Sahara thoughts

As I explained earlier the thing about the Sahara is mostly the light,the light and the colours.

Somebody asked me about the sound the "sea of sand" makes: The sound is the sound of wind with the sounds of thousands of little sand grains hitting you during windy times -probably a quarter of the time .

I am more a smell person. Smells are very light and really practically non-existent: The smell of dust, of gypsum dust, the smell of dry...hard to explain...maybe more a sensation that a smell..(?)

Things that I did not expect in the Sahara:

-there are often clouds in the sky

-the wind is warm and feels quite different from other winds. It has the warmth of a living creature and for me the lack of vegetation smell and moisture on it reinforces the sense that it has a purpose of its own and is not just a courier.

-the dunes in the morning are covered in foot prints of scarabs and a few scorpions.

-the sand goes on for ever and ever and ever…I knew it but to see it is something else

-the dunes look like mountain chains

-from the air the dunes looks like roses or star fish arranges in a very orderly fashion

-the dunes change all the time but they do not move per say…the sand moves, but dunes pretty much stay around one spots and their peak rotates around a center point .

-watching dunes is addictive ;-)

-there are lots of insect and lizards in the desert

-most of us do not stand a chance to survive for 48hrs alone in the Sahara (and this comes form a woman who would like to see all the deserts on this planet, goes camping and hiking in Death Valley, Joshua Tree all the time…well not all the time, but a lot). The Tuaregs have this alien like ability to go with very little water. I would be embarrassed to drink as much as I do in front of them.

-even when there is little wind there are constantly light coloured patches of sand running on the surface of the sand. Those are not an on going blanket of shifting sand, they are definite bodies with boundaries and they run around. Their motion looks like the motion of a human crowd as seen from the air. I can see how the idea of spirits or magical entities would seem a likely way to explain them. They are beautiful. On days when the wind is strong before the sand storms I love to go out there and watch all of them racing around the desert.