New Stuff

Later this year we aim to be the first people to cross the Great Sand Sea of the Sahara desert on bicycles. These will be special mountainbikes with huge six inch wide tyres. We are already some way into organising this expedition so I will backtrack a little and start from the beginning. I want to give as realistic an account as I can of the experience of organising an expedition. So you can do it too.

How do you get your ideas? People often ask me this and I always say- “from books”. That’s right, books are the single best source of ‘fertile soil’ for coming up with new ideas. The second source is the internet. The third is talking to people. You need a regular supply of this creative mulch in order to keep coming up with ideas. My current interest is the desert. Any book about the Sahara I will buy, within my budget, even overtly commercial coffee table books and guides. The reason is that within a coffee table book you may find one clue that will set you off. Also coffee table books and guidebooks have pictures which are essential to help you make it real in your own mind.

Because at the early stage the hard bit is taking it seriously. An expedition? That’s what other people do isn’t it? To make it real collect pictures, films, documentaries, maps, travel books, academic journals- all about the area that interests you.

So for the Egyptian Sahara I went from the Lonely Planet guide and the film The English Patient to the 1930s Geographical Journals of the original motor explorers of the Egyptian Desert. These you can now buy online from JSTOR journal archive. Here I discovered that the Great Sand Sea was first crossed from South to North in 1933- by vehicle, not camel. A slightly less difficult and direct route had first been made in 1873 by the German explorer Rohlfs. Now all this was just background- the fertile soil of creativity.

Next had to come the trigger. For some the trigger is the place- they find a mountain range and zoom in on a mountain they want to climb. They seek out rivers with certain features and then go combing the atlas for likely examples. For me the trigger is: mode of travel.

I find that when I focus on HOW I will make my exploration then I discover much more about WHERE and HOW. For example I wanted to make a journey by birchbark canoe. Once I had my method I looked around for a difficult journey seldom if ever done before. This I found in replicating the 1793 crossing of Western Canada by Alexander Mackenzie- we became the first to do it by his exact route in a birchbark canoe.

For the desert I’m always looking at new modes of transport. I got very excited when I discovered a diesel motorbike that did 100 miles to the gallon. For a while I seriously thought about exploring the desert on one of those. But I like a physical challenge too- and sitting on a motorbike is just a bit too easy.

I found myself talking to others about making a film about the explorer school. One of the film makers, Simon Ogston had already made a long cycle journey in India. I knew this but it had no impact, had no effect, until I eventually checked his website and saw pictures of him riding through India. This was the trigger- when you see someone you have met doing something adventurous you think for the first time, “hey I could do that”.

This is the key moment, when you cease to be a mere spectator and start putting yourself in the position of doing it yourself. The DIY Zen moment of enlightenment!

So seeing him I thought of moutainbiking the desert. I was already based in Cairo and had done a very limited amount of biking on sand- and given up. But this was early on in my desert career. Now I had crossed thousands of kilometres by foot, camel and 4×4 and I knew that most of the desert is hard enough to support a bike with wide tyres. I found on the internet a bike with very fat tyres but it didn’t look right as it had small fat tyres and I knew that the bigger the wheel diameter the better off you are in sand. Basically because the rolling resistance of a small fat tyre is greater than a tall fat tyre. I spoke, though, about desert riding to Simon and he searched the internet and found a number of US companies that produced fat tyre bikes- among them Speedway cycles of Alaska.

The second moment of enlightenment was seeing the possibilities inherent in these huge tyred bikes. Suddenly the desert seemed wide open.

At first I thought of crossing Egypt from East to West but then my earlier reading kicked in and the Great Sand Sea became the focus. It really helps if your idea has some magnetism to it- a name or idea that you like to repeat to others- and yourself. This again helps build the reality of the project.

So now we had an idea that we were excited about, that no one had ever attempted before, and that we thought we could do. All we had to do next was make it a reality. So that’s what I’ll cover in the next How to Organise an Expedition post- how to get others involved.

