to tread on the accelerator and go faster. That’s the wrong thing to do. What you really want to do is slow right down until the wheels are just turning and you are moving forward. However slowly you are moving forward as long as you’re moving forward you will escape. Sit looking out of the side window at the wheels to check you are actually going forward. As soon as the vehicle, as opposed to the wheels, stops moving forward the wheels will just begin to dig in again- so stop- but with a gentle motion, not the brake- use the clutch to disengage slowly. If you swerve from side to side in soft sand you can often get more traction. But the single best tactic crossing soft sand is letting out air from your tyres. It makes an incredible difference. If you drop the tyre pressure from say 30 PSI which is a  fairly usual road pressure down to 22 PSI you will find that you will not get stuck very often. If you do get stuck you can drop it even lower to around 15 PSI but you will need to reinflate that tyre fairly soon afterwards. You can go down to 10PSI if you drive really carefully. Using tubeless tyres is easier, cheaper and you are less likely to snag the innertube if you really drop the tyre pressure.

When you are driving on sand it’s easy when the sand is flat. The difficulties happen when you are driving over dunes. Dunes can be split into three varieties (for driving purposes) whaleback dunes, which are shallow sloping dunes which have hard sand on every side literally rising up from the flat desert like a whale’s back. You then have a ridge dune which has a hard surface on one side and a crumbly surface, the so-called slip face on the other side. Usually the hard surface is more on the side where the wind is blowing from and the soft surface is where the wind has deposited grains though this is not the always the case. And the third variety which is halfway between the two is the sharp drop off from a whaleback dune. You’re driving along quite happily perhaps on the top of a very flat whaleback dune and suddenly there’s a drop which is a very steep looking slip face of soft sand. (These are not the technical descriptions of dunes because obviously sand dunes fall into other categories such as the sieff dune which is a long dune, sword shaped if you like, and the barchan dune which is crescent shaped and then the star shaped dune which is made up of several barchans.)But in terms of driving these three are the kind that you encounter out there. The ridge dune you can approach by simply driving fast going up the hard surface stopping at the top, then aligning your car perpendicular to the slope going down, shifting into first gear, moving off slowly and simply cruising down that surface without using the brakes. If you start to swerve and use the brakes it will intensify this movement and you may roll. So if you do start to go off course you should give it some more acceleration to straighten up. But the best technique is to be absolutely perpendicular to the slope and just trust that you will go straight down, the four wheels effectively acting like rudders or small keels keeping you straight. No slip face is more than about 35/36 degrees depending on the dampness of the sand. You can get steeper slopes in hard sand if it is wet. Ideally if you’re going to go over a ridge it makes sense to scout it  out to know what is happening at the top. On the other hand maybe a very big ridge you don’t want to do that in which case you have to time your ascent so that when you get to the top you can stop ideally without slamming the brakes on which will only serve to dig you in. When you’re driving on a whale back dune the thing to look for is the horizon of the dune: if this seems to be quite sharp and unchanging as you rise up the dune chances are there is a drop-off and you need to be careful about this. If on the other hand as you shoot up the side of a whale back dune the top seems to merge with the rest of the horizon it means there isn’t a hard drop off- just a slope you can drive down easily. But at midday, when shadows are short, you can be surprised so you need to be careful. Over time you develop a sort of inkling about where drops are likely to occur. For example most dune systems in Egypt run from the North West to the Southeast and the drop-offs are usually on the western side of the dune. So you can usually cruise up the eastern side quite easily. This is not obviously an exhaustive remedy but it is a good guide or starting point.

