The White Desert

The White Desert lies in Egypt's Western Desert, a few hours beyond the Bahariya Oasis. It is a plain of chalk from which the wind has carved hundreds of white formations — mushrooms, towers, arches and shapes that people name as they pass.

It is a protected area, and the standard way to see it is to camp there overnight.

It does not look like anywhere else in Egypt, or particularly like anywhere on earth. Blinding white chalk on pale sand, with formations two and three metres high standing in isolation. In the middle of the day it is glaring; at sunset it turns orange and pink, and under a full moon it looks like snow.

The night sky is the other half of it. There is no settlement and no light for a very long way in any direction, and the Milky Way is fully visible. For most visitors this is the darkest sky they will ever stand under.

The route in passes the Black Desert — volcanic hills scattered with dark dolerite — and Crystal Mountain, an outcrop that glitters with calcite crystals. The contrast between the three within one drive is the point of the trip.

The chalk was laid down when this was a shallow sea in the Cretaceous period. The formations are the result of wind erosion working on rock of uneven hardness over a very long time — soft chalk cut away, harder caps left standing on stems.

The chalk is, quite literally, the floor of that vanished sea: it is built from the shells of countless marine micro-organisms that settled here — which is why the ground is scattered with marine fossils, and why the rock is soft enough for wind to sculpt.

The formations have working names — the Mushroom, the Chicken, the Tents — passed between drivers and guides, and the wind is still at work: the same erosion that carved them is slowly unmaking them and cutting new ones.

The area was designated a protected national park in 2002, which brought rules about camping, driving and litter that are worth respecting.

The Western Desert oases along this route — Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, Kharga — have been inhabited for millennia and were part of a caravan network linking the Nile to the Sahara.

• The chalk formations at sunset and sunrise
• Camping under an unlit desert sky
• The Black Desert, on the way in
• Crystal Mountain, an outcrop glittering with calcite crystals
• The Agabat valley, with sand dunes running up against white rock
• The desert foxes that appear around the camps after dark
• Fossil shells and shark teeth in the ground