Hard Core Expedition style Safari from Dakhla to southern Gilf Kebir and Uwainat Mountain. (An almost 2000 meter high granite and sandstone massif straddling the borders of Libya, Egypt and Sudan.)

These Trips Are very academic covering a wide range of Subject Matter from, Geology, archeology, ecology, ancient and recent desert history. Plus we will be discussing and viewing some of the deserts amazing flora and fauna species.

It should be noted that the masters And senior teachers of this domain Are The Desert Fox Colonel A. Mistikawy, of Zarzora Expeditions And Fliegel Jezerniczky Expeditions, It will take me years to accumulate the wealth of knowledge of those masters but I am working on it.

For these type of expeditions there is no detailed or itinerary or time table. There is however a detailed rout that we will follow camping when night fall and progressing by sunrise the duration of the expedition is 12 days of the expedition is twelve days including 2 nights and a full day for trekking and exploring at Uwainat. Dakhla to Dakhla.

Planned Rout:

Leave Dakhla early morning traveling to Sugar Hill & the Samir Lama Memorial A great photo op.

Onwards to Abu Balas (Pottery Hill) When the early explorers visited the site, there were about 300 complete pots and amphorae at the depot, though most were broken or had man-made holes in them supporting the theory that this was the water cache referred to by the Dakhla natives, which they destroyed when pursuing the "black raiders" a few years before Rohlfs recorded the story in 1874. The existence of this depot one third of the way to Kufra led Almásy to speculate that there had to be another depot or well two thirds of the way, most probably the unknown Zarzora oasis. (In fact the Gilf wadis are two thirds of the way, and there was an an intermittent well at Wadi Abd el Melik, proving Almásy's logic correct.) Unfortunately by now all the complete pots have been taken or broken, and all that remains at the site is a pile of broken shards at the foot of the hill. The photos below were taken in 1998 & 2000, by now even less remains. During his 1926 visit, Prince Kemal el Din found some engravings half way up the rocky hill, which he published together with the sites he found at Karkur Talh in Revue Scientifique Illustre. The cow suckling a calf, the gazelle hunter and a large indistinct human figure all seem to belong to the historic periods, having more in common with rock art near the Nile valley than the Gilf-Uwainat area. On the other hill a few hundred meters away, Giancarlo Negro noted a curious engraving on a boulder at the foot of the hill, possibly showing a falling meteorite (?). A re-examination of Abu Ballas by Rudolph Kuper and his team revealed a small cave in the side of the hill, near the engravings. The clearing of the cave is ongoing, no results are published yet. A further startling discovery made by the HBI team was the age of some of the pottery at Abu Ballas: thermo-luminescence dating yielded a date of 1500 bc! This early date puts the whole context of the cache in a different light. What was previously considered to be the water depot of the Tibu raiders (who may well have reused some of the post for this purpose), all of a sudden it seems to be evidence for an extensive trade network traversing the desert in Pharaonic times. Other new discoveries in the region also point towards the existence of the Abu Ballas Trail in us in ancient times

From Abu Ballas to the Prehistoric Lake  Bed where there are a group of low sandstone hills that have built a series of long trailing dunes on their southern side. Before the dunes formed, the area to the south of the hills was a shallow depression that contained a large shallow lake that is clearly visible on the satellite photos as a dark patch surrounded by the dunes. The mud of the lake bottom has eroded into a series of Yardangs or mud lions. Their pink hue makes an incredible contrast with the golden dunes and the cobalt sky, making the spot one of the most picturesque in the Libyan Desert. In Neolithic times the lakeshore offered an excellent habitat, attested by the numerous implements and the remains of several hut circles on higher ground around the lake. Nearly all the hills have the remains of one or more circular stone features on their flat tops, probably shelters for prehistoric hunters who had an excellent vantage point to watch game come to the lake to drink. The best preserved are two large circles of fairly large blocks on the flank of a hill overlooking the deepest part of the lake, where water must have remained the longest. A notable discovery were a few microlith blades made of Libyan Desert Glass, more than 300 kilometers from the source of the raw material.

Arriving at the southern end of Gilf Kebir The plateau becomes much broken near it's southern end, and two large wadis, Wadi Firaq and Wadi Wassa cross it's complete width. Near the middle of Wadi Wassa distinctly pink hued sand is built into giant sand ripples along an ancient lakebed. Near the mouth of Wadi Firaq, a conspicuous row of hills, named "Eight Bells" reach out to the plain,  This was also the site of a old world war 2 airfield. Near the airfield the ground is littered with discarded petrol and food tins.

