Desert Thanksgiving

For most of my life, Thanksgiving has been about family and food – preferrably LOTS of both. In Seattle, the family portion of it has been my “local” family. Either way, there has always been lots of food and lots of love. This year, all my versions of family are far away from me. Moving to Cairo has changed all kinds of “usual” events. Thanksgiving is just one of them.

We had a long weekend for western Thanksgiving, so we decided to get out of town. A friend had recommended the White Desert and a guide for the area, so we set up 3 days in the desert with Ahmed El Shemy. We opened it up to friends, and 2 friends joined us for the adventure, Ryan and Elissia (you’ll see them in the pictures).

We had a lovely traditional Thanksgiving turkey with all the fixin’s at Elissia’s on Wednesday. There were about 10 people, good conversation, lots of food and wine – what a treat!

We left for the desert the next morning at 7am (UGGH). A 4 hour mini-bus ride, with loads of flies in the bus with the four of us. Where the HELL do all these flies come from?? Although the ride was long, it allowed Cairo and the city stresses to slowly slip away. The air was clean and clear, the incredibly dense housing gave way to rocky, rolling dunes as far as one could see. The intense crush of the city was replaced by the intense openness of the western desert. Our rapid-fire conversation waned to silence as we went west. By the time we got to the Bahriya Oasis, the starting point for our trip, we were all (I believe) different people than had crawled into the mini-bus 4 hours earlier.

Event #1: We arrive at Bhariya and our driver tells the police at the checkpoint that he has 4 Americans in the car. We immediately get pulled over. CRAP. The driver goes into the police building, the 2nd guy (?driver’s helper? – getting a ride to Bahriya) gets on the mobile phone, there is much consternation. Eventually we are allowed to leave the checkpoint to head to El Shemy’s hotel.

The hotel is a really nice, quiet place just outside the local town. There is a main hall, about 15 western style rooms, a “Bedouin camp” area with small straw huts and an outdoor cafe with fire pit area. We fell in love with this place IMMEDIATELY. We met the owner, Ahmed El Shemy, who extended us incredible hospitality. We would be waiting at the hotel until some other guests arrived, then all of us would get the local tour of the oasis area.

The tour was amazing. We went to the outlet of a local hotspring and had a little dip in the mineral rich water. A man climbed a date palm and picked us fresh dates from the tree

(note: dates are very rich and fibrous, perhaps not the best idea when you are about to go off for a few days of Bedouin camping in the desert with no “facilities” – hindsight is 20/20)

We 4×4’d thru the local dunes to overlook the oasis and watch the sunset

We retired to the hotel for a delicious dinner, music and dancing around the fire. We stayed as long as we could, considering that it had been a REALLY long day, before requesting to be taken out into the dunes to camp for the night.

We took a 4×4 out into the dunes nearby the hotel. Two of the guides (Abdellah and Khal) went with us, to help set up camp etc. When we parked on the dune, and turned off the lights, the image was incredible. In Cairo, there are very few stars visible because of the pollution and lights, but on the dune we were enveloped in a brilliant blanket of stars extending from horizon to horizon with the feeling of un-plumbable depth. We slept by a campfire, on the sand, with nothing between us and the great swath of stars.

It was beautiful. It was a Thanksgiving unlike any other.