Last weekend we finally made it to the White Desert. A six hour trip from Cairo Turgoman to Bawiti in the Bahariyya Oasis (with obligatory blaring film on bus) followed by a three hour drive in a landrover leads to my favourite place on earth bar none: a moonscape under perforated skies, watching foxes shamelessly court your attention with their pretty eyes.
This was a repeat trip for me, and some guy from the village actually recognized me from when I was in Bawiti in 2006, staying at the now (thankfully) defunct Paradise Hotel. Lonely Planet had described it as the cheapest night in town with the bare basics, but it was nothing but dusty mattresses and three waterless, flush-less toilets. That trip was memorable for many reasons, one of the main ones being that my two fellow travelers didn't use the facilities for the duration of our three day trip. I, on the other hand, shamelessly used a different bathroom each day. I went by to check it the Paradise in its current iteration as the village mosque. We slept overnight in the desert, awoken periodically by cheeky foxes licking the kettle and trying to find food a few feet away from our heads.
Having not planned in advance, as per usual, we piggybacked on a tour that included a lovely French Canadian couple, two sun-scarred girls from Scotland and Ireland working in Sharm, a really old agricultural expert from New Zealand and his Thai lover, who brought and cooked her own food, applied metallic pink lipstick under the desert sun, and sweetly laughed loudly at anything remotely funny.
P and I escaped in the evening for a long walk alone over some dunes, then lay back watching shooting stars.
PICS coming soon.
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