The White Desert

At first glance, the White Desert seems much more like the type of desert we imagine the Sahara to be. It's full of dunes made of fine sun-bleached sand that spread deep into the horizon. It is the perfect contrast to the Black Desert. Where the Black Desert has a certain darkness and sense of oppressiveness, the White Desert is soothing and calm, the perfect place to spend a night under the pure desert sky.

The White Desert is a ways outside of Bahariyya, far south on the road to the oasis of Farafara. After a good hour and half of driving through the rough terrain of the Black Desert, we watched as the land around us turned from a dusty mix of brown and black to the light brown, almost white, of the fine sand of the White Desert. Eventually, our driver leaned back to tell us to hold on as we veered off the narrow jeep path, and on to the sand. We watched as our driver adeptly lead the jeep across the sand, following a path invisible to us, but that was burned into his mind after years of excursions into the desert. The jeep floated across the desert for a good while until it came to a halt atop of a small precipice. Following our guide we got out of the vehicle and looked around in amazement at the new landscape that lay before us. At the foot of the white stone and sand cliff, a sea of sand, spotted with small lumps of rock extended as far as we could see. This was the Plain of Tents, our guide told us, and indeed that small rock bumps that poked out of the sand looked like little tents, a whole field of them. These formations, were most likely much larger, but had been worn down after millennia of wind and sand erosion. It is from these soft, white, limestone rocks that spread themselves out over the sand, that the White Desert gets its name.

After a few minutes of gazing at the rock tents before us, we headed on to what proved to be an even more spectacular sight. The jeep continued on across the expanse below, weaving around the rock formations. As we moved along, the rocks slowly became larger, and soon we were stopped at the foot of at least ten good sized rock mushrooms, as our guide called them. These mushrooms were rock formations, ten to fifteen feet tall, whose limestone bases had been worn away by the mixture of wind and sand that had blown by them at high speeds for thousands of years. Seemingly defying the laws of gravity, these huge rocks stood high atop narrow bases that looked like they could crack at any moment. Our guide waited as we took climbed atop the rocks and took our photos, but soon it was time to head on, for the sun was about to set, and we needed to set up camp.

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