Yuan Guoying, a researcher with the Environmental Protection Institute of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and his son Yuan Lei, who works for the Xinjiang Environmental Monitor Center, will set off to cross the desert from south to north in October.

The expedition will be led by Dr John Hare, the founder of the Wild Camel Protection Foundation. A National Geographic magazine photographer and a Kenya-based expert on camels will also go on the trip.

North Africa was once home to many one-humped camels centuries ago, but wild ones became extinct five or six centuries ago.

Wild camels now only live in China and Mongolia. There are less than 900 left in the world and they are more endangered than the giant panda, he said.

The 2,400-km-long expedition on the former camel route will start from Nigeria and go through Niger to the final destination of Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The journey could take four months.

In 1906, Swiss explorer Hanns Vischer walked across the Sahara from the north to the south. No one has attempted to walk it since.

Yuan Guoying has carried out a lot of research in the Takla Makan Desert, the second largest desert in the world after the Sahara.

Father and son intend to make a comparison between the Sahara and the Takla Makan in an effort to find out why wild camels went extinct in Africa.

“The water resources condition in the Sahara may be better than that of the Takla Makan Desert in Xinjiang,” Yuan Guoying said.

Yuan Lei said the Sahara journey would be far from romantic. Since 1995, no one has investigated the Sahara and the wells on old maps may not exist, he said.

Mainly sponsored by the National Geographic magazine and the United Kingdom Royal Geographic Society, the expedition will collect first-hand materials from the world’s biggest desert and try to find out why deserts expand.

The Wild Camel Protection Foundation has helped the Chinese government to set up the 150,000-square-km Lop Nur Nature Sanctuary in southeast Xinjiang to protect the Bactrian, two-humped wild camels, which the International Nature and Natural Resource Protection Association, has classified as extinct. The Chinese government has put the camel under state first-class protection.

The aim of the sanctuary is also to protect the unique desert eco-system in which the camel lives.

Earlier this year, a scientific survey team found traces of rare wild Bactrian camels in the Lop Nur Wasteland of Xinjiang in the low stream of Tarim River. Water resources in the area are such that experts believe there could be hundreds of the animal living there.

The wild Bactrian camel is adapted to arid plains and hills, where water sources are few and vegetation is sparse. Herds of the wild camels move about, their whereabouts always linked to water, according to Yuan Guoying.

(China Daily 07/03/2001)