This Family In Asia: The Desert

We hired a car and took a trip into the desert to stay at Baharia Oasis, one of only 6 or 7 oases in the Sahara. When I was younger, I may have remarked that some Canadian prairie and northern towns were in the middle of nowhere. I was wrong. We drove for 4 hours to reach the lush, beyond greenness of the oasis that appears suddenly in staggering contrast to the sand. We stopped briefly at the only, uh, restaurant on the way. We didn't linger after buying the last bag of chips in the Sahara and declining the use of a toilet beyond foulness.

I may call this a "middle of nowhere town", but like any other it's a place where Bedouin people growup, get married, have kids and maybe have lots of drama and adventures, just like the rest of the world. Like the rest of Egypt they were frozen in time about 50 years ago but are sooo much more isolated than the rest of the country. The oasis has about 35,000 people in several communities growing mangoes, dates, and olives with the spring water. The have also dug deeper into the aquifer and have constantly running pipes and ditches of extremely hot water. They pool the constantly flushed water in concrete containers where people go to soap up and bathe. I should say where men go to bathe. Only tourist women use the hot spring water--the local Muslim women never getting the chance to feel the spring water in their own community. People were kind, curious and seemed glad we had come.

"Can you hear me now??"

We were the only guests at a very basic and seemingly cleaner hotel than we had in Cairo--all that was missing was a top sheet. (And wifi, Rob would add. We were told that the wire for the internet had been accidentally cut and that someone would be fixing it that day. Rob clung to that belief for 2 days, poor, sweet boy.) We used whatever we had in our suitcases as a barrier from the scratchy blanket we'd been given and fought off the mosquitoes as best we could. During a chat with the owner we were assured that after each room was vacated, the blankets were hung out in the sun for a week so that bedbugs wouldn't be a problem.

We spent a day with a guide going a further couple of hours out into the desert in a jeep to really have a look around. It was unbelievable....