In general speed is your friend when driving over soft sand. Just as useful is the ability to maintain a constant speed without jerky stops and starts. Often the slamming on of the brakes or harsh acceleration is what takes you into the sand.  A certain kind of hygiene if you like is a good idea in desert driving. For example, only park on a slope with the front facing down so that when you get in the car again you can roll to start without digging in. Or else park on areas where there are pebbles so you don’t sink in.  If you do get stuck you can often escape if everyone jumps out and gives you a push before you’ve become too dug in. You don’t want to swear and panic, you need to take your time and carefully work out a way of extracting yourself. When digging away the sand from around the tires it is best to dig more than you think you need. Chances are if you just make a few scrapes the car will simply dig in  further. It’s much better to dig four channels from each tyre, lay down sand plates and give the car a push and escape in one go. Repeated attempts of a half-hearted nature can simply result in the car becoming hopelessly bogged down.

The one area where you can sink very deeply indeed in Egypt is sabkha sand. This is sand which is very close to the water table and is supersaturated and usually has a high salt content. It can often be a thin surface of sand on a salt pan and the car sinks straight through it. These occur most often in the Qattara depression on the northern coast, but they also exist in parts of the white desert. Extraction from sabkha is hard if not impossible without another vehicle. And the best piece of equipment is a high tensile steel cable which should be at the least 100 feet long so that the other vehicle or vehicles can be a good distance away from the soft sand as they tow you out.

Other desert driving obstacles include navigating bumps and rocks. Driving slowly is the key here as hitting a bump at high speed can damage the suspension and hitting a rock at high-speed can damage tires. Driving over small bushes of tamerisk and other thorny vegetation can result in punctures so these are best avoided.

For some reason the natural glass in the Great Sand Sea of Egypt is always referred to as silica glass which is odd as all glass is made of silica unless it’s plastic…anyway this natural glass is 98% silica which makes it the purest natural glass in the world. Other glasses, such as volcanic obsidians are lower in silica at 75%.

The natural glass of the Sand Sea is found in a large area stretching from just north of the Gilf Kebir to a few hundred km south of Siwa. The area of highest concentration is small but I’ve found small pieces of glass spread over a long but not wide distance. Mainly the glass is confined to four dune corridors- the ones used by cars storming up from the Gilf to Siwa.

The glass was formed by a giant meteorite hitting the earth it is widely believed.

Dated as being formed 29 million years ago when there was 1000 extra feet of earth/rock covering the earth’s surface; which is why we can’t see the meteorite spot- apparently- though Farouk Al Baz has found a 32 km diameter meteorite spot some hundred km or so south of the main area. This could work- though I doubt if even a comet would blow a hole a 1000 foot deep.

That the glass was formed from a space object is confirmed more or less by the presence of large quantities of iridium and more than a terrestial quota of nickel and other minerals. A massive explosion and impact is needed to make clear glass- if you look at artificial impactites formed by H and A bomb desert tests they look like fulgarite- that nobbly hollow bubbly glassy stuff caused by lightning strikes in sand. To make big lumps of pure glass you’d need the power of a many thousands of H bombs in one spot.

Other mysteries about the sand sea glass: it has no bits of rock adhering- these pure lumps are not found in other tektite sites in Moldovia and Saudi Arabia.

The largest lump found was 57lbs and is in a French Natural History museum. A 10kg lump found by Pat Clayton is in the Cairo Geological Museum- always worth a visit in its dusty shack-like quarters along the Corniche just before Maadi.

I’ve found some 1kg lumps and if you look hard you may too. Someone calculated from the spread of glass that 14 million tons of the stuff would have been generated. You get the feeling that it rises up through the sand over time. Other nice finds include worked pieces of glass- anything from 20,000 to 3000 years old – as Australian Aborigines switched to glass from broken bottles direct from worked stone, it’s hard not to imagine ancient man using glass if he had the chance.

The glass was first mentioned in modern times by traveller Fulgence Fresnel in 1846, though Tutankhamun’s pectoral scarab has been shown to be carved from the stuff, and not from quartz as was thought previously. The scarab, of course, in Egyptian mythology rolls the sun across the sky, so a glass scarab that catches the light kind of fits.

I once was given a piece by Rupert Harding Newman, the last member of the Zerzura club who died only recently. He had collected two big bags of the stuff back in 1935. “I don’t suppose there is any left now,” he said, a little shamefacedly.

