The night had been extremely windy and we could hear sand thrashing against the tent walls. We woke up to half of our tent buried under the sand in the wee hours of the morning. The landscape looked a bit different from the previous evening, like as if the dunes had moved around a bit (there was a smallish dune behind our tent too, with some of it burying it!) It then dawned on us that what the camel herder was talking about the previous evening was not some banter, but fact: that in the desert, the dunes move because of the wind, and they usually tend to cover anything in the landscape that is static; The trees and shrubs would disappear and so would the roads and paths. Lesson learnt: Trust local knowledge!
