Luxuries in the desert

Luxury is something different for all of us; here in Egypt it might signify that a family gets hold of enough food every day. For others, to allow themselves to eat meat once per week, to send their children to a good school or to wear a new jacket on feast days.

Luxury might connote going on a two-weeks-holiday to Rimini once a year, to own a car or to call a yacht one’s own.

Those managers, housewives and other highly committed citizens, who rush from date to date, quickly do their shopping after work, hurry to the gym in order to be at home just in time for the late  news, set their alarm clock for 6am so that they can continue to hurry next morning… All those might declare “having time” as their luxury.

For me, it means to do something at that moment when I feel like doing it. This has really become a luxury good in our consumption stricken affluent society. It’s kind of a liberty that we hardly grant ourselves.

Yet, there is something even rarer to find in the era of technology:

Utter silence

Where can it still be found? Far away from civilization, i.e. on top of a mountain peak. In the sea. In the desert.

I’ve missed this absolute silence since I lost the mountains in the Alps. Here in the desert, I’ve found it again for a moment. To halt… amidst this infinite vastness… to stay motionlessly… to breathe deeply and listen. To listen and take in the absolute quiet: it was a wonderful experience.

I was surprised about the vastness: I underestimated the distance between the Sea and the first rocks of the Red Sea Mountains. In fact, the sand plain extends up to 40 km into the West, before reaching the black, light grey and pink rocks – far enough from the noise of the civilisation.

The one who thinks he will be ready for the uncertainties of the mountains or the desert, just because he can afford the up-to-the-minute brands and technical achievements, might be deceived. Just remember the numerous avalanche victims of this winter. Owning a Barryvox doesn’t protect you from an avalanche or the avalanche death! Just as little as one doesn’t climb a mountain off-handedly, one doesn’t enter the desert off-handedly. Some experience, reason and prudence are necessary in order to be able to face unwelcomed surprises or life-threatening conditions. It is recommendable to engage a specialist, a mountain guide in the mountains and a desert fox :) in the desert.

My long cycling trips on scarcely used highways bestow me somehow with this silence. Yet I felt happier on a mountain bike on the sand tracks (although it does need some stamina)! Hence, just because I was further away from civilization and because there was no sound at all. Just silence.

My luxury.

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