Robert Twigger

Getting to the Point

“It’s over there,” said Dave, “Somewhere.” I scanned the desert horizon. It was midday and the Egyptian landscape was flattened by the overhead sun. In a few minutes, maybe ten, we would be the first people ever to be at that specific point on the earth’s crust. 28N 31E to be precise. 28 00 00 N 31 00 00E to be very precise. There would be no distracting minutes and seconds, just the pure integers of latitude and longitude. The going got tougher, the desert surface gravelly and now stretching uphill. We were climbing up the humpy left side of a wadi, or dry riverbed. There was no vegetation visible anywhere in a 360 degree circle- I scanned hard but saw nothing except low dun grey hills and dry valleys. The only sight that drew the eye was a rock breaking the skyline. We had parked the 4×4 some way back and now I was out of breath, what with the heat and going uphill. Dave strode on manfully, pulling ahead. It was then I suspected, that like Hillary and Tenzing, only one of us would get to that sacred spot first. We both had GPS machines that checked our position but Dave’s was bigger, more authoritative. Plus he had a longer stride than me. It looked like I was about to assume the Tenzing position.

We were only climbing a small hill not a mountain and we weren’t interested at all in the summit. What drew us on was the promise of bagging a confluence point. A confluence point is where a degree line of latitude and longitude meet like 50N 25W or where a whole lot of lines meet like the North or South poles. It has to be a whole number and on land or within sight of land. There are 14,029 out there. There are 11,396 still waiting to be bagged. And Dave and I were after 28N 31E , somewhere in the Egyptian desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.

Only with accurate surveying techniques could the height of mountains and their ‘importance’ be recognized. Everest only became interesting as a summit when we were able to measure it. The current craze for bagging every peak over 8000 metres is a continuation of this artificial exploration activity.

Even more abstract are the North and South poles. Not places in the normal sense- they are defined by a series of numbers- yet they have become the focus of intense interest. But only with the invention of latitude and longitude, the sextant and the accurate clock could these places actually be found.

Unfortunately to be the first to the Pole isn’t possible. And even being the 5000th is a costly and difficult enterprise. Everest can be climbed- if you have £60,000 to hand, otherwise you might consider the attractions of Snowdon or even Ben Nevis- after all, all three have been climbed by many many people before you.

If you want to be first then you have to look elsewhere. And as Roald Amundsen put it, “I cannot see the point in being faster or going a different way. For me there is only being first.” Which is tough advice to follow in a world that, at first sight, seems pretty well explored.

Then in 1996 confluence hunting was invented, thanks to the ubiquity of two new technologies- Global Positioning Satellites and the internet. At last it was possible to visit all those other confluence points apart from the poles. The race was on.

You can go confluence hunting anywhere. But the UK, USA and much of Europe are pretty well ‘pointed out’ There are only 4 confluence points left in the UK and all of those require a boat journey into our chilly coastal waters. In the USA, only Alaska still has points remaining to be claimed. Though, of course, many people enjoy collecting points others have already been to.

But for me, the whole point of pointing, was to be first. The organizing force behind confluence hunting, the Degree Confluence Project tends to play down the competitive aspect of the activity. There are no lists, as you get with twitchers, of who has the most ‘firsts’. This is one of the many good aspects of the Project. Naturally I wanted to know who had the most firsts but was glad that someone had decided not to pander to this cheap desire. There is something out of the ordinary and far sighted about the DCP. The website itself is a model of clarity, emphasizing visiting and making reports from points rather than mere bagging.

I heard about all this from my friend Dave, who works for an oil exploration company in Egypt. Dave was a bit wary when I first started probing about “confluence hunting”. He’s used to people scoffing, or not seeing the point, so to speak. I was like that at first. It seemed nuts to me to spend a lot of time and money just to go to an imaginary spot.

