Dakhla

Dakhla’s fields, rice paddies, and fruit orchards stubbornly hold out against the harsh, engulfing desert. At two junctures the desert does indeed consume the greenery, segmenting Dakhla into three separate oases, but 65,000 Dakhlans are the clear victors in the struggles of water versus stone and farmer versus dune. Basking in government attention, the people of Dakhla have reclaimed this recalcitrant wasteland, planting peanuts and rice before introducing more fragile crops.

The New Valley Project may have rendered the town of Kharga unappealing to visitors, but in Dakhla-dubbed the “pink oasis” for the pink cliffs jabbing the horizon-something of the opposite has occurred. While in oases such as Siwa and Farafra development seems to be enervating local culture, in Dakhla the local oasians beam under broad-brimmed straw hats that look like the offspring of a liaison between a bowler and a sombrero, and share their infectious enthusiasm with visitors. In the villages around Mut, visitors will come closer to the traditional life of the oases prior to development than anywhere else in the New Valley.