What Not to Do in the Sahara
It’s been six years since my first trip to Egypt with Pascal, and I thought it would be fun to revisit the highlights of that trip. Notably, how we almost met our end in the Sahara.Here’s what I wrote at the time (you can also click here to view this post with accompanying pics on GabrielOpenshaw.com):
June 8, 2003: FUBAR in the Sahara
“I’m so tired; we’re all going to die.”
Those words were uttered by our driver Sayeed at precisely 5:24 PM on Thursday, June 5th in the heart of the Libyan Desert. It’s ridiculous how close to the truth that really was.
Here’s what happened.
The plan was to make a 250 mile journey right through the heart of the Sahara (a section called the Libyan Desert) almost directly due east to reach the next oasis, Bahariyya.
Not an easy trip under any conditions, it is especially perilous during the ridiculously hot summer months, as there is literally no civilization of any kind between these two oases.
In fact, it is nearly impossible for Westerners to make this journey in the reverse direction as the military will not allow them to go (in our case, we had to get special permits).
Naturally, apart from the sheer adventure of it all, safety was a top concern of mine.
“What happens if the car breaks down between Siwa and Bahariyya?” I asked our guide.
“No problem,” Fathy replied. “There are military checkpoints every 35 miles. They have radio and I have cell phone.” Fair enough. Get yourself into trouble and you call the Egyptian military to bail you out.
With containers full of water and enough food to last us a week, our bags, some sleeping mats and blankets, our journey began on Wednesday afternoon somewhat inauspiciously: the car stalled while shifting to second gear and would not start again.
This was an unexpected but not altogether unfamiliar surprise. The same problem had occurred on Tuesday as we explored the sand dunes closer to the Libyan border (but not too close—there are mines).
The fix then had been fairly straightforward: open the hood, manually squirt some oil into the engine, start the car. Fathy had blamed the problem on the quality of the local benzene (indeed, he had later on Tuesday ingeniously fixed the problem by rigging an additional fuel container to drip into the engine—a kind of supercharger, if you will).
But this problem was supposed to have been permanently fixed that morning by a mechanic. Nobody was pleased about this.
But it was easy enough to address: open hood, squirt oil, start car. Off we go.
(For those of you wondering why we would go out with an old Land Rover to begin with, consider the alternatives: it was probably the best-looking—and certainly the cleanest—of the handful of 4×4 cars available in Siwa, and it had proven its ruggedness the previous day in the dunes, a driving environment I never would have attempted even with my Jeep.)
We crossed the military checkpoint leading into the desert in the late afternoon on Wednesday. And it was amazing.
I’ve always pictured the Sahara Desert as one giant stretch of golden sand covering the entirety of North Africa. While there certainly is no shortage of such dunes, the variety of the desert landscapes is simply stunning.
Golden sand dunes, black sand, white sand, plains of rock, Grand Canyon-like plateaus; every 15 – 20 minutes would serve up what seemed like an entirely different desert, wholly different from the one before and equally beautiful in its own unique way.
And bloody hot. That certainly didn’t change with the scenery! Our drive was taking us right between the sun’s hammer and the Sahara’s anvil. Forget the “you can live for 3 days without water” deal—in the Sahara without water you’re toast in a day.
There is technically a “road” that joins Siwa to Bahariyya. And in many instances this is actually the case. But it’s the notable exceptions that guarantee that 99% of the world’s cars wouldn’t make it past the first 10 miles.
The first military checkpoint in the desert was nestled in golden sand dunes—the kind that you see in all movies about Egypt. There was so much sand on the road that it was impassable, so Pascal, Fathy and I got out to walk the remaining distance to the checkpoint while our young driver Sayeed took the Land Rover out into the sand to circumvent the difficult road.
We were first greeted at the checkpoint by a couple of white dogs. This surprised me, as Muslims generally heavily dislike dogs (they’re considered dirty because they go around sniffing crotches and eating feces—can’t say I find that appealing either, actually). But in this case I imagine function took precedence over religion, as they made great early warning sentries, barking enthusiastically at our approach.
The couple of young machine-gun wielding soldiers that emerged from their tiny sun-baked brick hovel of a checkpoint were happy to see us. And understandably so. Aside from being yanked from their regular life into forced military service, they had to endure blistering conditions in a tiny 2-man outpost for months at a time, with only one car every 3 – 7 days to break the monotony.