So the main point for coming up with exploration ideas is research, research, research- but in a laid back kind of way, covering far and wide, zoom around the net following up leads, ordering books, reading journals- it’s excellent for that. The net is also great for sourcing weird forms of transport that may set you off in a new direction. But to avoid going crazy first either fix the PLACE you want to go to (country, range, desert, even continent) or the MODE of TRANSPORT. With one of these fixed you will have more focus.

Robert Twigger

Leadership of expeditions

I have just finished the excellent Mysteries of the Nile by Richard Bangs and Pascale Scuttaro, an account of a descent of the Blue Nile and then the Nile from Lake Tana to the sea. This is a very considerable achievement and only a fool or someone with no experience of what is involved, or perhaps with time to kill, would dream of criticising the operation based on material drawn from a book rather than from direct experience. In one sense Scuttaro did absolutely nothing wrong since he succeeded in his objective- reaching the sea. And he got no one killed. There are many ways down a river, no single ‘right way’- in fact the right way is any way that works. The obstacles that Scuttaro and his team have to surmount, mainly the psychological ones mean there are many valuable lessons in the book and it is well worth reading if you are interested in leading expeditions, especially those involving water and Americans.

Why Americans? Well, this is, par excellance, an American expedition. It is certainly not DIY despite the best attempts of the expedition members to appear like good old boys, these are highly qualified, extremely well backed up, rich, well connected yanks who know what they are doing. They are neutral about the 1968 attempt to run the Blue Nile, which stands as a counterpoint of an old style military style expedition. But having written that I can immediately think of lots of contradictions. For example Blashford Snell gives his commanders on the ground freedom to make their own decisions as to how they achieve their objectives, as in a campaign; but expeditions since the beginning have not been characterised by a similarity to the military campaign. They are more like, well, an expedition- one group, isolated, having to make their own way.

But radios and sat phones and militias armed with AK47s change that somewhat. Scuttaro’s team, whilst not packing anything like the gear of Blashford Snell are there to make an IMAX film and have phone access to some influential diplomats and fixers. To me this is a major difference between DIY and non DIY expeditioning. Non DIY uses every means available to achieve its objectives. DIY has no external back up. It is just the team in the field alone.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, proponents and opponents.

But, the very presence of reassuring outside resources undermines leadership. When a team member can walk out they think about that rather than biting their tongue and shutting up. When they can phone home they phone home and people at home have no idea what you are going through.

Climbing, which Scutaro has done a lot of- including climbing Everest several times, is, contrary to popular belief, a poor training ground for leadership. Think about climbers and climbing- it attracts highly competitive loners, not team players. Very similar to high level kayaking, where the thrill is one man against a VERY DEFINED route filled with obstacles. The sheer focus of a mountain climb, the fact that each climber has to be an expert in route finding, makes leadership almost unnecessary. I am not talking about commercial expeditions where some people are more equal than others by virtue of their wallets, I am talking classic alpine style mountaineering. So you take a climber and a kayaker with incredible experience in their fields and you can also have neophytes in the everyday management of a typical expedition.

An example is the way Chris Bonnington, who was on the 1968 expedition, had huge mountain leadership experience, and yet undermined at almost every turn, the leadership attempts of those above him in the chain of command. Scutaro’s number two, Gordon Brown, an obsessive and highly skilled kayaker, is similar- disagreeing over where to camp at night and picking fights with other non-American team members. Unlike Scutaro, Brown has little experience of dealing with Africans. He becomes obsessed by the way one guy is looking at him. We later discover Brown has recovered from brain cancer so his paranoia may be grounded in unstable brain chemistry. An excuse, then, but not something you want to have to deal with 500 km from the nearest town.

The real problem is that modern life, which means, broadly, American style comfortable living, allows us to be really sloppy about many things that are killers out in the wilderness. Bedouin, when on new ground, make a fetish of not arguing with a designated navigator about the ‘right way’. They know that even questioning the leader can upset his confidence. But big chested US style management makes few allowances for such subtle factors. The idea is that everyone is ‘allowed a say’. Sorry, democracy parks its car at the Four Seasons on any real expedition; the classic modern way is to use fear tactics- ie. safety rules become the new cover for being authoritarian. But actually it is more honest to be authoritarian. Especially if there is a single vehicle like a boat. You can only have one captain and everyone signs on with the knowledge that his word is the last word.

