DAY EIGHTY-ONE The morning was bitterly cold as we had breakfast and packed up the truck. We bounced and jolted our way along the rough track stopping every now and then for piss-stops or to take photos. At about 9:30, with the sun up and warming us, we stopped at the top of a small rise beside the petrified remains of huge trees from a long-dead forest¹.
It was an eerie and mysterious place, there in the vast, empty desert, pieces of what had once been towering forest trees similar to those we had seen in the jungle. The grain and knots of the wood was faithfully preserved in stone that wind, sun (and passing tourists) were reducing to sand. In a few thousand years, not a trace of the forest will remain.
We moved on from the petrified trees and later in the morning we stopped at a wind-swept mill pumping cold, clear water into a tank. The windmill was set amongst the nothingness of the desert with only sun and wind to keep it company. The water was good.
Around lunch time we drove into a small town and had lunch at a café before pushing on northwards, once again on tar seal which Mike reckoned would last until London.
That night, we camped in a quarry for the first time in ages, stopping just before the sun touched the horizon. Scotty and I watched its passage out of sight: a shimmering ball which disappeared in less than a minute, leaving only the blue haze of dusk behind.
¹ For a description of how wood becomes petrified, you can read my story Forest of Stone, on my other blog, Travel Writer Life, about a petrified forest at Curio Bay on New Zealand’s South Island. Although the story is about a different place, vastly different to that forest we saw in the Sahara all those years ago, the processes which created the petrified wood are the same.
CurseOfTheTraveller 