Desert Rats

The camel trek in Siwa has so far been the best part of our trip in Egypt. We really wanted to do something with camels at some point, really wanted to see parts of the Great Sand Sea and wanted to do at least one overnight in the desert, so we started asking around and the owner of the restaurant (Abdu's) that we frequented recommended Sharif at Talaat Ranch. Sharif was an amazing guy who had about 12 well trained and well cared for camels. He taught us TONS of cool stuff about camels and the desert, plus, since it was too late to arrange an overnight permit for inside the Sand Sea, he arranged for us to camp overnight at the edge of the Sea at a friend of his's house where we could use her natural hot spring. It was awesome.

But of course the camel part was best.

The view from my camel. It was a bumpy ride.

One cool sand dune that I had fun photographing during lunch.

Heading up a dun late in the afternnoon, Jeremy in front of me. You can see there are lots of tire tracks from all the 4WD guys taking tours out there. It makes it really difficult to take a camel through because it churns the sand and they kind of sink a bit when they step down. Plus, those 4WD guys leave ots of trash. We don't like them.

Our camel caravan, sans moi.

We had to get off at one point and wak our camels down a particuarly steep dune. It was a lot bigger that it looked and if we had tried to ride our camels down we probably would have fallen or gone shooting off at super speed as camels perfer to run downhill. Crazy animals.

But it was all good fun. The only down side is that there's no bathroom out in the desert and very litte (if anything) to pee behind. And our lunch kind of made us sick (of course aided by the rocking motion of our steeds). We were ready to burst when we finally arrived at camp. lol.