A Desert Safari, and the Silence That Came After

I almost didn't go. A desert safari sounded like the sort of packaged excitement I usually avoid — engines, adrenaline, a queue of identical vehicles churning up the same dunes for the same photograph. I went anyway, mostly because a friend insisted, and I'm glad my scepticism lost that particular argument.

The driving was, admittedly, the loud part. We crested ridges of sand that seemed impossibly steep, the vehicle tilting in ways my stomach registered before my eyes did. It was thrilling in the uncomplicated way a fairground is thrilling — I laughed more than I expected to, and gripped the handle above the door harder than I'll admit.

But it was what came afterwards that I keep returning to. They stopped at the top of a dune as the light went gold, cut the engine, and for a moment nobody said anything. I have rarely heard silence like it — not the absence of noise you get in a quiet room, but a vast, total stillness, as if the sand had absorbed every sound that had ever been made near it.

We ate later at a camp, under a sky so thick with stars it looked almost crowded. The food was good and the company was warm, but I found myself drifting back, again and again, to that minute at the top of the dune. I'd come for the driving. I stayed, in my head, for the quiet.

I don't think I'm built for adrenaline, not really. But I'm glad I went, because the desert gave me something I hadn't gone looking for — a reminder of how loud my ordinary life is, and how rare it is to sit somewhere that asks absolutely nothing of you. If you go, and you should, stay for the moment after the engine stops. That's the part worth the trip.