PeteWpics

By PeteWpics

Show and tell

Back in March, before I stumbled into Blipworld, MrsW and I found ourselves wild camping in the deserts of Northern Sudan. It is a little known fact that Sudan harbours approximately 255 pyramids, which is about twice as many as can be boasted of by its neighbour Egypt. 
One reason for the lack of general knowledge about this is the difficulty of getting to or travelling between these constructions. Wild camping in the desert means that your en suite is a spade and a convenient sand dune and due to the shortage of water your shower is a handful of wet wipes. The little fruit like object in the bottom right of my blip is a gurum, or desert melon, and was picked up in the same area as the one in the photo I took at the time. It is believed to be the ancestor of all those piles of watermelons that can be found wherever you go in the world. 
The particular pyramids in the background are the pyramids of Meroe, fairly new in pyramid terms being built during the period of the 3rd and final Kushite kingdom between 300BC - 300AD. Unfortunately they took a bit of a battering by the Italian treasure hunter Guiseppe Ferlini back in the 1830's. 
I don't think the melons are edible although I think something is done with the seeds. Berber kids use them for ball games. 
So that's my blip for the day. I had to getaway from photos of rainy scenes for a bit :-)

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