Remember lying on the grass when you were younger, staring up at the sky, allowing your imagination to twist and shape the clouds into an elephant being chased by a mouse or a dragon being slain by a cat? Now what if you were the clouds looking down at the earth? What would your imagination let you see then? Let’s find out.

Desert week may be over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun in the sand. We will warn you though, you will need to pick up the phone and call the kid in you and have ‘em cover and play. You’re gonna need their help today.

Don’t guess right away; let your mind rotate the image a little. What do you see?

If you saw the lower part of a man’s face, you saw what we did. The great winds of Algeria have shaped the sand of the Issaouane Erg into a sad man’s face.

His is not the only face we found though. With a softly-curved-upwards nose and the line of the artist’s chisel surrounding the mouth, can you see the face of this little wooden girl?

There seems to be a lot of heads in the desert! Perhaps it is the hand of God doodling in the sand as we’ve found yet another one.

A westward facing goat’s head, maybe? What do you think it is?

Head’s are not the only thing to be seen in the sand though. Take a look at this shape.

The Dr. Seuss-ness of this tree stands out clearly to me. There’s no hatted cat to be seen, but let your imagination see the tree in purple and green.

All of these great sand shifted shapes come compliments of some high resolution imagery in the middle of the Saharan desert. Zooming out on this section it looks like the pockmarked face of a teenager in puberty.

Sadly, the high-res imagery is only available for a small area. The lower-res imagery surrounding the high-res rectangle looks like something you saw under the microscope in biology class. Though a contradiction in terms, we have micro-organisms in the desert.

Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed this little adventure into the sand. We’ve tried to keep it light and fun. Yes, we could have gone all serious on you and pointed out what seems to be a giant pool, enormous piece of tin foil, or a really very odd alien landmark, but every now and again isn’t it nice just to float in the clouds and gaze at the desert formations?

Okay, we’ll leave you with one more. This time we’re not going to tell you what it is though. It’s your turn. Take a look at this mystery shape, let your imagination run away with you, and leave your thoughts below.

After the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt’s next most visited historical site is the Karnak temple complex just outside Luxor.

Karnak was constructed over a period of 1300 years by approximately 30 different pharaohs, and eventually grew to become a collection of 25 temples. Known in ancient times as Ipet-isut, ‘The most select of places’, it is the largest ancient religious site in the world.

At the south west of the complex is the Precinct of Mut, an enclosed area which is not open to tourists, as it’s currently being restored. It contains the temples of Ramesses III, Khonspekhrod, and of course Mut herself, as well as a large crescent-shaped lake.

Leading north east from the Precinct of Mut is a 400m long avenue of ram-headed sphinxes, which leads directly to the Precinct of Amun-Re.

At 250,000 sq m, the Precinct of Amun-Re is by far the largest area at Karnak, and is the only area that is open to the general public. Amun-Re is dedicated to the Egyptian God Amun, who was the focus of the most complex theology in Ancient Egypt, and the huge scale of the complex here stands as testament to that.

The Ninth Pylon, and The Sacred Lake of the Precinct of Amun-Re

The main attraction here however is actually the entrance to the Temple of Amun, The Great Hypostyle Hall. Fortunately for us, the roof no longer exists, which means we can see the famous 16 rows of 134 columns.

122 of the columns are 10 metres tall, and the remaining 12 are a gargantuan 21 metres tall, each with a diameter of over three meters! (Ground-level photo)

Inscriptions of the names of the Pharaohs, as well as reliefs depicting an expansive history, can also be found recorded on the walls of this ancient fossil of humankind’s past.

For more information, be sure to check out the Karnak page at Wikipedia, which has links to a wealth of information about each of the sights we’ve seen today.

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

Even by Saharan standards, the Ténéré region of northern Niger is pretty desolate: a vast sea of sand, broken only by the occasional rocky outcrop, where barely an inch of rain falls each year. So it’s something of a surprise to see a huge picture of a DC-10 among the dunes.

The story behind this striking image is a tragic one: it is a memorial to UTA Flight 772, which was blown up by a suitcase bomb in the skies above this spot in 1989, killing 170 people¹. An investigation concluded that Libyan terrorists were to blame for the explosion, which occurred 46 minutes after the aircraft took off from N’Djamena International Airport in Chad, en route to Paris. (The flight had originated from Brazzaville, the capital city of Congo.)

