Black and White Desert

We left the mechanic, a newly formed diesel oasis and a trail of diesel as we drove into the Black Desert. This is very similar to monument valley only black with golden sands drifting up the sides and into every nook and cranny of the mountains.

As we left the Black Desert we entered the White Desert and the change is dramatic. The land is littered with small rock formations from the size of a car to Taffy sized in a huge variety of shapes from mushrooms to tents domes to pillars and strangely often the shapes are localised presumably so the tents stay on the campsite! All of these rocks are a bright white, they almost look painted! It bears more than a passing resemblance to the icebergs in the glacial lakes in Iceland, except its 35C and bone dry.

The White Desert is a national park and has a trail you can drive around some of the clusters of rocks. The trail was rocky but looked OK so we took Taffy in! For the first couple of kilometers it was slow going but manageable but soon deteriorated and we eventually got stuck in drifting sand, twice. We dug Taffy out and made it back to the car park both looking like ghosts and drank liters of liquid. Quite how anyone does any work during the day here is beyond me - but the dilapidated buildings would suggest they don't.

We had a lovely night in the desert camped in Taffy with no lights and no sound around us. Unfortunately the night was overcast so we couldn't star watch at night from bed.

We left the White desert and entered a martian landscape of flat reddish sands dotted with hand sized rocks stretching as far as you could see. By now it was a soul destroying 48C outside. It felt like a sauna everytime you opened the door. We decided to find a camp with electricity so we could hide from the heat in Taffy but when we hooked up at Mut we found our electric cable kept overheating because the cable reel was touching the metal of the geny which was red hot even though we hadn't used it! We can run our main air con without a hookup for a few hours so turned it on only to find it not working presumably because of overheating. I assume this is because the fresh air intake is right above our water tank and our cold water is hot enough to shower in! So its now 49C outside and 40 inside and our electricity, generator and air con won't work. Fortunately the bedroom air con works fine so we have hidden in the "den" and are a lovely cool 28! We've also had a cooling dip in the brown smelly thermal spring which is 43C!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device