In everyday life you can always phone a friend. And with a satphone you can do that too, But even a satphone can’t make the friend suddenly appear to whisk you away to dinner and a movie. Expeditions are all about managing cabin fever. Climbers manage it through just turning into themselves- when you’re out leading nothing else matters and when you’re in your tent you just switch off. Also climbing expeditions are short intense hits. They last days and weeks, not months.

It is ironic that some of the hardest rapids on the Blue Nile, hairy grade V stuff, are accomplished by an rafter who has so little experience he can’t even keep the boat straight on the flat bits. But it didn’t surprise me. Scutaro’s ‘top professional rafters’ leave early, in a way they are too highly qualified for the job. Maybe they should be leading their own expeditions. What you need are not skills but a sense of humour, a willingness to learn, enthusiasm and the ability to obey. Every trip is different. You can learn almost all you need on that trip for that trip if you have a good leader. Trips get very specialised and smart, fit people pick up that specialised knowledge quickly. I have always been surprised at how quickly neophytes pick really hard stuff when surrounded by people who are already skilled at it.

One of the great things about the book is the way it flashes back to accidents and experiences of Scuttaro that inform his current behaviour. This is really valuable as it allows you to spot a pattern in accidents which you can avoid. First off there is the ‘celebrity’ expedition. Very experienced people like Scutao attract top people from allied but very different fields- what I call Landcruiser bruisers- people who have ‘seen the world’ and can talk the talk very convincingly, except they were always driving and someone else was doing the driving. These people, be they aid workers, army types, TV people are the kind of people who knock the water over into the fire. That can literally be a killer in some situations and one of the things I always look out for on a trip is how clumsy a person is. Then there are other ‘celebrity’ types- famous people or just plain successful people who haven’t paid their dues in blood and sweat and manage by their lifeskill and high status to get promoted to expeditions where they shouldn’t really be. I’m always very wary of anyone who describes what is upcoming in terms of a thrill- they are still stuck in rollercoaster mode, and rollercoasters never crash. I much prefer someone who speaks with a certain nostalgia for a wet sleeping bag and watching the sun rise.

In two of the flashbacks in Scutaro and Bangs’s book, accidents happened because of celebrity presence. What on the surface looked like similar people was actually a very diverse bunch with differing experience levels. The next lesson was the chain of minor mistakes that leads to the big accident. Rarely do accidents come like the wrath of the heavens. Mostly there is the chain- and any leader with sense learns how to spot the chain and stomp on it early. But that is hard when you have celebrities and when you have people who are top outdoor people in their own right. On one trip an expedition member smuggles a large handgun into Canada. That is mistake number one. The second is he shows it off to non-team members- a driver- who reports him. The third is that the maps are being held by someone inexperienced when the police arrive and search them. The fourth is the maps get lost. The fifth is that now it becomes hard to explain what is up ahead since there is no map to reference what the leader already knows. One boat takes the wrong route without scouting first and one of the inexperienced people excited by the thrill of it is killed.

Never let anyone hold the maps except the leader. If he loses them then he doesn’t deserve to be a leader. This is where martial arts training is better than outdoor training. In martial arts you are taught that make a mistake and you die. You are taught that mistake making is just not acceptable. We have, in over reacting to Victorian style teaching methods, actually become sloppy. And there are some people out there who make more mistakes than others- these are the folk you don’t want around in tight situation.

Usually accident chains start rolling because of a sense of being in a rush. You keep going to find a better camp spot and then it’s raining and dark and there is no where to camp and you start suffering from hyperthermia, which has happened to me. Which is why choosing the camp spot is so crucial and is the leader’s choice everytime.

The other situation where accidents happen is underestimation. Experienced people go for what they think is a day trip, they take no precautions and then they have an accident. This happens with Scutaro when a doctor who is walking with him in Namibia breaks both his ankles. This account gives great food for thought. Everything is focussed on waiting for a helicopter to rescue the injured man- who is a panicked and talking about gangrene within hours of his injury. You have to ask yourself what do you do if there is no helicopter? You have to ask yourself could I, like Doug Scott and Joe Simpson, drag myself out with broken legs bumping along behind me?

