15 years ago I crossed the desert in Egypt from Com Ombo at the river Nile in the south east and up through the oasis's Kharga, Dakhla to Bahariya oasis close to Cairo. It was in a car and we were a mixed group of 6 young travellers from 4 different countries and a driver and guide from Egypt. It was in January 2002 and I was travelling in Egypt for 6 weeks with my girlfriend.
This was not the first desert experience I've had. The first was one year prior to the big Egypt trip and it was also in Egypt, but the Sinai peninsula. On this occasion we were trekking through the desert on camels backs for 3 days and two nights.
On both these encounters with the desert it has meant sleeping rough under the stars in the desert, and for anyone who has never experienced the desert, go and do it and sleep rough. It is an amazing experience.
Now I'm cruising through Oman and has been sleeping rough in nature on one occasion. Again. Try it out. Ok, this time it was not in a sandy dune desert, but still some sort of a desert, like the most of Oman is.
This time I chose a wadi, which basically is a canyon somewhere in the hills. I found it on my way from Sur at the coast and inland towards Nizwa and the mountains just to the west of Muscat.
There was a track leading into the wilderness and I followed it for a long while until I arrived at this little stream of water with some trees and something that looked like a camping site.
At the time I arrived, the place was in shade of the surrounding mountains and it was not to hot to get out and wander around. So I did exactly that.
Again the silence came at me like the first time on my first little outing into the wild I got a bit creeped by the silence. Being on my own maybe adds to it, because no one is talking.
It is hard to describe how this silence can be different from what we normally describe as silence, because it is so much more than quietness in ones house or anywhere close to something man made. It is like man made things, even they are just quiet things, still radiates some kind of sound or some kind of disturbance to nature. Like the black rectangular monolith in Stanley Kubrick's "2001. A Space Oddysee". Every time that thing shows up it causes some disturbance somewhere and somehow.
Anyway, there I was sitting on my very own, on a rock, next to my rented vessel and was...bored. But calm. And enjoyed being bored. Just be. Listening to the water in the stream. To the occasional bug buzzing past and to the fishies and frogs in the water and the sound they make when they break the water surface to catch an insect or whatever it is they do when you hear that special "blob or splash" sound.
After a while all these small and normal insignificant sounds did in fact quiet down the noise in my own head, until these noises faded and became insignificant. Compared to the first day I experienced the silence of wild nature and got scared by the sounds and noises in my own head, staying out there calmed everything down and all the issues bothering me in my daily life perhaps got caught by one of the fishies and frogs blob Bing or splashing through the surface or tangled in the buzzing wings by one of the passing bugs until I was just a man sitting alone in the wild thinking of nothing.
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