After I visited the DCP website I was converted. Suddenly it seemed like the most exciting thing you could do. I even got anxious that someone would rush out and do all the remaining points in Egypt that very week. What convinced me was the nature and the extent of the reports on the website. Because of the strict reporting procedure required by the degree confluence project, the abstract point becomes real. You have to take a photograph of the scene, plus photos in all the cardinal directions and one of the ‘zeroes’, the screen of the GPS machine that shows you are bang on the criss-cross of latitude and longitude. Then you submit a written account. If you peruse the thousands of reports of visits to confluence points the world over you begin to understand the grandeur of the whole thing. This is an amateur enterprise yet they, or we, will achieve something no government department, NGO, or monolithic UN organization could ever manage- which is- a report, both written and photographic, that covers the entire earth. These visits are self financed, self motivated, but over the coming fifty years every point will be visited- of that I have little doubt. At the equator confluence points are only 100km apart- as you get to the poles they get closer. It is the last great exploration project of the planet- until the next piece of technology comes along.

Grand thoughts for a grand adventure, none of which I was thinking as we rolled out of Cairo at 6.30am on our way to claim my first, and Dave’s 22nd point in Egypt. Dave, usually the model of a taciturn Scot, was surprisingly skittish and cheerful that morning. We all were (his wife and son came along too). There is nothing like the promise of even a small adventure to raise the spirits, that and leaving at the crack of dawn just like going on holiday as a child.

It’s getting harder and harder to find valid alibis, one’s that stand up to more than a cursory examination, alibis to get you away from the remote control and the wide screen telly. I don’t know why we need alibis to get out and about, but we do. I suppose it used to be hunting and making journeys to barter and trade, but you can do all that on the internet now. I know from my own experience that the alibi must convince oneself, even if explaining it to others is somewhat shaming. Once you ‘get’ the idea of confluence hunting there is no better reason out there for going miles and miles, facing hardship and pain, to reach an abstract spot on the earth.

We were unlikely to suffer too much hardship and pain on our expedition. Dave had his company Landcruiser, a heavy duty 4×4 capable of traversing the worst terrain. It was also about as good protection as you could get from the effects of a car accident. The Nile road we were driving along was notorious for accidents, but until you witness one, such information is, at best, at the back of your mind.

About two hundred kilometers south of Cairo, now in the desert, we stopped for coffee. Dave had a flask, which, on an expedition is always better than stopping at a gas station or a café. Expeditions have to be self contained otherwise they become diluted, a bit less of an adventure. Of course brewing your own tea on a hastily contrived campfire is always best but since we had Dave’s flask that would have been uncalled for. Back in the cruiser we drove for about a mile before, with the dawning sense of shock that attends such things, we arrived at a scene of devastating mechanical carnage. A giant twenty wheeler was skewed across the road, water pouring from its punctured radiator. An incredible dent in the front pushed the engine and front wheels back under the cab, as if a giant fist had knocked its teeth in. A man with an anguished expression was still in the cab and several people, including one with a crowbar were trying to break him free. As with any accident I was relieved there were others doing stuff already. I’d been on a first aid course years ago but I’d probably only get in the way. Then, having crept around the twenty wheeler, we drove past a man cradling another man who was either dead or unconscious. Behind were the utterly destroyed remains of an ancient pickup, the windscreen completely smashed. “Do you think he came through that?” asked Dave. A crash seems to instantly age vehicles and this pick-up, old to start with, already looked abandoned for months. The man cradling the injured, or dead, man shouted something to the saloon car in front which hared off. People were already gathering from where it was hard to tell. I had thought we were nowhere. I looked back at the cradled man, gawping but not wanting to. This was not a crash in the JG Ballard sense of the word. Third world crashes are different to those of the first. They are grubby and sad and are symbols of a desperate scrabbling for resources rather than alienated excess. They also exist in a different zone of responsibility. In the third world it is less about recovery and rescue services and more about a brush with eternity. It cuts you quicker and deeper because you know that even if an ambulance gets to the scene the level of medical care is not going to be high. Strangely, after a mile or less we reached a roadside ambulance station and already the saloon car was up the drive and the ambulance men coming out of their building. These ambulance buildings have sprung up recently along the most accident filled roads, but, though better than nothing, they don’t halt the rate at which decrepit trucks and overladen buses ram into each other.