Further on we will pass through Wadi Foraq then head north West of the Aqaba Pass, the high cliffs continue for over 200 kilometres north-west. About 50 kilometres west of the pass, a small rocky promontory with a spectacular scenery juts out of the cliffs. Apparently ancient humans thought likewise, as the promontory with its maze of rock islands and wadis is one of the most important rock art sites in the region, Wadi Sura.

Wadi Sora is located in South-western Egypt, along the western edge of the Gilf Kebir plateau. It's not really a Wadi, just a sheltered inlet among a promontory and a couple of detached outliers of the main plateau. The main painted caves were discovered by Almásy in October 1933 during the Frobenius expedition. They contain the little ‘swimmer’ like figures which inspired the fictious cave of swimmers in the movie "The English Patient". In the vicinity of Wadi Sora there are numerous other rock art sites, including the "giraffe rock" discovered by P.A. Clayton in 1931, and few lesser sites discovered by Almásy and Rhotert in 1933 (Published in Rhotert's Libysche felsbilder, 1952). There are several quite spectacular sites scattered in the nearby bays and wadis that have not been seen by the early explorers. These have been discovered over the past decade by Giancarlo Negro, Yves Gauthier, Werner Lenz, Fliegel Jezerniczky Expeditions, Colonel Ahmad Mistikawy and others.

Leaving wadi sura behind us we will head south to the peter and paul peaks and Part of the largest creater field in the world Using satellite imagery, Scientests  detected more than 1300 small crater-like structures distributed over an area of 40,000 km² in the Western Egyptian Desert, close to the Gilf Kebir plateau. Sixty-two of them were visited in the field, and morphological observations, rock samples and ground-penetrating radar data were obtained. After presenting our fieldwork results, we discuss two hypotheses for their origin: hydrothermal vent complexes and meteorite impacts.

Beyond the craters we will arrive at Karkur Talh and our base camp for 2 nights at Uwainat mountain. Karkur Talh is the largest valley of the mountain. It's mouth, marked by two acacias visible for many kilometers, opens onto the broad sand plain flanking the mountain on the north east side. From the narrow mouth choked with sand dunes, the valley winds for some 25 kms towards the base of the sandstone plateau forming the highest part of Jebel Uweinat. Except for a few kilometers in the beginning, most of it lies within Sudan. (The border was marked recently by a sign, the only trace of recent human activity in the otherwise untouched valley). As one proceeds inwards, the thinly spaced vegetation become more frequent, with a dense acacia forest, continuous tufts of panicum grass and colocynths covering the valley floor in the broad middle section. In prehistoric times, the valleys were densely populated, as attested by the hundreds of rock painting and engravings that may be found in shelters along the sides of all the main valleys. More recently Tibou nomads inhabited the mountain up till the arrival of the earliest explorers. in the mid twenties. By 1931 the Tibou were gone, driven away by the increasing aridity. The central section of the main valley contains a very large number of engravings, mainly concentrated on the south bank. (Possibly because only the south bank offers shade during midday, making it a more favorable habitat.)

Jebel Uwainat is the most formidable mountain in the generally flat and featureless Libyan Desert. Situated roughly at the centre of the aridest area, it stands out like an island from the surrounding plain. It's height is sufficient to capture a little precipitation from the summer monsoon clouds of the Sahel belt that occasionally reach this far north. These rains are very infrequent, the last one was recorded in September 1998, and probably as much as 10-15 years may pass without rain. However even this little rain is sufficient to allow some vegetation & wild life in the larger valleys. The eastern part consists of a large block of Paleozoic sandstone, resting upon metamorphosed Precambrian basement rocks, propped against the granite uplift to the west. The sandstone slab forms a large elevated plateau, that is dissected into several large units. The massif to the south is the highest point of the mountain (1932 m), and another three large, slightly lower plateaus lying to the north, surrounded by vertical cliffs. To the north the sandstone hills continue, much dissected for a further ten kilometres to the north and the east. To the south, the cliffs form a vast perpendicular wall dropping almost 600 metres to the foot of the mountain. The high plateaus and the northern foothils are drained by a large complex wadi system, which merge into Karkur Talh.

From Karkur Talh we will begin our trip back north east to Clayton's Craters. The plain between Uwainat and the Gilf Kebir is dotted with groups of low hills that from a distance resemble the other flat topped mesas of the region. It is only evident from the air, or standing on their rim, that the hills are ring like craters of apparently volcanic origin. They were first seen from the air during the 1932 Almasy - Clayton expedition by Sir Robert Clayton, hence their name.

Onwards heading more east we will arrive at Bir Tarfawi,Dum & date palm, acacia and tamarisk extend for 15 km in all directions. At the western most edge of the vegitation is evidence of stone age settlments datting back 30,000 years.

From Bir Tarfawi we will finish the safari at dakkhla oasis a small tour of Dakhla will be included.