Sandboarding and other desert wonders

Yesterday, Wednesday 12th, was one of the most fun days I’ve experienced. Ever. Though for the record, fun and laughing, I’ve learned are different. I laugh more laying on the beach with Tara and Katharine talking into the night or driving around with the Egyptian guys….
In the morning we toured The Mountain of death, predictably a set of tombs, and the Oracle temple.
Along the way we dove into Cleopatra’s Well. Pulling up I thought, who’s going into that! It was very slimy looking and a ways below ground level, but minutes after getting out of the van Ted had jumped and Oscar was stripping hurriedly as I filmed. A bunch, including myself when I finished filming, joined them.



The water was warm and refreshing at the same time. Climbing back onto the bus I felt wonderful and refreshed.

When Sullivan said we’d be taking four-wheelers into the desert a bunch of us pictured driving our own motor bikes. Instead jeeps showed up at 4:30 to take us on our desert trek.

Five of us chose a lovely blue jeep with a smiling driver and we set off into the desert, west toward Libya. We zoomed up sand dunes and sped down.
This is with my regular camera. There's lots of footage I took of sandboarding and such on the video camera.

He swerved back and forth and raced with the other jeeps. We screamed, laughed and felt pretty safe. We played on dunes, posed on rocks and picked up seashells.


We stopped at an oasis where Tara and I swam out and reveled in our location—we’re in a oasis, in Africa!! There we ran into a couple other students from BU, I think it was.
Weird.
Next we visited a natural hot spring.

Amazing. I know the wonders of nature but there are things here I’ve never heard about…and for the finale—we sand boarded.
Our drivers took out wooden boards waxed them and let us figure out the rest.
The driver handed me one when we were getting out of the van so I took it and went for it…it wasn’t as hard as I expected—I stayed up and glided a ways before falling and getting sand in every possible place…yummy…lol
Running up was the best workout I’ve had in Egypt…














After having our fill of the boards we sipped mint tea our drivers brewed us and watched the sun set over the dunes.














Moments after arriving at our hotel, Paradise Siwa, a few of us jumped into the pool, another natural body of water with converted into a pool, aka amazing and warm and chlorine-free. We played Marco Polo, haha I haven’t played that in a year or two. After dinner—which we got to around 9:30 or so, I did some reading for Abu Dhabi before falling asleep. It’s about 2:00 a.m. now and I can’t wait for morning. As much as I want time to go slowly here I am so eager to begin each day. Today we’re going to drive back to Marsah Matruh—three hours if our van doesn’t break down again, and spend the day on the beach. We’re—I hope leaving early Friday morning so we have most of the day in Cairo before jetting off to Abu Dhabi at Saturday morning.