They served us tea—which Pascal and I drank on top of a large sand dune—while Sayeed drove around the checkpoint, got the car stuck in the sand, got it unstuck, had it stall, did the oil squirt thing, and finally was able to bring it around to the other side of the checkpoint for us to continue.
The drive after the first checkpoint was made even more picturesque by the setting sun, so I asked Fathy to stop the car so that I could take a few pictures. Which he did.
When we went to continue, the car wouldn’t start again. So he and Sayeed did the usual oil squirt thing under the hood, and the car started. But this time something different happened: shifting into 3rd gear the car would have violent shakes and convulsions, followed by very loud popping sounds from under the hood.
I can’t even count the number of times we stopped and waited in the car while Fathy and Sayeed tinkered with the engine, only to start again and start the whole car convulsion and popping process. At least 15 – 20 times. At least.
It got so bad and the engine was undergoing such abuse (I’ve never in my life seen someone rev up second gear to the extent that Fathy did), that I fully expected the engine to finally explode out of the hood and scatter cranks and pistons and charred metal over a one mile radius of sand dunes.
Through sheer tenacity and vehicle abuse, we made it to checkpoint number two by nightfall. When we finally stopped the radiator was hissing up a storm, and Sayeed had the brilliant idea to take the radiator cap off. It shot up and sprayed us with boiling water. Thankfully no one was hurt, although I did have a fleeting urge to hurt him myself.
Fathy seemed close to a depression. He’d spent a good portion of the afternoon outside under the hood of the car, and obviously things were not going well. Not that I was in any mood to sympathize, mind you. In fact, we had a little heated exchange that evening about the state of the car.
After dinner we camped right outside the military checkpoint. Pascal had guzzled an unusual amount of water that evening so he had to get up to relieve himself three times during the night.
The unfortunate side effect was that this would wake the dog, who would first bark and wake everyone up and then chase Pascal to the restroom and back.
Against all logical common sense, we set out that morning into the desert once more. The car was having all the same symptoms as the day before, and after 10 minutes I really got fed up with all this stopping and tinkering under the hood every few minutes. Pascal and I agreed that the next time the car stopped we would demand that they turn back to the checkpoint and call another car.
As fate would have it, this was precisely the time that Fathy and Sayeed were able to identify the source of the shaking and popping from the engine. One of the wires had been exposed and they were able to correct the problem. All looked good once more.
In the morning we went off-road and visited some isolated tombs, one of which held a couple of very well preserved mummies—not to mention a complete collection of varied human bones scattered here and there. Great stuff.
We also saw the barren husk of an abandoned truck left over from a previous Paris – Dakkar race, an annual rally race across the desert. What struck me was that although it had obviously been there for a while there was not an inch of rust—no water around for that to happen.
We went deeper into the desert. While Fathy had fixed the shaking problem and we were now able to travel at relatively decent speed, we still had to stop regularly (about every eight minutes) to refill the overheating radiator with water.
We lunched at the third military checkpoint, which Pascal finished off by thoroughly crushing one of the soldiers in a game of chess, which obviously delighted the other soldier who’d apparently been on the losing end for the past month or so.
As we continued into the desert, something alarming started to happen. The time between refills of the radiator started shortening, from 8 minutes or so when we first left the checkpoint to five minutes, then four, then three. At four liters of water every refill, this is not something we could continue indefinitely.
The defining moment came when we had a longer pit stop than usual. We’d become accustomed to the 2 – 5 minute stops to cool down the radiator, add water and tinker with the engine. But this one was taking longer.
In the blazing heat of the early afternoon, Fathy and Sayeed spent an hour removing the radiator from the Land Rover. It did indeed have holes in it, but what they did next made me wonder if I’d started hallucinating.
They took a bag full of dates, rolled them up into a paste (with the pits included) and stuffed the radiator holes with this fruit mixture. What in the world?!
An hour later, the date-patched radiator was back in the car. The result? We were able to drive for 3 minutes before overheating again. (Note to self: dates don’t work to patch leaky radiator.)
It was at this point that, after refilling the radiator with water, Sayeed gave in to despair.
“I’m so tired; we’re all going to die.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Can’t we call the next military checkpoint?”
“No,” he replied “Cell phones don’t work and you can only radio from checkpoint.” I inwardly cursed Fathy for misleading me on this one.
“OK,” I said. “We’ve been traveling for a long time now. We should be very close to the next checkpoint.”
Sayeed let out a long sigh. “Next checkpoint 30 miles,” he stated.
What the??? Apparently Fathy hadn’t told me the full truth on this one either.