My own observations on leadership and the current ‘crisis’ in leadership are simple. We don’t have a leadership problem we have a ‘followership’ problem. When I take people out into the desert and I control the water, the transport, the navigation and the food- there is never a problem. Naturally I am not going to make things hard for myself by demanding different levels of comfort and not doing everything I ask others to do. But the essence is: we have a society where everyone can do their own thing and is encouraged from day one to think they are equal to everyone IN EVERYWAY. An expedition is like a throwback to medieval times. There is one leader, or dictator, who is either benign or a tyrant. But an expedition is over all too soon. Our priviledge is to be a day tripper not a permanent resident of the old days.

So these people who have been brainwashed to believe they have a right to an equal say do not hesitate to consider first whether what they have to contribute is better put on hold, perhaps until tempers die down.

A Startling New development in the potentially tedious field of fitness aquisition…

A strange series of coincidences has lead me into the arcane world of barefoot running.
1. I meet a runner who swears by running flats and not super padded shoes.
2. I see two runners- one running on his heels like most joggers including me and one runnning on air ie. his toes/forefeet.
3. I start running barefoot around my large sitting room and dining room- impossible to run barefoot on your heels.
4. I scour the internet and find a brotherhood of barefoot runners and runners who swear by running properly ie. not on your heels in big Nike trainers.

The problem is: I have thirty++ years of wearing shoes to overcome. If you start running on your toes/frontfoot the strain is high at first. Instead of your knees taking a beating your calves and achilles tendon tighten- because they are the new shock absorbers. But it feels so much better- more natural, more fun, more free feeling. The thinner the soles the better- I am currently running in moccasins. Things suddenly make sense- like why I always found it easier running up hill- because you automatically go onto your toes going uphill.I realise too that unless I’m pursuing the offbeat side of any kind of subject I lose interest fast.

The other key thing is making lots of fast small strides rather than loping great big ones. I think its easier to get your work rate up by increasing stride length than by increasing stride speed, so have a fast default stride at the outset.

robert twigger

This time I didn’t run in Wadi Digla, I made do with the sports field of Victoria college school. Armed with the GPS I managed my 4km doing laps of their rugby field, though it didn’t help that excessive watering had left part of it a giant puddle. The final 4km my son wanted to join in but I knew he would drop out without some incentive, so we endlessly circled passing a football back and forth between us, much rigorous exercise than merely jogging in a straight line at the same speed.

Today when I was supposed to be running 8km I went biking instead. I couldn’t face running even though I bribed myself with the thought of buying new running shoes. But the shoe shop is off route from the wadi where I train so I didn’t go. Such is the stuff of fitness training when you have convinced yourself not to push yoursefl too hard (for the excellent and convenient reason you might give up the whole program through over exertion).

So biking- and biking is what we’ll be doing in December so it was not wasted. I rode with the saddle high to save my knees but this was unsafe on loose sand. I experimented and found the best height to be about an inch lower than it should be for road riding. The return of control was amazing – I could grip the saddle with my legs when standing up which you can’t do when it is too high. And for skids and wobbles on sand you don’t want to be high and dry.

I went up a new (for me) wadi system which was a delight- even when I fell off and crashed into a large boulder cutting my palm so that blood spattered freely. Out on your own, no one knowing where you are, you don’t want to make a habit of such things I told myself.

I saw a new fox’s hole I’d never seen before and a Barbary Falcon, high up wheeling in a thermal. I am very lucky to be able to ride this place. Something I will probably forget when the next thing goes wrong as they tend to in Egypt in their own inimical way- like when I bought my bicycle and found the freewheel wouldn’t work because the person assembling it had left out a crucial spacer. But to fix it meant wrecking the freewheel and getting one the same wasn’t possible in Cairo so now I have an 18 speed not a 24 speed- which is fine.

The bike I have- front suspension cheapo Peugeot that I suspect was NOT made in France is, with flattish tyres, great for riding up the sandy dry river beds in wadis. Most of the wadi riders take the rocky singletrack along the canyon walls but for where we’re going- the Great Sand Sea of the Sahara- I need to ride all the sand I can find. I should start fat tyre training in June- that’s the plan.

