Gaberoun

Gaberoun is the kind of place the Sahara is supposed to make impossible: a deep, still lake lying in a hollow between dunes of the Ubari sand sea, ringed by date palms, with sand slopes rising straight out of the far shore. The colours do most of the work here — dark green palms, water that shifts from turquoise to near black as it deepens to about seven and a half metres, and the ochre and apricot of the dunes behind. In the low light of morning and evening the reflections double the dune crests, and the silence of the sand sea presses right up to the water's edge.

The lake belongs to a cluster of more than twenty basins scattered through the dunes of the Idehan Ubari in Fezzan, fed by groundwater and concentrated by relentless evaporation until the water is several times saltier than the sea. Swimming is possible. The brine is far from empty, though: it teems with tiny brine shrimp, and that small creature shaped the human story of the oasis.

For generations Gaberoun and its neighbouring lakes were home to the Dawada, a small, closely knit community whose name in Arabic is usually rendered as "the worm people". The women dredged the shallows with rope bags on poles to gather the shrimp, which were dried, pounded, pressed into cakes — sometimes mixed with dates — and traded to passing caravans along with natron scraped from the shores. Houses were built of palm fronds and blocks of natron. In the 1980s the inhabitants were moved out of the dunes to a new settlement in the Wadi Bashir, and the old village on the western shore now stands empty among the palms, its crumbling walls one of the most evocative sights at the lake.

Today a simple camp with palm-frond huts on the north-eastern shore is the only building in use, and the best season is from October to May, when the desert heat relents. The appeal is not facilities but the composition itself — an oasis lake that looks almost too perfect to be real, set inside one of the great sand seas of the Sahara.

Getting there

The nearest town of any size is Al Ghurayfah in the Wadi al-Hayat, about 61 km away by road and track. The nearest airport is Sabha Airport (SEB), roughly 95 km away. The final approach is a four-wheel-drive crossing of the dunes of about 36 km; the lake cannot be reached by ordinary car, and visits are made with local drivers who know the sand.