Great Sea of Sand Travel Guide

From the oases of Siwa, Farafra, and Dakhla, the Great Sea of Sand extends approximately 800km/500mi south to the Gilf Kebir plateau and westwards far into Libya.

With its immense stretches of sand dunes, this extremely hostile natural environment has barely been explored. Temperatures frequently exceed 50°C, but it gets bitterly cold at night and the wind blows uninterruptedly.The wind blows the sand into dunesof various shapes. They can be classified by the amount and consistency of the material they are made up of, the wind direction, time of year, substratum, and possible presence of sparse vegetation. Longitudinal dunes form when a rock or shrub breaks the wind and causes it to drop sand. Especially strong winds form very long, narrow dunes with sharp ridges. The crests of such longitudinal dunes can be 100m/330ft or more in height and extend over hundreds of kilometres. When the wind direction changes frequently, so-called star dunes form; they look like giant starfish from a bird’s eye view. The arms of a star dune extend outwards from a central peak and are often curved in a sickle shape. The most common type of dune is the sickle dune. The wind piles up entire fields of small sand arcs with their convex sides facing against the wind.South-western DesertThe landscape and especially the cultural history of the south-western Desert with the 1082m/3,550ft-high plateau of the Gilf Kebir and the Abu Ras plateau dissected by deep wadis is particularly interesting.

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