Seeing the crash dampened the mood of the trip considerably. It had all happened very definitely within the space of our coffee break. It could have been us, no doubt all of us were thinking, but no one said, for fear, perhaps, of tempting fate.

The desert stretched either side. Rocky desert. The Sahara east of the Nile is rocky, riven with wadis. The Western desert is smooth by comparison filled with dunes and sand sheets. In a moment, always a highpoint of any desert trip, we at last left the highway and went offroad. Dave made the symbolic gearshift to full-on four wheel drive and rumbled over the gravel plain following the LCD arrow on his GPS.

My own GPS, though good enough, was not a top of the range model. I kept it more or less out of sight. Dave not only had 22 points in Egypt he had also bagged the symbolic ‘best’ point 22N 25E which marked the intersection of the Libyan, Egyptian and Sudanese borders. Dave, though naturally modest, was obviously the man in charge.

We lost sight of the road and headed further into the desert. The point we were aiming for was the most accessible unclaimed confluence left in Egypt, the nearest to any made-up road but still not on a road. Why it had been ignored, or missed, I could only guess was due to the lengthy drive along an accident prone highway. The ground beneath was hard gravel and easy driving, though bumpy. We crested a low hill and saw more ahead. It was hot day, at least thirty degrees, though in the burgeoning sense of excitement I did not notice the heat. The hill got steeper and Dave thought it prudent to park. I then understood another intriguing thing about confluence hunting- what if the point just happens to be halfway up a rock face- or at the bottom of deep gorge? That’s where the challenge and adventure kick in. I lost seconds fiddling with the white balance knob on my camera and Dave was already ahead. He was the kind of expedition member who would consider it a bit wimpy to wait for stragglers so I hurried on, sweating in the noon heat.

Then, all of a sudden, after Dave had wandered around in a large circle, holding his GPS like someone trying to find a better signal on a mobile, he announced we’d arrived. 28N 31E was exactly here. There were no car tracks or footprints where we gingerly lay the two GPSs side by side showing the numbers on the screen. To this tiny spot on earth we were certainly the first confluence hunters, and very likely the first people, to have stood.

It was not a great feeling. It was an odd, different sort of feeling- not an anticlimax exactly, more like the feeling a gasman must feel when he has successfully read a meter right out in the countryside. Dave and I made up for the lack of natural elation by saying such things as, “Well, at least we did it” or “Better than staying home slumped in front of the telly”. It’s hard to imagine one of the great explorers of yore saying these things but who knows?

We took the photographs and everything needed for the report and though I knew once it was written up and made permanent I’d be happy, and though I definitely would go confluencing again, there was something missing. I decided it was a view. And driving rather than walking. I think there should be an elevated category of confluence bagging where you have walked from a bagged site to an unbagged one, unassisted by an internal combustion engine.

As if to emphasise the superfluity of cars we saw three more crashes on the way home. All had occurred sometime before we passed, so we were merely observers, but all were nasty. Two human shapes covered in newspaper lay beside a rolled truck. Trapped on top was the truck’s load of chickens in palm leaf cages, squashed crates of squawking, bloody, dead and damaged birds. We’d stopped commenting on the accidents by then. There was nothing left to say. Dave, as always, drove carefully and we were back in Cairo before nightfall.

I wrote up my ‘report’ with considerable pride. It took on the status of something semi-official, the prose a bit dry, rather dull and careful. Dave was concerned that I had missed his name off- I had, but this was easily remedied. Being named on the report is a bit like sharing authorship of an academic paper- important stuff. You can see it, along with the pictures by typing my name into the search box for degreeconfluenceproject.org. I had my alibi. Already it feels like a real achievement after all.

