Chasing a fantasy to cross the worlds harshest desert in the company of nomadic bedouins, Yoginder Sikand discovers that an entire way of life built on a symbiotic relationship between the Sahara and its people has been transformedThe overladen omnibus from Cairo chugged down a clogged thoroughfare, and inched across a bridge over the Nile. Already, at this early hour, the road traffic was dense and deafening as workers from rural Egypt poured into Cairo, stuffed in buses, cars and even donkey-carts. A dozen barges and a few luxury liners anchored in the river lazily watched the occasional country boat navigating the murky waters of the Nile. We crawled through decaying suburbs of the city and accelerated through a succession of villages strung along the great river. An hour later we were speeding in sheer, pristine desert. Not just any old desert. This was the fabled Sahara of myth and legend. One of my childhood fantasies was to cross the Sahara, the worlds largest and harshest desert, atop a camel and in the company of nomadic Bedouins, moving from oasis to oasis by day and camping under starry skies at night. Several decades later here I was, realising my elusive dream of Saharan exoticism, albeit in an air-conditioned bus, munch-ing cheese crisps and sipping bottled mineral water manufactured by an American multinational company. But I wasnt complaining. The bus was comfortable, and armed with a dose of history and culture, I was deep inside the Sahara desert. We raced down a surprisingly smooth highway for four hours, cutting through the desert. Far from mono-tonous, the landscape kept changing as we advanced deeper into the Sahara, travelling south-west. At first, the terrain was pebbly, interspersed with giant black rock formations that loomed on the far horizon. Then, it transmogrified into a landscape dominated by flat-topped hills, displaying a rich profusion of hues — rust brown, pale green, mustard yellow and even peach pink. Later we cut through towering breast-shaped dunes of pure sand lacerated with wavy ripples. Trees, or even a patch of grass, were conspicuously absent. At noon, the bus pulled into Bahariya, one of the few oases scattered across the vast Egyptian Sahara. I had planned to spend a few days here but as the bus drew into the settlement, I changed my mind. Bahariya wasnt the remote, unchanged Bedouin outpost in the middle of nowhere that I had imagined. Heaps of garbage rising to pyramidical heights lined both sides of the sand-strewn road. Lank-haired Western tourists sat under rainbow umbrellas planted in the shade of ramshackle motor repair shops. Run-down lodges, incongruously named ‘Cowboy Inn, ‘Bedouin Delight, ‘Ali Babas Home, and supermarkets that titled themselves ‘The City Store and ‘Madonna Palace, peeped out from behind rows of date palms. Men in jeans and T-shirts zipped about on motorbikes and pick-up trucks, sending up whirls of dust. Satellite television dishes sprouted like algae on the roofs of squat houses bunched together or huddled below dome-like dunes in the distance.…
