Food for thought: Was watching one of the episodes from the excellent Human Planet BBC series and this particular one was on desert people. They had a group of Tubu women making a 20 mile journey by camel in the Sahara to reach a distant well, landmarked by just a single lone bush. The older woman with the most experience was explaining to her children how she uses the dunes as landmarks, making sure to take count of the dunes passed as a reference for how close they were to the bush. Included in that message was that one should not attempt to use the smaller dunes as a guide because the desert winds easily cause them to move, shape-shift, or disappear entirely - making them unreliable. But larger more prominent dunes, the ones towering above the others, are more stable and less affected by the wind - revealing signs of a bigger picture.
Tuareg not Tubu...How they navigate with the stars and a single tree as a marker is incredible. PS they were fighting for autonomy, independence in Mali...