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The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name's Jack Shenker.

I'm a journalist and I'm the author of the 2016 Guardian Long Read.

Welcome to the lands that no country wants.

There's a pretentious reason I wanted to write this article and a slightly less pretentious reason.

The pretentious one is that borders and border lands have always fascinated me and been at the heart of my work.

I tend to be drawn into the margins to places and communities that often get overlooked by the media.

And yet whose stories I think can tell us a great deal about how our countries and societies are governed and in whose interests they're governed.

And those margins can be metaphorical or they can literally be places that are on the edge of things and in many ways there's nowhere more on the edge of things than beer to wheel.

800 square miles of completely barren land in the Nubian desert that sits between Egypt and Sudan in northeast Africa.

And due to a quirk of history is unclaimed by either country and so has no government or authority over it.

And it's that unusual status as the only truly unclaimed in inverted commas land on earth that makes it such an intriguing example of a so-called no man's land.

This concept that has a long and dark and potent history particularly in Africa and which by its very nature forces us to view most of the world as a series of claimed territories with clear and often violent and militarized demarcations between them.

The less pretentious and possibly more honest answer is that from the balcony of my friend Omar's apartment where we sat one summer's evening knocking back lukewarm Egyptian beers and planning out this trip.

The idea of embarking upon a madcap adventure across hundreds of miles of some of the toughest terrain on the planet to find a land that was beyond the reach of any government.

That just felt like a lot of fun.

Writing this article was a particularly interesting process because it took place many years after my journey to Bitterwill itself.

And that was for the simple reason that within days of me and my colleague returning to Cairo where I was based as a correspondent for the Guardian at the time, the Egyptian revolution erupted.

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