The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology by TC Boyle

Author:TC Boyle [George, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786576132
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

TRACKS IN THE SAND

BY ROBERT TWIGGER

Steve was my buddy. He had been on an expedition across the Canadian Rockies with me in a birch bark canoe when he had lost the top part of his thumb, sawn off by a nylon rope when the canoe got caught in a vicious current. His whole top thumb joint was gone but some sort of vestigial nail was lurking and a thin crescent regrew so it looked almost normal, until you took a second glance. The accident had happened while towing the canoe through deep, ice-cold rapids. Now I was asking Steve to do some more towing, this time through the opposite terrain – dry not wet, hot not cold, in fact the hottest, driest section of the Sahara, down in the righthand corner of Egypt that borders Libya and Sudan. We would be taking turns towing a homemade trolley – four motorcycle wheels and a baseboard that carried water for ten days, over 100 litres of the stuff. Our mission: to find a lost temple deep in the Sahara.

A strange German explorer called Carlo Bergmann – Google him and you can see his amazing desert discoveries – had found evidence that ancient Egyptians had penetrated far into the Egyptian desert. Cologne University had spent 20 years looking for evidence of the Pharaohs in the desert and found precisely zero… They drove 4WDs and lived high on the hog. Carlo Bergmann had two camels and went alone, season after season, searching for the old routes through the desert and meticulously following up clues in the manuscripts of the first explorers of the region a hundred years earlier. In one piece of research he’d found a local reference to a stone temple 18 hours southwest by camel from Dakhla oasis in southern Egypt, the place where Steve and I would start our journey. A camel caravan can average five kilometres an hour, so Bergmann reckoned on the stone temple being 90-plus kilometres into the desert – but what he found was far more intriguing. Because Bergmann was very concerned about his discovery, the exact location remained a secret. But retracing Bergmann’s track, we might just get lucky….

We didn’t have camels and we didn’t have 4WDss. I had been in the desert only a few times and, frankly, the place scared me. Or rather camels plus desert, or cars plus desert unnerved me. I needed to keep it simple. Also, in keeping with my tightwad approach to adventure travel, I had decided manpower was the best way forward. And, to be honest, I’d also become a little bored with the clichéd image of the lone Westerner with camels or dusty jeep and existential freedom, etc. It was time to burst the bubble and what better way than a pretty ludicrous-looking trolley made in a few hours in the Cairo bazaar? The axles and wheels had been fitted to a piece of plywood I had bought for US$5 from a scrap wood shop out near the Cairo ring road.

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