But I've never experienced The Middle Of Nowhere as profoundly as when Lisa and I ventured on the bus to the Western Desert. Somewhere between Cairo and Libya - or, in fact, everywhere between Cairo and Libya - is an expanse of desert so vast, so monochromatic and bland, that you feel as though you could walk and walk and never arrive, as if the sun has baked every hope of life into the hard, grey sand.
First the bus took us through the suburbs of Cairo-stark apartment complexes that stood naked save for halos of smog. What greenery there was seemed to be an afterthought, and did little to soften the impression of heat and concrete. As we left the city further behind us, we encountered stranger complexes-stranger because they were so far removed from any of the history and richness of the ancient city. They were new and freshly painted with primary trims. I wondered aloud what made them so eerie, and then realized: there was no Nile. The further we got from the Nile, the more absurd the buildings seemed. Who lived out here? What was there to DO out here?
Once the suburbs had fallen out of sight, it was just us in the bus and the flat, boring desert. Even I, who adores the clean, invigorating desert feeling, was lulled to sleep by this desert. We drove for hours to a rest stop which seemed to also be a meeting point for wild dogs. Then we continued the bus trip. Suddenly, there was green. There were palms. Handmade signs pointing to a side road. A small mosque. Across the horizon were spurts of green and long sinews of shrubs growing along the tiny streams. We arrived at our desination, Bahariya, which we had assumed, erroneously, would at least have an ATM, and were greeted by a bevy of safari guides, clamoring to snag the tourists who were stretching their legs after the long bus ride. We ended up in an Ahmed Safari jeep, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if all the safaris were actually just subsidiaries of Ahmed Safari. The jeep took us to the Ahmed safari headquarters, where we settled in to negotiate our desert trip.
Ahmed Safari Headquarters
We ended up with a tall guide, whose name might have been Ayman, a French freelance photojournalist, a Gereman student, her Brazilian boyfriend, and a Korean woman traveling across Egypt solo. First stop: the Black Desert, which Rebecca rightly described as, "You know when you have a campfire and then the fire goes out and leaves sort of a heap of ash? Yeah. Imagine that, but bigger heaps." So the Black Desert was not that exciting.
The Black Desert and our trusty jeep
But our next stop (which felt like it was about a week away) was the White Desert. First you drive through the remains of the Black Desert, which reminds you very much of Southern Nevada, and then it's flat, flat, and then mounds of white chalk appear on the surface of the sand. The further you drive, the larger they grow, until they very closely resemble something Dr. Seuss might have seen on his way to Solla Sollew.
Tracks to nowhere
We drove through the white formations into-and past-sunset. Our poor fasting guide must have been starving, but he kept driving, perhaps because he has "his spot" - all the spots looked exactly the same to us foreigners, but I supposed if one knows the white desert, one has one's favorite spots. Twilight was just seeping out into the horizon and the air felt cooler and stiller. It was dead silent. It was a silence I could hear your heartbeat through. It was almost deafening after the hubbub of Cairo and the roar of the Jeep's engine. The white shapes are tomb-like, rising still and cool into the air, bumping the stars with their mushroom-cap heads.
We ate a meal prepared by our two guides over the campfire, listened to shrill, but upbeat!, Arabic music on his mobile phone, and laid our sleeping bags in the protection of the windbreak between the two jeeps. It was then that the realization of The Middle Of Nowhere sunk it. We weren't in Nevada, a few hours awy from Vegas. We weren't in Wadi Rum, only an hour or two from Aqaba and the Red Sea. We were an easy nine hours drive West of Cairo-probably further. We might be closer to Libya, actually. If we had been lost, there's no way we could have found our way to civilization before we collapsed of thirst. All the white shapes looked like all the other white shapes, and the horizon never changed. Nothing mattered except the sky and the stars and our heartbeats and the white tombs around us. Everything else seemed completely irrelevant and unecessary.
SunsetThe next day we returned to a little bit of civilization: the oasis towns, built up around springs. Farmers worked out in their fields, planting, weeding, with their donkeys and children around them.
We dipped out feet in one of the springs, feeling fresh after a night in the desert and some long, long hours in dusty vehicles. We were still in the middle of nowhere, but in a slightly more orderly middle of nowhere, where someone would probably notice if you were injured on the side of a road and the silence was just quiet, not the echoing, lonely stillness of the previous night.
And we returned to Cairo that evening, on the last night of Ramadan, and were welcomed by the chaos of horns and pedestrians in Giza, Ramadan lights blinking on and off, men yelling as they leaned out of open bus doors, women with their Eid purchases pushing their way through crowds of rowdy young men. It was like a jolt of caffeine. I couldn't remember what silence sounded like.