More fitness- I have a chin bar across my office door- good for doing one arm hangs- they straighten out the shoulders a bit and build grip.

Robert Twigger

Biking will be the main part of my fitness program but as there will also be some big obstacles to climb- namely the highest dunes in the Libyan desert- which is what they call this part of Egypt, I’ll need to be all round fit. All round fitness- grudgingly I know no better way of achieving it than running.

I hate running, pretty much. I also injured my knee two years ago by excessive running on asphalt after a long lay off. So I have double reason to be wary of the ‘king of exercise’ as I keep reminding myself Bruce Lee called it.

As I mention elsewhere my new interest in running is sustained by technology. Namely the good old handheld fairly cheap GPS- used to be Garmin but now I’m fully converted to Magellan- a ‘mark’ button is way better than scrolling and clicking especially in the dark. So the GPS gives me accurate speed and distance measures which is all I need to take my mind off the tedium.

So, the first run was in Wadi Digla, a dry canyon about 15km long in the initial section that is very near to where I live in Cairo. I started off running quite fast interested to see what I could get my GPS speedo up to- about 20kmh for a second or two, then back to a highly sustainable 10-11kmh, darn slow by most running standards but I could manage it for 4 km out to a short wall of rock just below a cave, thats fun to climb (only one move really and you’re up) and then I headed back again- running the last 2km without a rest. A bunch of Egyptian lads drove by shouting and waving from their jeep. I used this to keep going a bit longer than before, wouldn’t do to shuffle past such dimwits like I really was ie. totally knackered.

So, next challenge: same distance- first 4km run without a halt.

People usually have so much to do before an expedition that they neglect their fitness. Often if you have good base level of fitness you can use the early part of the trip to get in shape. For those over 35 there is in this more extreme strategy the increased possibility of injury to a tendon or ligament usually. Muscles tone up fast- two weeks can see a return to past glories but bones, ligaments and cartiledge take three months minimum, or at least should be allowed as much.

The best fitness program concentrates on brute strength rather than mere stamina if you have to choose- why? Because injuries usually occur through the sudden overstraining of your body when hefting something heavy.

But then you need stamina too if the expedition requires paddling or walking with packs or walking along river banks for hundreds of miles. The slant of a river bank can over days and weeks lead to a version of shin splints as I discovered in Canada a few years ago having walked 400 km along the north bank of the Peace River in Alberta.

Sledge towers train by towing tractor tires tied to their waists. Canoeists can train in a pool by having a bunjee tied to one end of the canoe with a scale on the pool side - they have to strain against the bunjee cord to make a certain mark. Inventiveness is key in exploration fitness acquisition because of its deadly dull (usually) nature. Climbing walls are great for upper body and fun too. Mountain biking up hills and down dales is as good as running for aerobic – or almost as good.

I have found that running truly is the ‘king of exercise’ as the master Bruce Lee put it. Unfortunately it is bloody boring even in the beautiful wadi digla area where I train in Cairo. My new and exciting solution: take the gps and turn each run into a number fest. I constantly check my speed as I go up hill and down dale. I measure the distance I have gone and have to go. I cross check this with previous speeds and times and pretty soon I’ve run 2 km then 4 then 8. That’s where I’m at right now.

Train in the hills by carrying jerrycans of water in your rucksack- climb the hill with it in and then dump it for the trip down to save your knees. Which are better built through biking and climbing and yoga than the shock impact of pounding down a hill 20kg heavier than your usual weight.

The best way to train is always with a buddy.

Cross the Sahara on a push bike- December 2008

Fat tire bicycles offer some intriguing possibilities, in fact one suspects a mtb revolution is brewing somewhere- there are big big big snow and desert trips just waiting to be done.

Our contribution is an attempt to cross for the first time by bike the Great Sand Sea of the Egyptian Sahara from the Gilf Kebir to Siwa Oasis. It’s the world’s biggest sand sea.

600 km through the most profoundly arid region on earth bar none.