Checkpoints were 35 miles apart for the first 105 miles from Siwa, and for the last 105 miles arriving to Bahariyya, but that left a very significant gap of 140 miles in between!
Pascal and I went from being mostly annoyed at all of our technical problems to extremely angry.
We’d been told help was only a cell phone call away, and at the very worst the longest we would have to walk to get to a military checkpoint was 17 miles. There hadn’t been any reason to be overly concerned about the status of the car.
But this was different. We could theoretically be as far as 70 miles from help, in the middle of the desert, with maybe one or two cars per week for traffic. This was insane.
Compounding the problem, we only had 4 bottled waters left—one for each of us, and we’d completely used up 40 liters of water for the radiator. We were stuck in the desert with no one to help us.
“You stay. I walk to checkpoint to call other car,” Fathy said.
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “It’s 5:30 now and Pascal and I will walk to the checkpoint at 7:30, when it’s cooler.”
“No, no,” Fathy said. “You stay here with car and I walk now.”
“Look,” I answered. “You can walk now if you want but at 7:30 Pascal and I will walk to the checkpoint. There’s absolutely no way we’re staying with the car.”
“Why?” Sayeed whined. “Car has shade and is comfortable. We can wait for help.”
“It’s crazy to stay at the car,” I said. “What if Fathy doesn’t make it to the checkpoint? What if the radio doesn’t work, like at the last checkpoint? What if no one can come? What if the car that comes also breaks down? What if there’s a storm and they can’t reach us? We only have one water bottle each and if we don’t get more water before tomorrow we’re all dead. I’m not taking any chances. We’re walking at 7:30 whether you like it or not.”
“OK, OK,” Fathy agreed. “We all walk at 7:30.”
With that, we laid out a blanket on the shady side of the car and laid down to rest for the next two hours, with Sayeed grumbling for the first 10 minutes or so.
As we tried to rest in the sweltering heat, Pascal tried to calm himself down from wanting to smack our two Egyptian guides for their utter lack of common sense and dangerous deceit, which had now put both of our lives in serious danger.
I tried to rest as deeply as possible. Thirty miles is a long walk, and especially at night would require serious focus to ensure that we didn’t lose the road and accidentally end up wandering into the desert.
Pascal and I estimated that the walk would take us between 7 – 9 hours. If we started at 7:30, when it was cooler, we should make it by sunrise. With the cooler nighttime temperatures, we hoped that one and a half liters of water each would sustain us for this.
Of course, the 30 mile estimate was strictly conjecture. Neither the speedometer nor odometer worked on the car, so we had no accurate way to measure our actual distance from the checkpoint. Although we figured it was 30 miles, we had to be ready to face the possibility that it was much farther—maybe 40 or 50 miles.
One thing was certain: we either had to reach the checkpoint by 7:30 the next morning or we were dead. While 8 hours of walking is doable, 12 hours is very iffy on so little water. With sunrise at 6:00, if we didn’t reach it by the time the sun started really pounding past 8:00 we’d die on the road from heat exhaustion. No second chances.
[Gabriel’s 2009 comment: I had also been having extreme lower back pains during the day, occasionally causing me to collapse in agony without warning I later found out that this was my kidneys reacting to already advanced dehydration.]
So we had a lot on our minds, and braced ourselves to experience the Sahara up close and personal.
Then God intervened.
At precisely 6:45, Sayeed exclaimed: “I think I see a car!”
We all sat up and looked on the horizon. Two black specks stood out in the distance against the golden sand. Sure enough, two 4x4s slowed and stopped as we excitedly flagged them down.
“Do you need help?” one of them asked? Heck yes!
We met Jim, an American geologist and head of the expedition, a British lady archeologist and a Chinese ecologist. They were on their way West to do some research and were accompanied by a guide, mechanic and driver. Boy were we happy to see them.
The timing of their arrival is almost incomprehensible. First of all, it’s next to impossible for people to travel in the direction they did (in fact, they told us a General from the Egyptian army had had to sign off on it.) Also, they hadn’t planned on coming this particular way. And they were only minutes away from turning off from the road to camp off in the distance.
The timing on this was nothing short of miraculous.
On that note, I’ll sign off for now and tell you of our further desert adventures later.
Cheers!
Gabriel
March 31st, 2009 in
Egypt
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You guys are crazy! Never ever trust an Egyptian :). Great story though. This question might be strange, but were your programs any different in the Sahara?… strange I know lol.