Tag Archives: desert As we parked our car and followed the stone and concrete walkway into Wadi Bani Khalid, I had Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis dancing through my head. Walking towards the green date palms after two days in the magical Sharqiya Sands Desert (see: Sand Songs and Desert Dreams and Life in the Desert), it […]  Lawrence of Arabia screened on free-to air television here in Australia on Easter Saturday. It seemed an odd choice for the Easter weekend, but nothing is ‘normal’ this year. I’d forgotten what a long movie it is (four and a half hours with ad breaks!) but with the Covid-19 lock-down, it’s not as if I […]  The desert is a magically beautiful place. It is also unforgiving. You have to be tough to forge a life in these hostile, barren expanses where almost no precipitation falls. Bedouin or “desert people” – from the Arabic badawī – have made the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East their home for thousands of years. Even […]  It was another 4:00am wakeup call: we were expected to break camp before 5:00am so we could drive back into Namib-Naukluft National Park and catch the sunrise colours over the sand dunes near Sossusvlei. Sleep, as they say, is over rated. We were aiming for Dune 40 – 40 kilometres past the Sesriem gates on the road to Sossusvlei, […]  Namibia is big. It doesn’t seem particularly big if you are looking at a map of continental Africa, but that is only because Africa is HUGE. Namibia is the 34th largest country in the world. And if your bottom is on a seat in a truck, and you are being driven almost 4000 kilometres in less than two […] |
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