First oasis

On Saturday night we camped at an oasis in the Sahara. Amongst other things there were hot springs and palm trees, but nobody looking quite like Rudolph Valentino.

Earlier in the day I realised, after the first 10 miles of our journey into the desert, that there was little profit in looking at the scenery any longer unless one had a particular liking for sand. The few people we saw along the way greeted us smilingly with the now-familiar cry of "welcome to Egypt my freend". One little boy had a novel way of demonstrating his goodwill by (in the colourful words of our driver) jiggling his junker at us.

Arriving at the oasis (less Rudolpn Valentino and more Clint Eastwood; like a dusty one-street cowboy town with concrete "houses" and rusty Toyota pick-ups) I took a restorative dip in a hot spring. Empty when I arrived, it was suddenly packed with little boys mobbing me excitedly with incomprehensible questions - but to my surprise not one request for money. Another pre-conception confounded.

They all asked me to take their photos, but at the last second they lost their nerve and hid their faces with their hands. One, with a few words of English, explained that he was going to get set up for email and insisted that I write to him when I got home. I don't think he really understood that ahmed@yahoo.com has probably already been taken.

When Michelle, a young blonde Canadian woman, joined us they became goggle-eyed and speechless. And evidently torn between furtive curiosity and the terror of eternal damnation. At first they withdrew, wriggling with embarrassment (and no doubt other emotions), to the far end of the pool, from where they slipped away one by one - presumably in fear of an adult catching them.

Next a bearded and hatted elder arrived and stridently ordered Michelle out - on what authority I do not know. As she pointed out later, there are few places in the world where a middle-aged gentleman (her exact words were "an old man" but we'll draw a veil or seven over that) sharing a hot tub, albeit a natural one, with a lot of little brown boys is considered acceptable, but where a woman in a swimsuit is not.

On the way back to my tent, three of the boys caught up with me, and I returned home in style on their donkey with a growing entourage and feeling a little like Jesus Christ on Palm Sunday.

The experience was slightly marred when I went to offer them a small tip. With an empty feeling in both my head and stomach, I realised that all my money for the entire journey was safely locked in the hotel safe 200 miles behind me in Cairo.

There are few places in this dodgy world where I would trust a friend of a friend of someone I had never before met to collect the equivalent of 6 month's wages from a backpackers' hostel 200 miles away in a teeming city and deliver it to me in the middle of nowhere. But these are seriously devout people, and I have rarely felt so safe from even petty crime. Of course, there were predictable and escalating demands for baksheesh from everybody involved, but that's all normal and part of the experience. In total it cost me less than a taxi from Heathrow to the West End.

The money arrived on time, correct to the penny and another guilty half-acknowledged pre-conception was confounded.

My first night in a tent was an interesting experience. But there was an element of childish fun, and it took me straight back to the legendary 1970 Bath festival (the UK's first major open-air rock event) - but without the mud and without quite so much hair.