See also: "the first ten years"
a page made to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the website launch
This website is run by András Zboray, FRGS. András made his first desert ventures at the age of 16 while living in Egypt, visiting Kharga & Dakhla oases in the Western Desert of Egypt with some friends. A year later he made a solo trip to northern Sudan. Since then his interest in travel and archaeology has taken him to over 80 countries on all continents, yet his main addiction remains the Sahara, where he began a serious study of the prehistoric rock art. The first major Sahara trip was to the Tassili N'Ajjer in southern Algeria in 1991 (accompanied by Magdi, wife and partner on most later trips), which was repeated in 1993.
In 1987, after a request by Hungarian Television to organise an expedition along the footsteps of Almásy, we ventured into the Great Sand Sea in Egypt. The following year we succeeded in reaching our longtime goal, Jebel Uweinat and the Gilf Kebir.
Based on the success of these trips, we established this website in 1999 to organise expeditions to the Western Desert of Egypt. Since then we made over twenty five expeditions to Jebel Uweinat and the Gilf Kebir region from both Egypt and Libya, and this website grew to be the most important online resource on the Libyan Desert (Eastern Sahara). Following a rapid rise in interest, Fliegel Jezerniczky Expeditions Ltd. was incorporated as a UK limited liability company in 2004, to provide a proper legal and corporate framework for running the expeditions.
After an exploratory family trip in 2005, we made our first serious expedition to the rock art sites of the Upper Brandberg mountain (Namibia), using helicopter support to carry supplies up the mountain to permit an extended stay at the sites. Since then we have returned to the Brandberg every year to explore its remote high plateau and valleys.
In 2011 we returned to the Tassili, this time with our teen daughters Dóra and Viki, to revisit all the sites seen 20 years earlier. Since then an annual trip to the Tassili is also among our regular plans, expanded to cover the much less known Central Tassili with the magnificent shelters of Iheren, Tahilahi and others with the very refined Iheren style paintings.
In 2014 we made a longtime dream come true by visiting the Tibesti mountains, one of the remotest and least accessible parts of the Sahara, off-limits for nearly two decades due to ongoing civil war. Another Tibesti expedition was completed the following year to the rock art sites of Karnasahi & Fofoda along the Eastern Tibesti, one of the least known regions of the Sahara, yet harboring one of the finest rock art anywhere on the continent.
There are ongoing plans for further expeditions to Jebel Uweinat (from Sudan, as the route from Egypt or Libya is now impossible), the Tassili N'Ajjer, Northern regions of Chad as well as the Brandberg Mountain in Namibia.
Having an economics and business degree, András spent most of his "normal life" in the airline industry with some side ventures into the dotcom business. However Rock Art and exploration has become more than just a hobby, András is the author of numerous articles on rock art of the Gilf / Uweinat region (mainly in Sahara, an international journal dedicated to the prehistory and history of the Sahara). He is also the author of the "Saharan Rock Art", "Tassili N'Ajjer" and "Egypt" chapters of Chris Scott's Sahara Overland, the only up-to date guide to the whole saharan region. In 2005 András completed the DVD publication "Rock Art of the Libyan Desert", the result of an ongoing documentation project of all known rock art sites in the central Libyan Desert. The DVD is a complete illustrated catalogue and bibliography of all sites known in the central Libyan Desert (several hundred of which were discovered on our own expeditions), with over five hundred sites and more than ten thousand photographs. An expanded second edition was released in the second half of 2009, and the third edition is currently in the works with release planned for the second half of 2015.
In 2013 András, together with co-authors Kuno Gross and Michael Rolke, completed the book Operation SALAM, the product of three years of painstaking research in various archives around the world, as well as in the Libyan Desert itself to re-trace Almásy's 1942 tracks. This book fully documents the secret WWII operation, and clears up a number of misconcepts and blank spots that remained in earlier publications dealing with the subject.
András is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a regular attendant of conferences on Saharan prehistory and rock art. Magdi also has a background in economics, with a professional career in finance and banking.