Dawn Potter

Confluence hunting appeals more to men than women but Dawn is one of those happy to get out there looking for a new point. She started hunting with her boyfriend Phil, who heard about confluence hunting from a radio program whilst driving in his HGV. Dawn has conquered 15 or 16 points, including some abroad. In Rumania Phil but not Dawn was arrested by border police who got one look at his google earth maps and gps and assumed he was an illegal migrant from Moldava. “We all had a good laugh in the end,” said Dawn. Another tricky call was when a point was surrounded by a herd of cattle. First they had to persuade the farmer why they wanted to get into his field and then they had to brave the cattle. Dawn visited the last confluence point left unclaimed on mainland Britain, Blakely Point. This meant a trip by boat accompanied by local press though she did concede, “Most times I go out it’s raining or I get stuck in a muddy bog.” Her job is indoors as a manager so she relishes the chance to get outside. Confluence seeking is something that fits in well with her other hobbies of hiking and camping. “It’s a nice walk at the end of the day. And you always have some kind of adventure.”

Gordon Spence

Visit Gordon Spence’s website and you get some kind of idea of what he’s like. Maths problems, computers and confluence hunting are all interests represented and arguably confluence hunting brings them all together. He is the regional coordinator for the Degree Confluence Project and, in a game that avoids competition, Britain’s top confluence hunter. He’s visited all the sites in the UK- many for the first time. The hardest point in Britain, “logistically” he added, was 55N 3W- This was the Long Pound ammo dump, Europe’s largest, home to depleted uranium missiles and the Lockerbie wreckage. It took Gordon three months to get permission to enter the camp and another three months to get permission to enter the missile store zone where the point actually was. Gordon explains he just “likes being outdoors”. And in Britain every point is outdoors. There are none in London and only one is in a building- a cowshed near Basingstoke. He’s been abroad too- in Texas he was accused of being an Iraqi spy. “But that’s Texans for you.” “I call it wandering with a purpose,” he says, “You know where you are and why you are there.”

Robert Twigger

During one of several days showing computer executives how to navigate in the desert one of them, Per, from Sweden, produced from his backpack what looked like the stone vertebra of a creature at least as large as cow. He’d found it some 3 km back, near an outcrop some 60 km north of Hara Oasis in Egypt. Hara is in the Bahariya depression and Bahariya is famous for dinousar remains, including the notorious spinosaurus feautured to grisly effect in Jurrassic Park III, if you follow that kind of thing. We jumped in the car and went back to check.

What was really interesting apart from the 6 or 7 obvious lines of vertebrae was the fact that a) there were so many remains and b) a group of 18 people had walked past them and through and only one person had noticed. Now we knew what to look for we saw dinosaur bones everywhere.

The concept of ‘search image’is well known to paleotologists. They look at pictures and extant examples of fossils before going to find the real thing. You truly do find what you are looking for.

In our case, of course, no one had a camera, so these few words must suffice. Apart from the vertebrae we found tube like lengths of fossil which suggested those tube like fronds found in the ocean. That this area was under the sea several times in the past is indicated everywhere by the seashells and shark’s teeth easily found.

As we looked at the seemingly vegetable fronds we began to doubt our vertebrae. Were they really dinosaur backbones or just more of the sea tubers? That we had found something was not in doubt. But what exactly?

A return visit with a more knowledgeable person is the obvious answer. And taking pictures might help. For me, though, the experience of driving back over the sand, jumping out, and seeing those bones lined up in the sand was enough. It was the essence of discovery- alone in the desert, miles and miles away from anyone or anywhere, free, finding something new, unwritten about, unphotographed. It was an experience I never want to forget.

In the last five years of desert exploration and travel I have seen one scorpion and one horned viper. I have seen sand viper tracks but no sand vipers. Despite our massive aversion and fear of snakes and scorpions one is forced to conclude they are simply not that common.

And both the scorpion, the viper and the viper tracks were all near places with vegetation or visited often by people. In remote, arid conditions you are unlikely to meet these creatures.

