Circumnavigating the Western Desert: Part Eight–Reaching the White Desert.

For the last few nights, I had been intently observing the moon in the night. It was growing and growing… People say there are three best ways of seeing the White Desert. One at the sunrise…..when the entire Desert becomes pink, like a Salvador Dali’s painting…. Another at the sunset, when the shadow of night looms over the Desert and creates magical pink and black scenery…. But the best way of feeling the magic of the place is on a full moon night… when there is enough light so as to see the surreal objects and yet not enough light so as to distinguish the two objects… when the chalky formations of the White Desert merge with the background and create an illusion that…perhaps we are standing in midst of an ice field… with snow all around… as if we are in South Pole minus the chill of it.

Serendipity is not all that serendipitous. It does not occur to people who shy from experiments… it favors the brave or at least the experimenting one… When I started for the Desert Circuit… I did not look at the moon… nor did I know that White Desert is most beautiful on a full moon night… it occurred to me while talking to Eric in Al Qasr. And then every night I used to look at the moon with a request on my face…and finally as if it granted my request… Ahmed said to us…you are lucky, today is the full moon night.

In the morning, we wished good bye to Farafra… last night while strolling in the oasis, we saw a marriage procession and participated in it for a while… it was a wonderful cultural experience… Egyptian marriages… are quite similar to Indian… there is a baraat like procession, the bride called Areesa is applied Mehdi (Egyptian girls are fond of Mehdi and Indian Bindi) ….like an Indian marriage it is more of a social affair…a kind of get together for the entire extended family… Farafra was indeed a wonderful stay.

After a drive of about an hour, one starts seeing the first chalk formations on the left hand side of the road this area is called Nasser Desert… the actual White Desert is on the right hand side of the road… about 20 kilometers further down the road… The first few formations are impressive… one shaped like an ice cream cone, one like a lady turning her head to see her paramour… one like a sitting camel (of course you have to let your imagination run wild and then you start seeing these image)… and though we wanted to stay a bit more, our driver Ibrahim insisted that Nasser Desert is at best a precursor for the real thing and we should spend more time over there…

After 15 kilometers drive down the road we started seeing even more impressive chalk formations…. Much bigger, much grander and leaving little to imagination… we started behaving like children….look that looks like an old man, that like a hut, that like an ice cream cone, that like a camel and that like a horse….that like a pyramid…. The place makes you feel like a kid again…

According to a few Pyramidologists, the Pharaohs got the idea of making Pyramids from the White Deserts…. Quite a few formations look like a mini Pyramid… may be they have a point… Billions of years ago the entire Sahara Desert was a part of Atlantic Ocean… tectonic shifts caused this area to become a marshy land, then a savannah and then a bush land and then a desert…. Evidences of these changes are lying covered and uncovered in the Western Desert… A few days ago with an Environmental Club… I visited Wadi Al Hitan (Valley of the Whales)… where there is a mass fossil grave yard of Blue Whales… there are fossils of Amphibious animals also indicating the existence of Marshes… and then of prehistoric mammals… of savannah…

Desertification is a slow process, it takes millions of years for desertification to take place… today’s fertile land will become desert and the desert may become fertile yet again… but for last few years… human intervention has expedited the process manifolds… seeing fossils in Wadi Al Hitan shuddered me… over my insignificance, the human insignificance… in the larger scheme of nature…

We parked our car in midst of white desert, Ibrahim told us to take a walk around the area…. We were surrounded by a field of chalk formations… with every formation having an image to be imagined and a story to tell… millions of years ago, after becoming a marshy land these chalk formations were subjected to erosions, which like a craftsman had chiseled beautiful images out of them… Ibrahim told us a wonderful way of navigation… of locating formations in the horizon and traveling deeper into the desert, with the help of it…the entire exercise works like a GPS, where you mark a few coordinates for the sake of guiding yourself…with this method you are never lost in the White Desert

This part of the White Desert is very often visited by travelers… and therefore for the purpose of finding solace, one has to go deeper in the Desert. Some 10 kilometers from the White Desert…. There is another field of Chalk formations called the New White Desert…. Driving towards it you arrive at a place called White House…. (not much of a show stealer though… it’s a huge hut shaped formation and you have to let your imagination loose to digest what Ibrahim said was a door, a window and a chimney)… near a white house I located a borough of a desert fox… Ibrahim told me to be careful…this is the season when desert foxes rear their young ones… and can be particularly ferocious when sniff a danger for their kids…

We drove further to the New White Desert and at the horizon could see the famous Mushroom Formation….the formation which beckoned me to the place…. Which is so beautiful so as to stop you on your tracks and make you ponder over its story…. And praise the Almighty that had carved it on the yonder earth