Siwa Oasis

Coming to Siwa Oasis after leaving the rush of Cairo was a welcome respite. We found ourselves in familiar territory with donkeys, semi-dirt roads, and small town friendliness.

Siwa lies in the Sahara Desert, in the far NW of the country but getting here was easy. There is a bus from Cairo that goes to Marsa Mutra, where after a short tea break got back on the bus for the final ride. Since we always take the cheapest option meaning a slower ride, we stopped a few times and once to pray the Friday prayers at a road side mosque.

The slow rides are nice and with this one the flat featureless desert scenery rolled on forever.

Siwa was easy to get around as most of the action, which is locals going to prayers, donkey carts carrying both people and goods, and few restaurants and shops that are lined up around the town square. The women of Siwa rarely come out in public and never show their face if married and instead cover it with a decorated shawl. They get around taking donkey carts.  Poking around, I found an old mosque in an abandoned fortress with impressive views of the town, the desert, and the many thousand date trees of the oasis.

We want to celebrate the start of Ramadan and so Mohammad (lots of guys are named this) running the hotel happily agreed to accommodate our request.  He warmly offered to wake up us up in the morning and even offered to buy Sahor (morning meal). 

Another reason to come to Siwa is to also explore The Great Sand Sea (Sahara Desert); in fact you can see the towering brown sand dunes right outside the door.  We made a reservation with Mohammad to go exploring and he arranged for a driver to come pick us up.  Driving in the desert is pretty cool, it feels like the truck will tip over right at the precipice of a dune but it just keeps on going.  Our truck had a few mechanical issues, luckily we weren't too far from civilization so didn't feel like we would die.

We came to a few small oasis, a large pond even had a few hundred fish.  I wasn't feeling like taking a dip, so took a shade under a palm tree and contemplated the scenery.  I love dates and there is nothing like picking semi-ripened ones off the tree to nibble on.  We ended up at a hot spring, which none of us went inside on the account of the desert heat, so instead had cooling mint tea and dates.

Our guide had told us that we would be sleeping in the desert, so I imagined camels, starry nights, and quiet but instead we found a mosquito ridden campsite that had trash around, pretty bad food, and no quiet, in fact you could hear a water pump or something running in the distance.  Both of us opted to sleep outside in the open, which was definitely a better alternative as we could watch the constellations and have some quiet. 

We both feel asleep looking at shooting stars and tried our best to tune out the water pump........

A Dry and Dusty Land

After sitting in a hard seat for 19 hours to arrive in Dunghuang, we were a bit tired to say the least. We opted for the hard seat both to prove it as a challenge to us of endurance and to also save money as independent travelers. To tell you the truth, the train pretty much emptied out long before our destination, so we were able to spread out on the seats and sleep. Watching the scenery go by as the train rolled on, it changed from leafy green to canyoned rivers to short brush and finally to mud brown desert with hardly a tree to be seen.

The highlight of the town was of course the Gobi Desert, which after seeing the Sahara truly has some seriously high sand dunes. There are some that are over 800 feet high and some even covered with snow. From a distance, they look solid and resemble mountains but are of course completely made of sand. Leave it to the Chinese to make money from the experience, so arriving at Mingsha Dunes where there is a crescent shaped lake, there is a ticket office but we walked a few minutes and found a side road used by the camel trekkers and entered for free. Now, I am not condoning beating the system to save a few yuans but at the same time following the spirit of independent travelers, it was nice to get away with it and have a story to share. We hiked for a few hours and after a while lost the town amidst the sand dunes and truly felt the awesomeness and nothingness of the desert. To make the day slightly weirder, it even started to rain and then hail for a while.

Buddhist relics exist all over China, but the ones at Magao Caves defiy wonder as there are over 700 caves dating back some over 1,500 years containing religious objects along with the third tallest buddha after the one at Leshan. Much of the site is influenced by Hindu culture, so the scenery contains animal objects and apsaras, flying angels that protect buddha.