"The last 40 km through the desert"

Sorry to keep you hanging so long before to get the opportunity the find out about the end of the story but I have never really been writing this expedition down and the more I think the more I want to explain. Well back to the story...


The sunset came at around 6:30 and it turned the surrounding desert reddish, it was a totally unbelievable view. Camel who is a faithful Muslim positioned himself for prayer with the setting sun, the desert breeze and the reddish colour around him, everything was like taken from a movie! I tried to film it but it did not come out as I wanted it.

Sitting outside the hut of Kazim, my feet where busted up, my legs started to feel the long walk and the mind was still suffering from the memory of the grizzling heat during the day. I checked the GPS and after this point we had like mentioned before around 40km of desert before reaching Douz and the oasis hotel with a nice bed that waited. In this area there where no Bedouin camp of any kind which means if we got stucked/hurt/sick we where FUBAR... (Military expression, but I will not teach you the meaning but please google it if you want)


The plan was to sleep at Kazims and start in the morning at around 4 but due to the situation we decided to walk during the night, and keep a lower tempo to save the strength. We started of and the darkness soon surrounded us and we put on our headlights. We decided to walk 10km and then have a 10 min break and so on after that.


lights from the oasis Douz was filling up the sky 40km in front of us and this made us not take it as easy as we planned and the first 10km we did in a little bit more than 1,5h which is a crazy speed at this part of the march, soon after the next 5km the calve on my right leg locked it self in cramp and I screamed in agony.... Not good and extremely stupid of me not to fill up with important salt and water during the march.


We took something like 15 minutes extra pause in the dark and I was sitting down when suddenly Camel told my in his relaxed voice to stand up because I have a scorpion behind me! I flew up as a rocket and after that we did not sit down during the rest of the night. The scorpions was everywhere and it was like a scary movie with them walking around our legs all the night. If we would have been bitten by one depending on the size and colour we would have been forced to take the antiserum and then try to get to Douz as soon as possible.


After the next 10 or 15 km the calve on my left leg called in as well and the tempo really went down. Every step was a torture and every little movement where extremely painful. Camel was also suffering and I think we look a little bit like penguins with our rocking slowly walk in the night. The last kilometeres took many hours...


When approaching the oasis we realized in our happy frenzy that I did not now where the hotel was where we should sleep and panic came. As we approached the city border sign, DOUZ, at around 3:30 in the morning we had been walking for 23,5h and was in terrible need of rest, shower and a bed.


Camel had a low low signal on his phone and I called my agent at the northcoast and tried to explain to him to call the hotel and make the send a taxi to the city sign so we could get to the hotel.


The taxi came after maybe 10min and of course he did not believe us that we had been crossing the desert that they but we did not really care at this moment... We were smiling!


We were finally at the end of our journey....


Thanks for having patience with me...


//Your explorer

Last part... Maybe... "A walk through death in the desert where time never moves"

We started up at 4 in the morning on the 5 of July and started out even before the minarets started to call for prayers. The dark night was hot and the winds from yesterday kept pumping in hot air in our faces. I was in a terrible mood and people who know me can of course recognize my morning temper so Kamel was not talking.

The first hours in the night I was not feeling good at all, my boots where edgy, my backpack heavy and wrong proportioned... It was a a very bad morning...

As the sun started to rise my mood started to lift aswell and the bad language that went through my mind started to disappear. The landscape started to appear with the sun in front of us and soon we left the mountains behind us and entered the open, flat and yellow desert in front of us.

The temperature was rising and rising and before 10:00 it was already over 40 degrees in the shadow and over 50 in the sun. We started to really feel why people don't normally do stuff like this and why no life could exist here. We where approaching my first possible shelter point on the GPS where it was supposed to be structures.

We arrived at the place around 11:30 if I remembered correctly and the place was empty. We went in a very rustic structure made of palm leaves and old carpets. Inside it was an old tent bed and some mattresses that had to work for a little rest.

Our body felt OK, but I started to feel that my feet was starting to be more and more swollen in the heat, and maybe my choice of boots was not the correct one, I tried to cool them down and tried to level them high so the blood would stop pumping so hard in them. We ate bread with tuna and a lot of nutella on crackers and when finished we tried to get some rest before we should continue.

I woke up sweaty and warm 30 minutes later and could really feel the extreme heat outside the thin carpet wall. At the same time a felt a bit stressed up and woke Camel up and we when went out to continue. We had at this time made the first 40km...

The heat was the worst I have ever experienced and at the beginning I was walking and laughing but after 30 minutes it was not funny anymore. The temperature was at this time over 52 degrees Celsius and my mind started to play with me. We had from the little break around 20km to the next real stop possibility and it was only harsh and boiling desert between us and this point...

I started to see some crazy stuff and at one point I saw some oil drilling stations with fire in the top, and a couple of days after I found out that it does not exist in Tunisia... I have hard time remember all with my boiling brain, but I think we walked in to Kazim and his goats at around 16 or 17 in the afternoon and this amazing Bedouin look like he had saw a couple of ghosts when we came in.

We sat down in his small structure of concrete and he came with fresh goat milk, it tasted like fur but went down easy at this moment due to our fysical status. Kazim started to talk with Camel and started to laugh with the answer he got and after that he was quiet for some 10-15 minutes before he started again and Camel said to me:

- He says that, first of all we are out of our mind crazy to walk in the Sahara during summer time and especially today with the south winds. But that now after survived this, nothing would ever kill us in life... hmmm... At this time he did not know that we intended to continue for 30 something kilometers more... hmmm...

