White Desert Bahariya Oasis Egypt

The White Desert in Egypt is said to be one of the most visited popular attractions for adventure tourism due to the sheer unusual and diverse rock formations in its bright white surroundings.

Location:

Just north of the Farafra Oasis town in the Western Desert region and very accessible for all guided tours into this region, it has a lot of sites to visit.

What to see:

To see the desert at its whitestone must drive some distance from the main road. The weathered chalk mounds are dotted like pavlova cakes, ice-cream cones, and pools of icing. One might skim over a snow-swept glacier or thread one’s way through a maze of peppermint drops. The fantastic shapes of Farafra’s White Desert are the result of millions of years of erosion of this chalk by wind and by sand blown in from the Great Sand Sea.

Encounter the Khoman chalk ridges created from the sediment of marine creatures deposited in the bed of a vast ancient sea. A similar but rather white, chalky limestone is the source of the ice-white bricks used all over the Western Desert, north to south, as a building material for structures that will last only a tiny fraction of the eons the stone took to form. A layer of harder limestone dating from the later Eocene period forms a pink crust over the surface of the chalk At sunset and dawn you see a dramatic theatre left by an antique ocean and this is the best way to appreciate the White Desert. Whether seen by jeep or camel, the marvelous contours of this pale landscape, which at times resemble a field of snow and at others gives the impression of a giant ice-cream parlor, are an unforgettable vision in one of the most spectacular of all deserts.