Michael Asher (explorer)
Michael Asher (born 1953) is an English desert explorer and writer. He has travelled and lived in the Sahara and the Arabian desert, published both non-fiction and fictional works based on his explorations and encounters, and supported the production of several documentaries based on his published works. Early and personal life. Michael Asher was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, where his father, Frederick Asher, a chartered surveyor, was a partner in local company of Valuers, Auctioneers and Estate Agents: his mother, Kathleen Asher, was a State-Registered Nurse. Asher attended Stamford School, a direct-grant grammar school , now independent. He later graduated from the University of Leeds, where he studied English Language and Linguistics. As a young man he served in the Paras, the SAS, and the RUC Special Patrol Group. He has spent much of his adult life in Africa, and speaks Arabic and Swahili. He is married to Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, with whom he has a son and a daughter. Career. Military experience. After joining the Parachute Regiment in 1971, aged 18, Asher was posted to the 2nd Battalion, and saw three tours of duty in Northern Ireland. During this time, he was  shot at, and saw eleven comrades killed by radio-controlled bombs. He was awarded the General Service Medal. Later, while an undergraduate at the University of Leeds he successfully passed SAS selection, and served in B Squadron, 23rd SAS Regiment, based in Leeds. The day he was presented with the sand-coloured SAS beret, he said, was, up to that point, 'just about the best day of my life'. Asher subsequently served as a police constable in the Blue Section of the now disbanded Special Patrol Group of the Royal Ulster Constabulary - a mobile SWAT unit whose main task was  anti-terrorist patrols. Disillusioned with the military and law enforcement paths, he resigned after less than a year, to become a volunteer teacher in the Sudan. Desert travels and life with desert nomads. In 1979, Asher went to the Sudan to work as a volunteer English teacher. In his first vacation he bought a camel and travelled about 1500 miles across Kordofan and Darfur, joining up with a camel-herd being taken north to Egypt along the ancient trade-route known as the Darb al-Arbaʿīn (Forty Days Road). He later transferred to al-Gineina, on the Chad-Sudan border , a small town without electricity or running water, where he lived in a mud cabin, kept his own camels, and made frequent solo journeys by camel in Darfur, covering more than a thousand miles – experiences that formed the basis of his first book, "In Search of the Forty Days Road", which he wrote on a mechanical typewriter in his hut in Gineina. In 1982, Asher went to live among the Kababish nomads of the western Sudan, whom he stayed with for most of the next three years, a subject that become the subject of the book, "A Desert Dies", focuses  on the way of life of these people, and their decimation by a drought that began in 1984. On a visit to Khartoum in 1985, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organise a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja people cut off by drought and famine. During this expedition, Asher met Italian photographer and Arabist Mariantonietta Peru, with whom he subsequently embarked on a 4,500-mile West-to-East trek across the Sahara on foot and camel-back, a trip that became the subject of the book, "Impossible Journey". The idea for the  trek was influenced by the work of British author Geoffrey Moorhouse who had unsuccessfully attempted the crossing in 1972. Setting off from Chinguetti in Mauritania, in August 1986, with three camels, Asher and Peru passed through Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the Sudan, and finally arrived at the Nile at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt in May 1987, having made a journey of 271 days and by camel, the first recorded crossing of the Sahara from west to east by non-mechanical means. In 1988, Asher was offered a job by UNICEF, as Project Officer for the Joint WHO/UNICEF  Nutrition Support Project (JNSP) among the Beja nomads in the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan.. Asher ran the project - a rural rehabilitation programme - from Port Sudan, but travelled frequently in the hills, talking to nomads and staying in their camps. In 1991, Asher crossed the Western Desert, by camel, from Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, to Aswan in southern Egypt - a distance of . He travelled for two months with a single Bedouin companion, and for the first month they saw no other human beings. Two of Asher's five camels died on the way. In 2002 Asher began  to lead commercial treks by camel in the Bayuda Desert of the Sudan, working with Exodus Travels UK. He continued to lead these treks regularly until 2014. He also led regular camel treks for Exodus in the Hammada du Draa and Erg Chebbi, Morocco, from 2001 to 2010. In 2008, Asher returned to Darfur, western Sudan, with a team of researchers, under the aegis of UNEP, to make a study of the Janjaweed horsemen-militias who had been involved in the civil war. He was a co-author of the paper the team subsequently produced. Education and deep ecology activism . In 2010, Asher became an activist in the deep ecology movement, and began writing a column on deep ecology and related environmental issues in the Kenyan national daily newspaper "The Star". The theme of his writing was summed up in a piece entitled "Stop Ruining Nature or Join the Dinosaurs" '...the Earth is sacred... nature isn't there for mankind to plunder, but is of intrinsic value in itself' ...'Nature not technology, is the true source of our wealth. If we are to preserve the biosphere - and ourselves - the 'development' process has to stop.' From 2014 to 2019, Asher taught  English Literature and Language, including writing, at Hillcrest International School, Nairobi, Kenya. In co-curricular activities he headed the debate society, coached fencing, and ran a survival club with the help of indigenous people. Published works. Asher is the author of nine novels and fourteen non-fiction works, various of which are published in thirteen languages including Arabic, Chinese, Lithuanian, and Korean. The non-fiction books include works of travel about his journeys and experiences with nomads in the desert, historical works such as "Get Rommel", about Operation Flipper, the British attempt to assassinate Erwin Rommel in Libya in 1941 , "Sands of Death", about the Flatters expedition of 1881 and the Tuareg, and "Khartoum, the Ultimate Imperial Adventure", the story of the fall of Khartoum, the Gordon Relief Expedition and the reconquest of the Sudan. He has written two biographies: "Thesiger - A Biography" - a life of explorer Wilfred Thesiger - and "Lawrence - The Uncrowned King of Arabia", a life of T. E. Lawrence.