Dream

When I was seven or eight, Mum bought me a set of World Book encyclopaedia. I guess I was a pretty geeky, strange kid (even then), because I remember aching to read them.

I'd choose a volume and flip, stopping to read whatever seemed interesting. Cosmonauts were far more intriguing than astronauts, but I can remember poring over the entry on the Apollo Moon landings and looking closely at Moon maps. Like I said, a nerdy child. My parents must have wondered what on earth they'd spawned.

The World Book entries I never tired of, though, were one about the Sahara and a shorter piece about Tuaregs. My eight-year-self decided that when I grew up, I would go there. Just to see.

I don't remember thinking very deeply about it, it was more of a pointer of what could be possible once you were done with long division and PE on Wednesday afternoons. It was one of those dreams that you don't or shouldn't think through - if I had, I would have realised that, on face value, it verged on ridiculous. A kid from a one-mechanic town in the middle of nowhere, from an island in the middle of nowhere, travelling halfway across the world for sand and camels? As my Dad would say: "What do you want to go there for? We've got sand and camels here."

Didn't stop me wondering how vast a sand sea could be or imagining Tuaregs at the head of great camel caravans, ignoring borders, heat and sand storms as they headed towards the horizon. My imagination discounted the fact that the internal combustion engine and 4 wheel drives had rendered camels, as a mode of transport, virtually obsolete. Shhhh.

Still, sometimes you get to do the things you'd only ever dreamed of. One thing I know now about holding tight to a dream for so long is that reality can be very different from the idea you have carried for years. The reality can be better.

Sebha, the main town in Fezzan, Libya's Saharan province, is 1000 kilometres and a world away from Tripoli. You can feel the Sahara on the streets, hear it in people's voices. The sky is bigger, wider, emptier, bluer than the sky over the Mediterranean coast. The people have eyes that stare past the sun, gauging the depths of the horizon. There's coarse sand in the air and it creeps across the road leading out of Sebha towards the sand seas.

We'd been driving for hours - first down a long, thin wadi with dunes on one side, the twisted sandstone outcrops of the Jebel Akakus on the other. The road was a track, twisting snake tracks carved across a black gravelly reg by 4WDs, neat slices curving through volcanic debris. Ibrahim, the lead driver, swung his vehicle off to the left.

The gravel started giving way to sand. Yellow and orange into the distance, meeting the sky in a strip of white who knows how many miles away. Then slowly, the sand gained bulk and height. And then? Dunes. The dunes of my imagination. Beau Geste's Sahara. A sand sea.

And it is a sea. Waves of sand in every direction - vertiginously high in places, too. Perhaps upwards of 300 metres in places.

Our camp nestled in the bowl of a mighty dune. Its arms cradled the camp, smaller dunes crested in the distance. It was nudging sunset. I'd put my sleeping bag on a mat behind one of the 4WDs and stashed my shoes deep in my rucksack. I grabbed a can of (non-alcoholic) beer I'd bought when we passed through a small town earlier in the day. And then I took off. And up.

In places, the sand was hard-packed and rippled into hard, nobbly ridges by the wind. The climbing was easy. A little further up and the sand loosened, it was like stumbling through molasses, warm on the surface, colder, damper underneath. Scramble a couple of steps sideways and the sand was firm again. The going wasn't easy - the dune was steep, towering above its neighbours. It was magnificent, almost alive. You had to earn the right to climb it.

Finally, finally, I reached the top - a long, thin, sharp ridge of sand slicing through the flat light. I sat, pulled the can out my pocket, opened it, took a swig and looked around.

Below me was a near-vertical drop to another bowl carved by the wind. Seif dunes danced off into the distance. To my right and left and way, way ahead, there was sand. Nothing else. An ocean of it. Vaster than my dreams, vaster than the Sahara of my imagination. Dustyu orange gave way to pinks and purples as the sun bowed and took its leave. The moon rose, full, heavy, enormous, so bright it blocked out the stars.

I took another slurk from the can. The wind sang across the Sahara. I have never been so happy.