Travel: The colonel's caravan (Gilf Kebir)

“Hit the gas hard and stay on my tracks,” our driver orders into the radio before stepping on the accelerator and catapulting us up a long and narrow wadi of red sand rising between two rocky plateaus. Tension grips the passengers as the vehicle fishtails wildly and as our driver assumes the air and intensity of a pilot navigating severe turbulence. He shoots up a dune, and nearly stalls in a patch of soft sand near the top before turning the vehicle on a downwards plummet at full throttle back towards the rising wadi.

“We need to get more speed,” he says, growling between his teeth.

Following a violent tussle with the steering wheel and a near collision with the face of a rock, the jeep ascends the wadi to the top of one of the plateaus.

“Voilà!” exclaims retired Colonel Ahmed al Mestekawi, our expedition leader, as he parks the 4x4 at the edge of a cliff overlooking a desert plain stretching endlessly into the distance. Three other vehicles soon follow suit.

Our motor caravan has reached the summit of the Gilf Kebir, a vast, 1,000m-high plateau system the size of Switzerland, located in the south-west corner of Egypt. It is the sixth day of a two-week expedition travelling deep into the heart of the Western Desert, a veritable no-man’s landof extreme desolation sitting on the western flank of Egypt’s narrow strip of verdant, inhabitable land.Extending west from the Nile into Libya and all the way from the Mediterranean Sea to Sudan, the Western Desert, also called the Libyan Desert, is one of the driest, most forbidding and least populated places on the planet. This vast area of towering dune fields and black conical mountains constitutes the other Egypt, which rarely features on tourists’ itineraries.