He was a very interesting man and as a thanks for his hospitality I gave him my billabong flip flops I had with me for the day after when we where finished with our torture.

.... And tomorrow I will finalize the end of the expedition because now I'm tired again of writing...

so....

TO BE CONTINUED

"A walk through death in the desert where the time never moves"

The continue the story from where I left yesterday...

The first date that we put up was in the end of April, but that was postponed until first week of June, but that was also postponed until the first week of July and to be more exact the 4 of July. We decided to take the local bus down to the town/oasis of Matmata that is positioned in the lower end of the desert mountain called the Matmata mountain. The funny thing about this place is that the first of the Starwars movies was filmed here and we actually spend the night in the place where LUKE SKYWALKER was staying in his home planet of Tatooine. So as a well beaten StarWars fan a one note was check off in the BUCKET LIST!!!!

The evening the 4th of July in Matmata we where planning the last details of the expedition and we soon became the biggest happening since 1976 when GEORGE LUCAS was filming in the area. With Camels language skills we could finally get some scorpion anti-serum, from a local doctor who was driving around for a couple of hours before he could fix it, freeze it into a brick of ice so we could keep the temperature down of the serum. We only got 100ml but it was said to be enough. We also got the locals to point out the positions where there was permanent Bedouins positioned and where we for sure would get some cover of the sun during the hottest hours.

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"A walk through death in the desert where time never moves"

I first come to Tunisia, a country on the north tip of the African continent and the southern coastline of the Mediterranean ocean, in 2008. I learned that thirty percent of the country is covered by the Saharan desert, and I thought WOW, I will have the possibility to see the biggest desert in the world and to experience an area of the world where the endless sand create an emptiness that is stopping time!!! FANTASTIC!!

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A military mission to help and to create hope where it is needed...!

My little tour abroad started as a military man. After school military service was something most people did and I was one of them. I loved it... The organization, the brotherhood and the power of action! I was stucked...

After a year home I applied for international service and was accepted...

I will not go in to any details due to secrecy of our operation, but I will spread a little bit of my experience with some pictures and lessons learned...

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Movie clips I took from La Malinche and Pico de Orizaba...

During the 6 days that it totally took to climb La Malinche and Pico de Orizaba I managed to make some small movie clips aswell, click on "MORE" to see them... ENJOY!!! :-)

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Mountains - The roof of the world

Here is some pictiures from the days up to the top of Pico de Orizaba:


The top 5756m, tired...?

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Mountains - The roof of the world!

Pictures from the La Malinche climb:



La Malinchi from the village below. Normally it has no snow.

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Mountains - the roof of the world!

I always liked the extreme parts of our planet... Why? Let me explain...

Nature and its skeleton has been around us for millions of years and if we just start to listen to it we can learn the story about life! In the deserts, on the top of the mountains, through the jungles and deep down the oceans there is a story ready to be told if you just open yourself for it.

At the same time it is a good motivator for training because most of this places are remote and demands a hard fysical effort, and that is course part of the fun and the experience!

Let me today tell the story about my expedition to Pico de Orizaba in January this, the highest mountain in Mexico and one of the highest volcanoes in the world!

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Waiting, waiting and waiting...

Do you know the feeling when you wear a hat and after some time your hair is really hurting because it have been laying in a bad way due to the pressure from the hat... I hate it... but it is at the same time interesting. Well...!! The volcano is starting to make life a little bit less complicated and hopefully I will be able to travel back to North Africa and Tunisia on Saturday. Sweden is cold this time of year so I get kind of desperate to get out of here... I need to get back to work...!!! Plus that my girlfriend is stucked in Houston due to the same volcanic-reason... Life is something very strange... hmmm...

So what Im doing??? Let me continue on my story from yesterday...

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It all started in the beginning of the 80s´...!!!!

I was born in a small town on the westcoast of Sweden with the classic setup:
- a mother
- a father

Four years before my arrival to earth my loving parents created a child that became my sister. I came a rainy and stormy night in August and a couple of years after me, my parents closed the sack of three kids, with my little brother... Like I said a classic babyboom setup...

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Welcome to my life...

This is the beginning of something that I have been rejecting a long time. Is this something for me???? Should I waste valuable time of my life sitting writing about what Im doing???

It has been itching me for quite some time now that maybe this can make me grow and maybe this can help other people learn something a long the way...

In other words, my kind of crazy life will now be open for the world and hopefully I can make the people who wants, to feel as a part of my hectical and sometimes chaotical lifestile.

I will try and after that we can see what will happened, you will be my judge...

Due to the fact that I have been travelling for the last decade I alredady have a million stories and million of pictures... I just have to dig deep and find them somewhere among all the old laptops and computers...

My presentations with text and pictures will not have a specific timeline it will be coming as a part of my daily mood, the "hot"-subjects in the world and maybe I can bend around some suggestion from you guys!

This is also a part of my big project to climb Mt Everest or Sagarmatha as it called in Nepal. I have a couple of Mountains behind me and is now collecting experience around the planet so I will stand ready when the day comes! My next project is Mt Aconcagua in Argetina in January, where I together with my girlfriend are organizing and expedition with a local company. More about that later...

I was born and raised in Sweden but have not been living there for many years and is only passing by a couple of times a year to get a piece of my mothers food and say hello to the incredible and fast growing growing two nephews.

I will not try to dig to deep during the first contribution an ones again welcome to my life.

I will try not to bore you to much...

Your explorer..