Merry Christmas To All

... and a very happy New Year!

The Off-Season

Berry Merry

It's Winter, Truly

Have I told you how hot it is in our apartment?  If you're living anywhere like this city right now, you're probably not going to want to hear about it.  Some quirk in the building's furnace means that it's about a constant, oh, 28 degrees centigrade in here at all times.  The water is coming out of the faucets either warm or hot these days (not splendid for drinking), but as it's minus 15 outside and we don't have to pay for it, I'm really not complaining.

Lying, sweating, in my bed, it does feel like it was just yesterday that I was riding my Bixi bike around town and tossing and turning through sweltering summer nights.  In fact it was actually just yesterday that, as I stood in the kitchen making chicken pot pie (which was excellent, thank you), I watched the gathering snow steadily creep up the kitchen window to form the drift that now covers, sincerely, the bottom foot and a half of that window, not to mention the rest of the city with it.  So, here we are and it's really the season.  Maybe the city will make a proper show of its famous snowy winter this year - I, for one, would be thrilled (not that you want to hear about it).

City of Lights

Great Big Sky

The Feeling of a Place: Snow at Kits Beach

Down On The Corner

First Snow

This is today...

The White Desert (Part 6)

The White Desert (Part 5)

The White Desert (Part 4)

The White Desert (Part 3)

The White Desert (Part 2)

The Most Magical Place I'd Never Seen: The White Desert (Part 1)

I wonder sometimes what travel must have been like before people like me set about making it their lives’ ambition to ruin the surprise for everyone else.  It’s an amazing thing to arrive at a place you’ve never seen before, and an experience that’s becoming increasingly rare.  That I found such a place in a country as toured through the ages as Egypt is a mystery as amazing to me as the landscape of the White Desert itself.  (And surely it’s with a heavy sense of irony that I encourage you to keep scrolling on.)

This particular journey begins away from the fertile and crowded Nile River Delta, some 400 kilometers west of Cairo.  A dull-looking square on the map, the Western Desert actually stretches from the Mediterranean and the Nile all the way to Egypt’s borders with Libya in the west and Sudan in the south.  From the verdant oases and the ancient, North African caravan routes to the formidable Great Sand Sea, the romantic notions this place inspires in the mind of the impressionable traveller are almost too much to bear.

Our travels start at Bahariya Oasis, one of the few relatively lush spots in an incredibly dry expanse, and continue south through increasingly spectacular and fantastic landscapes.  In the Black Desert, crumbling black-topped peaks litter the desert with millions of dark rocks which run down the sides of the mountains like dried lava.  Some distance further, we’re driving off the edge of a great dune (was it Naqb as-Sillim, the Pass of the Stairs?) and down between the enormous island mountains that mark the beginning of the White Desert.  From there the ground becomes hard and chalky, and snowy white rock formations like whipped meringue crop out of the ground in a landscape truly as awe-inspiring as it is bizarre.  This is where we camped for the night, under the stars and amidst these great, calcified monuments that have been carved by the desert winds, somewhere in the quietest 300 square kilometers in the world.