Tag: Desert Expeditions
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The Wonderful Wahiba
One of my favourite ever adventures was conducted over a Bank Holiday weekend whilst living in Oman. I was enraptured by the Wahiba Sands (also called Sharqiya) the first time we visited – a beautiful, archetypal sand sea some 60 miles wide and 100 or so high. On the recommendation of a friend, we decided…
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1000 Miles Across the Empty Quarter Desert
Today, two friends of mine will be flying to Oman to undertake an almighty expedition. Starting in Salalah and finishing in the UAE, Leon McCarron and Alastair Humphreys will drag a huge cart laden with a couple of hundred litres of water, 1000 miles across the Empty Quarter desert. I remember Al telling me about…
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Deserts: Dehydration, Water and Minerals
When travelling in a desert, you need to take enough water to replace that which your body loses in the hot, dry environment but you will almost certainly have constraints on the amount you can carry. Working out how much you need is both complicated and critical. Some factors influencing water requirements include: The temperature…
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How To Buy A Camel
Jeremy Curl is a record-breaking explorer and photographer who has crossed the Kaisuit and Koroli deserts. In 2008 he traversed 2000km across the Sahara using camels with the Touareg tribes. Here he shares his advice on purchasing camels for a desert expedition. [divide] How To Cross A Desert eBook This article is an edited extract…
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Desert Advisors
I didn’t write the entire contents of my book all on my own. I had help. Here are the great people who assisted me with the chapter on How To Cross A Desert: Charles Foster Charles Foster is a traveller, author, barrister, and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Much of his…
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How Much Water Do You Need to Drink in a Desert?
It may be surprising to learn that desert travellers often live for many weeks and months at a time, working hard in hot conditions with only a few litres of water each day. Conventional wisdom may dictate drinking many times more (up to ten litres in some instances) for that level of exertion in those…
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Walking Across the Wahiba Desert – Part III
Morning broke with a heavy dew. The moon was behind us and illuminating the thick mist in the valleys below. We each had a litre and a half of water left and, we reckoned, some three hours to the edge of the dunes and another 10km to the road from there. Since last night’s hike…
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Walking Across the Wahiba Desert – Part II
It is a rare treat to watch both the moon set and the sun rise in a single sitting but that is how we started our second day. Twelve hours later we would catch each celestial body in the reverse role but there were many more dunes to cross before we reached that point. So…
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Walking Across the Wahiba Desert – Part I
I was amazed that we found it at all. I’d zoomed in as close as possible on Google Earth to trace the fine lines of what looked like a dirt track ending at the western edge of the sand dunes. I jotted down the coordinates, punched them into the GPS we’d borrowed and was trying…
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Day One in the Desert
Question: How good is a spatula at digging a car out of sand? Answer: Better than a coolbox lid but not not as good as Tupperware It was fine last night. The black-top had turned to dirt-track and the dirt-track had turned to sand-track but we weren’t too bothered because we knew there was a…
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A Day in the Desert – Sharqiya Sands in Pictures
I keep having to pinch myself over here in Oman as a reminder that I am not on holiday and that these amazing places I visit are done so on my weekend, just a few hours’ drive from Muscat. One of the highlights of my week is downloading the photos from the previous weekend for…