In Western Sahara, a small green revolution is being led by women in the harshest of conditions. Their goal: to build a network of gardens in the desert.
Tag: desert
Hundreds of thousands of migrants are in limbo in Tunisia, which has in recent years become a major transit point for migrants fleeing conflicts and poverty in Africa and the Middle East for better lives in Europe. Women in particular lack basic rights, including sexual and reproductive health services.
David Thomas, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, has been studying dunes for the past 40 years. And no, they’re not “just sand” — far from it.
There is a long history of mining in Egypt that goes back thousands of years, but has largely been dormant over the past century. But it’s picking up now, with troubling ramifications.
More and more French wine growers are interested in the mechanics of growing grapes and producing wine in the world’s most arid regions—like Israel. Climate change is pushing the wine world to imagining all possibilities, including the most extreme.
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Peeking At The Pearl
From afar, the northern Sahara town of Ghardaïa, Algeria looks very quiet — and very dry. But once you get to the shade of its main square, you can relax, sit back and watch the camels grunt about.
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Flying Blind
Taken from the window of my hotel room, in Ghardaïa, in northern Sahara’s M’zab region.
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Greetings From The Desert
“As-salamu alaikum …” — “Wa-alaikum-us-salaam!”
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Camel Trophy
Driving through Algeria and Tunisia 45 years ago wasn’t actually so rough: For our European postérieurs, the seats of our 404 Peugeot were undeniably more comfortable than the saddle of this camel.
Every French region has its own version of brioche, which has a solid but modest history. But now in some corners, this lightly sweet breakfast bread is taking on a high-end air.
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Desert Relentlessly Advances In Iran
TEHRAN — Iran is increasingly “becoming a desert” thanks to decades of wasted water supplies and a dry climate exacerbated by climate change, Tehran daily Arman-e Emruz reported Thursday. Water resource specialist Mohammadreza Fatemi told the newspaper that the state environmental agency has mismanged water resources for at least 20 years, destroying the environment in […]
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From A To M’Zab
Ghardaïa is “only” 1,700 kilometers (1050 miles) away from my house, as the crow flies. But 45 years ago, to get to the “the pearl of the oasis” in northern Sahara’s M’zab region, my wife and I first drove down to the port of Marseille in our Peugeot 404, took a ferry to Annaba, visited […]
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Popular Desert
Although it is somewhat cast into the shadow by the world-famous temple of Petra nearby, the Wadi Rum region in southern Jordan is popular among travelers who want to discover the wonders of the desert and its Bedouin heritage.
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Desert Martians
I knew Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, had been used as a filming location: Much of Lawrence of Arabia was shot there in 1962, which made sense since the British officer himself passed through the region in the early 20th century. What I didn’t know was that since then, several science fiction movies were filmed […]
ABU DHABI — The indefatigable Jean Nouvel, 69, can be proud of his project. For that matter, he is. The star French architect shakes hands, hugs, takes in all the praise with a stoic pride. The construction site is massive in scale. In the sand, under the searing sun, 5,000 people are hard at work […]
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Once Upon A Time, In A Peaceful Middle East
Though Petra is awe-inspiring, I’m not sure I’d go back today. A trip to Jordan must be very different now than it was 18 years ago. The colors on this shot of the Ad Deir monastery shows well why the archeological site is nicknamed “the Rose city.”
KAPOOSAR — Pancho Mai is a villager in Kapoosar, located in the Tharpakar district. Today is the festival of Holi, but the 25-year-old mother is deep in mourning. Over the past three months, her three children have died. “They had fever for a few days, and then pneumonia killed each one of them,” she says numbly. Her mother-in-law, Kaplana Mai, had rushed the children to the only government hospital in the district. But it was too late. They died within days. This is not an isolated case. According to independent statistics reported by the local media, some 200 children, mostly […]
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Mystery From Up High
Travelling the world for more than 50 years as we did, you are bound to see some incredible sights. The Nazca Lines, in southern Peru’s Nazca Desert, rank high among these unbelievable wonders. No one really knows why and how the geoglyphs — some of which are over 200 meters across — were made … […]
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An Oasis Of Tradition
At Ouargla’s traditional market in southern Algeria, this merchant was selling wooden bowls carved from single blocks of wood. Even though palm trees are ubiquitous in the several oases surrounding Ouargla, Saharan craftsmen prefer to use Atlas Cedars, found in the nearby Algerian mountain range of the same name.
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Barren But Bright
When we toured India almost exactly 20 years ago, we got to see some pretty desolate hamlets — especially near the Pakistan border, in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert. Despite the region’s ruthless aridity, the nomadic and sedentary tribes living there have a rich (and colorful!) culture.
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Hills And Humps
On the road from Batna to Laghouat, we overtook these Berbers with their camels slowly making their way through the Aurès — an eastern continuation of the Atlas Mountains — in northeastern Algeria. It was in this region that the Algerian War of Independence was started by Berber freedom fighters in 1954.
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Danger: Camel Crossing
This is the greatest danger we faced when we drove from Ouargla to El Oued in southern Algeria: bumping into a wild camel…! By 1970, the anti-French sentiment left over from the Algerian War a decade earlier had largely faded away. But we were lucky to enjoy the calm then; as three years later, the […]
WUWEI — Twilight is falling at the edge of the Tengger Desert, and the vines stretching out row after row are a snapshot of peace and serenity. A towering red castle-like building standing not far from the vineyard displays the name of the property — Weilong (Grand Dragon) Desert Oasis Organic Winery. “We are about […]
BEERSHEBA – “If we need to be violent to be heard, we will be violent. We will lay down under the bulldozers…” A few kilometers south of Beersheba, the largest city in the Negev desert, Fahdi, his brothers and dozens of other relatives of his large family are gathered in a corrugated sheet metal hut […]
The terrorist attack and hostage-taking in neighboring Algeria is just one of the ways that France’s intervention in Mali could spread across Africa, and beyond.