We will start at the ‘cave of the swimmers’, so named after the 5000 year old rock art paintings of seemingly diving men on the walls of the cave. This was the place featured in the English Patient movie where Kristin Scott Thomas’s character dies- which we hope will provide a suitably upbeat start to the trip…

We then ascend the Aquaba pass, discovered by Count Almasy (the real life English Patient) and used by him to spirit spies into Cairo behind English lines during WW2.

Over the top of the Gilf Kebir, a plateau the size of Switzerland, only with no groundwater at all.

We then go through the Silica Glass area of the great Sand Sea, a mysterious natural glass that was used to make the chest scarab of Tutankhamun. We will skirt the meteorite crater that may have been the cause of the high temperatures needed to make the sand fuse into glass.

It is then up dune corridors between the highest dunes in the Eastern Sahara- over 700 feet high, more than high enough to put the fear of Ra up a cyclist aiming to cross them. Which we will have to do at their end in order to enter subsequent new dune corridors.

We aim to do all of the above on a suitable fat tire bike such as the Surly Pugsley or similar. We will have two Toyota Landcruisers as back up vehicles.

To donate money or goods to aid this trip email the explorer school or phone Richard in the UK. We will also be raising money for charity, principally an orphanage in Luxor.

If you are able, and have water, use that to polish your dirty bot as the Egyptians do. If you are wedded to paper use a lighter to flame it after use, or bag it and take it away. Leaving paper, as the Cologne University crew have done at their site 60 km SW of Dakhla is simply revolting. Archeologists of all people should know that paper lasts for thousands of years in dry sand- hence the buried MS in the sands at Oxyrhincus. But no, those German eggheads just kept on shitting in the same place week in week out leaving the white paper behind. The shit has gone- eaten by beetles but the paper, denuded of sand by the wind, remains.

Flame the bloody stuff. No one wants to see other peoples shitty paper in the otherwise pristine desert.

If you have to shit on a featureless sand sheet you will find you are invisible except in a very general sense when 1 km from the camp.

Wetwipe the hands to remove the inevitable. Burn or bag the wipes.

When is a traveller not a traveller? When he, or she, is an explorer. We all love to explore, even on a micro scale like picking over the beach after the tide has come in.

The desert is like one great beach, and in the case of the Sahara it’s the biggest beach on earth, and despite what we may believe, it is not all explored.

We aimed to set up the explorer school to put people who want to explore in touch with the skills they need. As I had just spent the last couple of years exploring the Egyptian Sahara it made sense to start there.

Typically we spend an entire day preparing to leave for a ten day desert journey. It is always very hectic- Bedouin are, on the surface, disorganised. But we have learnt that each trip breeds its own organisation. We start off with all the bags thrown on the camels higgledy piggledy and then over the next hours and throughout the first two days we perfect a system for that journey. Every trip is different and it makes sense to not be too rigid- take weather for example: the packing will be different if we expect sand storms and high temperatures or whether we are stomping through the chill of a January morning.

Despite cold starts, the Sahara in winter is the best time to visit. Sunny and clear by day but never more than 25/26 degrees. By night it can be freezing and if you sleep out without a tent, which is the best way to see the stars move through the night sky, you may wake to find frost on your sleeping bag.

The Bedouin teachers/guides get the fire going before dawn. It is built with any sticks and brushwood we find during the day together with slow burning acacia wood carried in camel bags as a reserve. The trick is to stand the pot downwind actually in the fire so the wind blows the flames around it. No petrol or gas stoves allowed! Bread for breakfast is another skill we learn: scrape away the embers and lay out unleavened dough on the hot sand. Cover with more sand and embers and cook for fifteen minutes. Uncover again and dust it off with a clean paintbrush (or your hand) and you have delicious bread. Surprisingly the sand doesn’t stick to it at all.

Then it’s time to load the camels. This is the main skill we learn from the Bedouin who have practised the art since camels were first brought to Egypt about 500BC. The key is balance. Each load is done with a balancing load on the opposite side of the saddle. A female can take 150Kg, a male over 250kg. Mostly we take females as they are less unpredictable and more friendly. The key knot is very simple- just a stop knot threaded through the weave of the rope held in place by tension. This basic fastening is used in place of complicated straps everywhere on the camel’s saddles. It has the great advantage that if a rope breaks you can repair it easily.