Cerastes cerastes- the horned viper is the most widespread deadly snake in Egypt. It prefers rocky areas such as those of the Eastern Desert- East of the Nile- to the more sandy places West of the Nile- if it exists in a sandy area it will be near some kind of vegetation such as a lone acacia or tamarisk bush. They like to lurk near lone trees to catch migrating birds. In very arid places it prefers loose soil to sand.

The sand viper- Cerastes vipera- does not lurk in the lovely arid dunes that are such fun to slide down- it prefers the vegetation dotted dunes close to such oases as Sitra and Nuwamisa on the stretch between Siwa and Bahariya. Sand vipers are less widespread than the horned viper (which sometimes occurs without horns) and are less tolerant of extreme aridity. Both are nocturnal and are more likely to be seen in summer than winter, when they semi- hibernate.

Scorpions, again, prefer rocky places and places where other invertebrates lurk. They leave a six legged track, a bit like a mountain bike track, that can be confused with the far commoner tracks of long legged beetles. My only scorpion was on a discarded eggbox on the Partridge Dunes- a very regularly visited set of dunes, in fact the closest dunes to Cairo.

Caves- traditionally the haunt of scorpions or so we are lead to believe- contain more beetles I think. People regularly sleep in the Djara caves and I’ve never heard of a live scorpion being sighted there.

The general rule is: in places with no vegetation and no soil you can be reasonably relaxed. If there is considerable vegetation and dunes, typically at a well or oasis, keep an eye open for possible sand vipers and their giveaway ‘sidewinder’ type tracks. In the Eastern desert and rocky places with some vegetation or soil watch out for horned vipers. The only one I ever saw was in the main tourist venue of Wadi Digla- five minutes from where I live- it was curled up being watched by a group of ten hikers, unperturbed and dangerous only if trodden on was my guess.

From time to time I’d like to review books that catch my attention even though they may be tangential at best to the notion of exploration. This is not the case, though, with Duncan Fallowell’s excellent Going as Far as I can which was published in February this year. It is ostensibly a book about New Zealand and a visit Fallowell made there with the fragile hook of finding out about a tour made in 1948 by Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. These gimmicks are we not tired of them? Chatwin and his Uncle Charlie’s piece of dinosaur skin from Patagonia. That book about Irish fridges and playing tennis with the Moldavian football team. And others, many others. But in this case it works well because it is genuine and guileless. Olivier is a fascinating figure. And it is a strange thought to be in New Zealand of all places touring with a theatre group. It interests and intrigues us.

But the book is really about the minute observation of New Zealand, trying to catch it, trying to convey what it is like and what it’s essence is like. It is a daring book- we can all visit New Zealand for the price of a medium quality fridge- it’s easy, like all air travel. But the author erects and ineffable barrier to entry- his eye, his astute feeling for place. It helps that he isn’t a middleclass or even upper or lower class tosser. He is a beach bum with a classical education, the very best sort of traveler.

Exploration is about discovery. The old distinction between some kind of objective accumulation of fact, the province of the old European explorers (now parodied by the bearded worthies of the British Antarctic survey and other instruments of scientific simulation) and the private discovery of self and a new place and self in a new place is now dissolved. I’m not sure why or how this happened but now we are as interested in Ranulph Fiennes toes and how frostbitten they get as we are in any rock samples he may bring back from the south pole. Perhaps we already have too many rock samples.

The author’s book proceeds as a rather exciting exploration of New Zealand which is new to me and new, also, at the time of the journey to Duncan Fallowell. You feel him pushing out further and further each day- living in the now of new experience which is the addictive edge of travel, easily blunted in exploration, as traditionally conceived, by the unpleasantness of the conditions. Then the exploration begins to falter as social arrangements begin to impose themselves. This is part of the author’s policy of complete and transparent honesty which in the main, the 95% main, serves him very well. But I rather wonder that his accidental persona- gay, single, adventurous- which perfectly suits the best traveler persona (lots of chances for strange and interesting and undomestic encounters) becomes tarnished by the revelation that Duncan, like everyone, would prefer a nice Christmas lunch with friendly friends to the opportunity to meditate alone on a rock with a couple of penguins.

