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Be your own donkey
On an innocent walk into the Libyan Desert, our correspondent discovers just how easily fancied adventures can turn into real ones.

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By Rolf Potts

March 28, 2000 |   By the afternoon of my second day in the Libyan Desert, I finally found the sense of isolation I'd been looking for. The faint white ridge-line that marked the far edge of Dakhla Oasis 37.5 miles to the north had just dropped beneath the horizon, and I found myself adrift in a sterile sea of yellow dunes. Inspired by the gorgeous absence of everything but curves and light, I unslung my pack, tossed it into the sand and sat down for a much-needed breather.

Though it seemed innocuous at the time, this was probably the act that turned the next 10 hours of my life into a wearying mix of self-loathing and dull paranoia.

Up until that moment, my hike into the sandy fringe of the world's largest desert had been full of simple discovery and fascination. In the utter emptiness of the landscape, I found myself vividly aware of slight details: telltale irregularities in the texture of the sand; the metallic ping of the odd rocks beneath my boots; a lone ant marching up a dune, its abdomen tilted skyward. I noted a complete lack of odor in the air; I watched the rippled shadows of the landscape dissolve at midday, then deepen again in the afternoon.

This all changed just before sunset, when I opened my pack to find my gear slathered in a sodden brine of damp grit and filmy garbage. Beneath this water-slicked gear, I found my last bottle of Bakara mineral water -- its thin, plastic shell burst open in the middle, its contents mostly gone. Unthinking, I sloshed the excess water out from the bottom of my pack and started spreading things out to dry in the sand.

It wasn't until I'd begun to tally my gear that I realized the problem: Two days into the desert, I had only one bottle of drinking water remaining, and that bottle was half-empty.

There are some moments in life when unexpected situations call for momentous, life-changing acts of resourcefulness and endurance. This was not one of them. Granted, I was hiking into one of the emptiest areas in the world: To my south and west, nothing but sand and rocks lay between me and the distant, barren borders of Sudan and Libya. To my north, however, a village called Mut -- the southernmost outpost of Egypt's Dakhla Oasis -- was no more than a 12-hour trudge away. Outright stupidity on my part excluded, I'd not likely be forced to jettison my gear, drink my own urine or flag down passing airplanes in the effort to survive.

Rather, my situation was far more representative of prosaic day-to-day life: It didn't require outright heroism so much as it required thankless, forgettable drudge work. A 12-hour forced march to Mut on a half-liter of water was certainly doable; it just wasn't desirable.

Sitting in the sand, the day going dark, I pondered other options. The only unknown factor at the time was what lay to my east. The map in my guidebook (which, I'll confess, was not designed to aid desert trekking) showed a dotted line dropping south out of Mut -- evidence of the old caravan route that once arced down to the distant sands of Sudan. By my own estimation, I could cut due east in the cool of the night and arrive at the caravan road in less than five hours. If this road were still in use, I could wait there the next morning and hitch a ride on a truck (or, I'd secretly hoped, on a camel), thus neatly avoiding the tedious slog to Mut. On the other hand, if this road were disused I would double both my hiking distance and my odds of being forced to swill my own urine.

Gathering up my gear, I took an eastward bearing off my compass and rolled the dice.

Next page | Shopping for donkeys in an Egyptian oasis