Our journeys take us into the Western Desert around Dakhla oasis, the longest continually inhabited area in the Sahara- there are house remains in Dahkla over 13,000 years old. It has been a trade route centre for as long as there have been trade routes, and it is these old routes that we set out to explore. Curiously it is our exploring, not Bedouin knowledge, that has revealed new information about this remote area. The local Bedouin previously only visited the land to the East, not the West and South West. This was because of banditry in previous centuries closing the old West-East Sahara routes which caused a decay in local knowledge. Those old routes are still marked by ‘alem’ or stone men, literally several flat stones piled on a prominent rock and indicating a route. Often we find the tell tale furrows left behind by very ancient camel routes and always we find stone age tools, pottery, bones and closer to Dakhla even human bones and winding cloths from disturbed graves that date at least from Roman times.

The terrain of the Western Desert is sandy, real desert, with dunes and sand sheets, mirages and dried lakes crusted with salt. But Egypt has the most varied desert terrain of the whole Sahara. In a typical day we will cross a dune barrier, wind our way through buttes and mesas as in Monument Valley, made famous by cowboy films, dip into canyons and file through rocky outcrops. The sheer variety hides old water depots full of broken pots, burial sites and the hidden nesting sites of Saker falcons.

The main part of the day is spent walking and learning new skills such as navigation and desert survival. Bedouin only ride their camels when they are in a hurry, either on a raid or taking them to market, or making a short journey. Walking is the best way to appreciate the desert and to find treasure beneath your feet. But, if you disdain boots, make sure your sandals don’t rub your Achilles tendons as mine did at first- it’s a real killer.

One of the exercises we devised was locating the buried water drop. Camels can go for many days without water in winter (months if there is vegetation to eat) though they do need time to recover. To save the camels we give them a drink after five days. A camel can guzzle fifty litres in five minutes so the water is hidden before we set out. As a test of compass skills (no GPS allowed) we give only the bearing and distance in paces (each person having already measured their pace) and then, like the search for buried treasure, which it is, in a way, the race is on. We haven’t failed to find one yet so increasingly we do this exercise using only the sun as a compass having first learnt how from the Bedouin.

The Bedouin who accompany us are the true teachers of desert exploration. Any time of the day I would ask Ali which way was north. Even without the sun he could tell me within five degrees. At night it is the camels who show the right direction. By some homing instinct they always go to sleep with the bodies pointing towards the starting point of the journey, however many twists and turns we may have made on the way.

One of the great lessons of desert exploration is travelling by night. This is highly dangerous by car but safe by camel, if there is a moon. By lining up the two side stars of the Great Bear and moving a short distance up the sky one always finds the Pole star and so true north. By watching the way stars revolve around the Pole star it is possible to tell the time at night with considerable accuracy.

Our exploration goals are simple: make a map of the journey, record what you find, and be the first at a confluence point. Confluence Points are whole integer intersections of lines of Latitude and Longitude. The first person to record their presence at one wins a place on the extensive Degree Confluence Project website, a kind of Royal Geographical Society for amateur explorers.

Map making is possible because the only accurate maps of this desert are 1:500,000 made in the 1940s. Sat photos, though useful after you’ve been somewhere, are too confusing in place of real maps. We made our first expedition without any map at all, just using a compass and GPS to record bearings and positions on a sheet of graph paper. Over time we have added information to make a detailed record of the area we aim to explore. Each trip, though, we go a new route, very often one which rarely crosses camel or vehicle tracks for days at a time. One set of tracks we were happy to find: the tiny narrow tracks of a baby Ford left by Laszlo Almasy in 1932- he was the real life Hungarian explorer on whom the English Patient was based. His car tracks were preserved in the surface of black gravel lying on sand that he had disturbed but the wind could not erode.

Coming into the oasis after ten days in the desert, the sudden green is like a dream. There are springs where you can dive into clear water and feel your body suck up moisture again. But all too soon the pleasures of the Oasis wear off. As the Egyptian explorer Hassanein Bey wrote: “When the desert smiles there is no place to be but the desert.”