Happy times in domestic surroundings- the warm fug of mince pies baking and chardonnay being uncorked (or some more exquisite wine- the author is clearly an expert)- makes for a kind of literary Wilton carpet experience rather than the ancient oriental weave one was expecting. One flips it over and sees a made in England label and the evidence of machine stitching is all too apparent.

You see the author is planning to stay with people (Bernard and Daisy) who he rather likes and who have a rather nice house- but from a narrative point of view we might prefer people he hates, or loves and who live in a bus shelter or a castle on an island. In the end he doesn’t stay with them but their very existence, the fact that they connect with the author beneath the established weft of his tale is, for me, a minor minus. Maybe I just didn’t like the sound of them. In any case this diversion does not impair the book; it is merely an interesting development and a sign, perhaps, of the limiting effect of a philosophy of writing that pushes honesty (ie. self revelation) ahead of narrative qualities. As Duncan’s pal Matt says, “Australia made sense because I was there for work. But this place doesn’t make sense. Why am I here?”
“Because I’m here and Bernard and Daisy are here.”
“Is that it?”

Fallowell’s prose is as always: supple and sly and very very funny at times; he is probably the master at bringing highbrow down to earth with a choice bit of vernacular and no clunks. He makes Martin Amis look somehow old fashioned, trying too hard. You can enjoy this tome for the sentences alone.

Because the author is gay and single and on the prowl the book has a decent amount of sex in it- a lamentable lacuna in most travel books- even Miller’s Collosus of Maroussi has no sex in it, though maybe Miller is a special case and it’s a good thing. Travel books, whatever they pretend, always stand in some kind of relation to fictional tales. This book is a distant relative of all the quest stories ever written and so the author must find something and preferably someone. He does, in a deft way, and then loses them, it is satisfactorily done but it is not the whole point, it’s just a way of tying up the loose ends. The reality of this book is an honest and hugely successful attempt to make you feel you have experienced what the author has experienced, been where he has been. One trusts his eye, his judgement. A wonderful achievement.

Going as Far as I Can
by Duncan Fallowell
Profile Books
£12.99

This has never been an area in which I can pretend to be extremely successful though more out of lack of application than anything else. The basic rule is: if you ask enough people and companies enough times you will get the money and goods you need. Some rules emerge from my own experience which includes gaining free flights, gear and fat tyre bicycles for our latest Bike the Sahara expedition.

1. Asking for money is harder than asking for gear. Don’t be greedy and ask for both. Just ask for gear/service assistance.
2. Offering to return the gear after the trip increases the chance of being offered gear.
3. Make a video- even if it’s on your mobile phone and tell them you are making a video. A gear supplier can put that up their site.
4. Have a blog that mentions your sponsors- this site gets over 2000 hits a month so any sponsor- such as Speedway cycles of Alaska are getting exposure all the time.
5. Be inventive. The more firms you contact the more likely you will find a true enthusiast who wants to back you more fully even perhaps with hard cash.
6. Be prepared mentally to do the trip even with zero sponsorship- this puts you in a stronger position when it comes to asking. You don’t sound all needy. It also makes the trip more real in your own mind.
7. Don’t rely on email alone. Use email, phoning and faxing. Faxes are good because they result in a hard copy on someone’s desk. Assume most emails are only glanced at. You have to phone to confirm and enlarge on the project.
8. Have website full of info about your expedition so a potential sponsor can check you out immediately they get your request.
9. Offer to write an article for the website/inflight magazine of an airline to get freeflights. Always ask the marketing director and not a lower down hireling. Check out airlines offering new routes- they are most open to getting publicity.
10. But don’t compromise the success of the expedition because of the lure of lucre from potential sponsors. They are entitled to publicity but not if it means you can’t get the expedition finished.

Most of my expeditions I have paid for myself with only sponsorship adding a tiny fraction to the overall cost. This way I actually went places rather than spent ages waiting for that phonecall. In the end a cheap trip that works is worth ten big ones that don’t.