Bechir Abdelhafidh
I was born in the Tunisian desert and spent all my life there until January 2005 when I moved to Scotland to be with Warda. The desert is my dream, an opportunity to experience life as it really is - and it remains so even now that I live so far away for most of the year.

I have many years of experience in accompanying groups of tourists on desert trips - I love taking people to the Sahara and showing them the desert so they can learn to appreciate it. Arabic is my first language but I speak French and English (with a Scottish accent).

Warda Bucciarelli Abdelhafidh
I am Italian but have lived most of my life in Scotland where I first came to study English and French at university. I then stayed on to do a multitude of different things - running a women's theatre company, working as a psychotherapist with young people and most recently working in the field of mental health.

I found myself in the Sahara 7 years ago when I took up a friend's place on a trip at very short notice - and life has never been the same since...

The Bedouins and their camels The Bedouins who accompany us in the desert have between them decades of experience in this kind of work and have all spent a long time travelling the Sahara. All are known the Bechir and most of them are family members or close friends. They are friendly people who live simply in their village but are used to having regular contact with tourists. They will look out for you during your time in the desert. Some of them speak French so the journey is an opportunity to make contact with people who live lives very different from ours. Their camels (strictly speaking, dromedaries) are good tempered and some of them have been with their owners since birth. They are trained to carry heavy weights (our luggage) from an early age - on some trips, a young one is brought along to get used to the rhythms of the work without actually carrying anything, as a sort of apprentice. These are not the spitting, grumpy animals you hear people joke about in Britain - every group so far has fallen in love with them and there's always somebody who wants to take a camel back home at the end of their stay...

Everyone else...
We have checked all the places we stay in and all the transport in person and many of the hotel staff and drivers of the 4x4s we use have become good friends over the years. We always invite feedback from our groups as to what works best and make our future bookings accordingly - if you like it, it stays in our programmes.