Desert travel during day?

D

Dinosaur

Rational Skeptic
Valued Senior Member
Fictional books & movies describe/show difficult, possibly life threatening, day time treks in a desert.

In real life, did anyone with limited resources travel across a desert during the day?

I wonder if well equipped caravans in ancient times traveled during the day in the Middle East & North Africa..

BTW: I once read that wagon trains traveled across prairies in a row 50 to 100 wagons wide. In the movies, they travel in a single file column.
 
Back in engineering school we had to do a calculation that involved the desert water cooling bag. The water cooling bag is a leather or canvas pouch for water, where some water will seep through the surface of the bag and evaporate. Because the desert is so dry, the evaporation, like sweat cooling the body, will cool the skin of the bag, thereby cooling the water contents. At 100 F with zero % humidity, the internal water is about 70 degrees. Travel in the desert will make use of this principle with clothing designed like a cooling sack.

ebaywaterbag.jpg
 
Most of the concerns about tranversing deserts aren't actually related to the temperature or the water a person can carry, it's actually down to how deserts look. For instance dunes never stay still, they are constantly shifting with the weather. So it's possible to lose landmarks to know what direction you are headed, going in the wrong direction would keep a person out in the sun for longer than necessary and thats when it gets dangerous.

An example of shifting sands is the Tatoonie Starwars set in Tunisia
 
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