Breakfast was at 8am and some of us left with a Jeep to shortly visit the local sights. There were four of them: museum of the Golden Mummies, two tombs, a ruin of an ancient house and the Temple of Alexander. Most impressive were the first two. The mummies were really different from the ones I’ve seen in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They were fully wrapped and their faces were painted with gold color. However, I liked the ones in Cairo more since you could really see their bodies. The tombs were very interesting as well. We went approx. 10 meter down into them. They were colorful painted and told the story of their owners.

While four of us visited the sights, others went to a hot spring close to our campsite and had a relaxing bath. We started driving at 10:30am and headed into the White Desert located in the Farafra Depression were we arrived around lunch time. The White Desert is pretty amazing since it consists of diverse formations of chalk rock which give it its white color. One of these formations is called “Mushrooms” since the rocks are formed in this shape. We took two hours to drive around the White Desert and looking at all kinds of white rock.

In the late afternoon we put up our bush camp in the middle of the desert. Bush camp means camping without any facilities such as showers, toilets, etc. If you need to go to the bathroom you basically need to find a rock to hide behind. You also need to consider the direction in which the wind is blowing if you do not want to become wet from your own pee. There are also useful tools such as a small shovel which you should use to dig a toiletry hole which you close afterwards to avoid others stepping into your excrement. However, if you walk away from the camp with a shovel in your hand everybody knows what you are planning to do. Using the bathroom while travelling on the road needs also little organization since there are no facilities in the middle of the desert. Whenever our truck stops, it is decided which side of the road is the men’s bathroom and which the women’s one. For the women it is even more challenging since there are no bushes in the desert behind which you can hide…