Farfra Sightseeing Details

The isolated oasis

Beautiful gardens Farafra is a very nice oasis to walk around in. You quickly find your way in between the nice gardens, and many are well maintained. There are also more variation in the vegetation here than in many other oases in Egypt.

Traditional houses

These photos show a part of Farafra's history which seem to be under threat. The traditional quarters of Farafra represent only a small part of the village, and it is hard to understand the mechanisms here. The new quarters are ugly and badly maintained, while the old quarters are smooth, elegant, clean and obviously well maintained. Still, people move out of the old quarters and into the new. Hopefully, they will soon discover that they have something valuable which can easily be lost.

Holy tomb

This unnamed tomb has a dome which rather visibly reflects female fertility. While many tombs of this kind are actually built around the graves of holy Muslim men and women, some have roots back to pre-Islamic times.
What makes this intriguing is that it is very well-kept, apparently in full use, but not painted in white, which is almost obligatory.

45 km north: White Desert  from frafra

WHITE DESERT
Cream landscape

About 45 km north of Farafra, the White Desert begins. It is truly white, in clear contrast with the yellow desert elsewhere. At night, and many of the organized trips out here include overnight stay out in the desert, it gets a character reminding of an Arctic landscape.

The rock formations of the desert are often quite dramatic, and you should not miss out on the weird rock balancing on top of a white pillar (see picture above).

 WHITE DESERT
Mushrooms

There are numerous mushroom formations here, formations created by wind and sand. The explanation is not that the higher part of the mushroom is harder, rather that the blowing sand takes more lower down.

WHITE DESERT
White and gold
Among the most attractive visual qualities of the White Desert is the immediate contrast between the chalk formations and the orange-yellow sand. Without the latter, the White Desert would possibly have turned bleak. 

 Going Next

45 km north: Crystal Mountain
55 km northeast: Agabat
100 km northeast: Black Desert
150 km north: Bahariyya

 CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN
Sparkling like diamonds

 The name "mountain" is result of Arabic speakers using the word for mountain also for formations that are really small. The Crystal Mountain is not really a mountain, rather a rock or ridge.
But "crystal" is a correct description, and a stop here is definitely worth the time. Resembling the crystals of the Superman movies, the quartz crystals manage to fascinate most visitors. Although you should not break off crystals from the rock, there are plenty of loose crystals spread around on the ground. Walking away from the most frequented parts, there are crystal lumps as big as footballs.
There is also a natural arch here, man-high.

  AGABAT
The beautiful valley
Agabat is a small valley of unusually beautiful mountain formations. Here, the white cliffs common to the White Desert meet the dunes and the yellow limestone rocks of Sahara. Also, mountain sides here are steeper than elsewhere along the route between Bahariya and Farafra.
Up from the lowest point in the valley, there is what must have been a riverbed, lifted up by nature to a position weirdly off any place where water could be brought forth.

Going Next

50 km northeast: Black Desert

160 km northeast: Bahariya

BLACK DESERT
Windblown and volcanic
 The Black Desert is a region of volcano-shaped mountains with large quantities of small black stones. The stones lie out across the orange-brown ground, so that it is not quite as black as many people may hope for. Especially after visiting the White Desert, which has formation that are really white, many will imagine a desert as dramatic as this.
Climbing one of the many soft peeks, the view from the top is really nice, with similar peeks continuing on into the haze.

The Black Desert is uninhabited, and there are no amenities here. Visitors out here do that as part of organized trips from Bahariya Oasis or from Farafra Oasis. Such trips include at least stops in the White Desert and at the Crystal Mountain.