The memorial was created in 2007, to mark the 18th anniversary of the disaster, by Les Familles de l’Attentat du DC-10 d’UTA, an association of the victims’ families. Financed by a compensation fund paid to the victims by the Libyan government, it was constructed by 100 people working largely by hand under the desert sun.

The life-size silhouette of the aircraft lies inside a circle more than 200ft in diameter, created using dark stones set into the sand. Surrounding this circle are 170 broken mirrors, representing those who died, and arrows marking the points of the compass. At the northern point, part of the right wing of the DC-10 has been erected as a monument, with a plaque commemorating the victims.

The association’s website (in French) includes a moving video of the crash site – still littered with perfectly preserved debris – and numerous photographs of the construction of the memorial. (These are large PDF files, but are well worth downloading as they give an idea of the stark beauty of the region as well as the impressive size of the memorial.)

Thanks to Tom Van Steen.

Nestled amongst the highlands of Northern Ethiopia, the town of Lalibela is a destination for Orthodox Christian pilgrims drawn to its famed monolithic Churches.

Dated to the 12th and 13th centuries, but still actively used for worship, the Churches are each carved from a single piece of rock – either down into the ground, or into a hillside. The most well-known of the Churches is Bete Giyorgis¹, or the Church of St. George, with its distinctive cross shape approximately 25m square, surrounded by deep trench walls.

The last of the Churches to be built, and the best preserved, Bete Giyorgis was constructed on the orders of King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela after seeing it in a vision. The town (formerly known as Roha) later took his name to honour his legacy.

A number of structures described below have tin roofs – added, one assumes, rather later than the 13th century. While this obscures the view on Google’s images, they are obviously intended to protect the historic structures from the elements. Panoramio has an excellent selection of images of most of the Churches to give you a true sense of their beauty.

Just to the north-east of Bete Giyorgis can be found a cluster of 6 Churches known as the Northern Group. Bete Medhane Alem (the largest tin roof – the structure shown clearly here in an excellent historic photo) is considered the largest monolithic Church in the world, and houses the Lalibela Cross, one of Ethiopia’s most sacred religious relics.

The middle of the 3 roofs houses Bete Maryam, thought to be the oldest of the Churches in the area, while Bete Golgotha – at the western edge of this Group – may contain the tomb of King Lalibela.

The Eastern Group consists of 4 Churches, notably Bete Amanuel, thought to be the Royal Chapel, and Bete Abba Libanos which is carved from a rock face on a hillside (respectively, the largest and bottom-most of the roofs in the image below).

The Rock Churches are protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For further reading, Wikipedia has good information, and Sacred Destinations has more background accompanied by superb pictures.

The spectacular Leptis Magna is an exceptionally well-preserved Roman city on the coast of Libya which has a history dating back over 3,000 years. Today the archaeological site is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

With a history dating back to 1100 BC, the city gained status as a leading part of the Roman Empire in AD 193 when Lucius Septimius Severus became the first African-born Emperor of Rome.

The baths at Leptis Magna

Although there are loads of ruins here, most of the prominent remains date from the first and second centuries, including the incredible theatre.

The theatre at Leptis Magna (ground-level photo)

Severus spent lavishly on new buildings for his home town as it developed into a major trading port, making sure he had an extensive market and a truly magnificent forum.

The market and forum at Leptis Magna

One of the major projects attempted during Severus’s reign was the redevelopment of the harbour, which was known for heavy silting. However, the changes just made the problem worse. Many of the quayside buildings are intact but rather annoyingly a strip of low-resolution imagery obscures the harbour.

However the good imagery returns further east, just in time for us to be able to see Leptis Magna’s wonderful amphitheatre – the location of amazing public spectacles, and the most prized symbol of Roman citizenship that a town could have.

The amphitheatre at Leptis Magna (ground-level photo)

The city eventually fell into decline in the fourth century when trade moved elsewhere, but thanks to Emperor Severus and his ebullient spending, there remains an absolute wealth of history for people to explore in his once splendid home town.

Wikipedia of course has lots of info, but I recommend that you visit the Temehu site for excellent pictures and background, with a more detailed history to be found at Livius.org. Also see an earlier post on Google Sightseeing about the city of Sabratha.