Zaire - part 1

I crossed the river border from the Central African Republic into Zaire at Mobaye, near a modern-looking hydroelectric dam. Whether it generated any electricity I was unable to discover; at no point during my time in Zaire did I encounter any functioning facility powered by mains electricity, although many buildings were optimistically equipped with fittings.

On the same ferry was a Landrover driven by a group of Australians. They were in desperate need of both fuel and the French vocabulary necessary to purchase some. The latter deficiency had apparently defeated them throughout the Central African Republic and their petrol shortage was now acute. They offered me a lift to the nearest town on their roof-rack in exchange for my services as an interpreter.

We arrived in Gbadolite, the hometown of President Mobutu, then still firmly in power. According to the locals, he maintained a substantial palace nearby, and ran the satellite settlement as a kind of show town. Amazingly, there was a supermarket. It stocked only Worcester Sauce. We changed some money with the manager. Zaire was suffering from the gradual onset of hyperinflation – the exchange rate to the dollar doubled during my month there. I received a large wad of impressively clean and new 50,000 Zaires notes, bearing Mobutu’s face on one side and a picture of mountain gorillas on the reverse. “Monkey money,” I was told later. “Look, you see, it has a monkey on both sides.”

 After a lengthy and complex negotiation including the tasting of both the surface and depths of the petrol to verify that it was not watered down, gasoline was successfully purchased and the Australians dropped me off on the track south. Northern Zaire has no useful road transport system, and in anyway no roads for it to use. I enquired why not: “A fellow dictator is overthrown by rebels and rings to ask Mobutu for help. ‘How did they come and get you?’ asks Mobutu. ‘They came by road,’ replies the fallen despot. ‘Ah well, I told you not to build roads,’ says Mobutu sagely.”

The only semi-reliable means of travel apart from the Congo river itself is to ride in/on goods trucks, not in the cabin of course, but as part of the load. Even this is hampered by whole towns being without fuel for days on end, disabling all trucks. However, my luck was in, and I was able to purchase a ride in the back of an empty truck bound for Bumba.

Situated on the northern bank of the Congo, Bumba is as attractive a town as its name implies, with nearly as much to do. It was in Bumba that I encountered “The Belgians”. The Belgians were an Explore/Encounter-overland type holiday operator, driving a rather splendid bright-orange truck with cutaway sides and throne-like seats for the tourists aboard. As I was to discover in subsequent conversations with other travellers, they enjoyed a legendary reputation.

The Belgians’ trip had, according to the stories, started in Ghana. Their tour was led by a charming husband and wife team. On the day their new party were due to land in Accra, Ghana’s capital, they had set out for the airport to meet their guests when they were stopped by the police. In common with many African countries, Ghanaian law requires that one carries ID documents – a passport for foreigners – with one at all times. The husband and wife had left theirs in the hotel. The normal procedure throughout the continent in such situations is simply then to negotiate an appropriate ‘fee’ with the police – “il faut discuter un peut” in francophone lands -, whose size is inversely proportional to how long you are prepared to hang around, and then everybody proceeds on their way. The husband and wife took umbrage, and so, therefore, did the police, resulting in a night in the local jail and their tour guests with no previous experience of Africa having to find their way to an unknown hotel in an unfamiliar city in a foreign language.

Neither husband nor wife could cook. Accordingly, they had hired a Ghanaian to carry out this very necessary duty in a land where restaurants can be few and far between and the food inedible even when there is an eatery. The Ghanaian had no papers, but somehow made it through Togo and Benin as far as the Nigerian frontier, where he was forced to leave their expedition. I crossed paths frequently with The Belgians over the next few weeks. “Monsieur Chris, we have some food spare,” was the usual greeting from the tour guests. Of course I was not about to pass up such free delights as tinned ravioli (prepared by the wife) accompanied by cream crackers (prepared by the husband). One day, I know not how, they offered me lumpy blancmange.

Much later, I heard that The Belgians had embarked their guests on the ferry up the Congo, but taken their vehicle by the overland route, where it became stuck in one of the coach-sized potholes which can obstruct travel along jungle mud-tracks for days on end when it rains. The grand finale of The Belgians’ trip was to be visiting a mountain-gorilla sanctuary near the Rwandan border (the troubles in Rwanda were not yet serious in early 1991). They never made it, and eventually had to fly home at great expense from a bush airstrip.

I first met The Belgians when they drove their truck very hard into the gatepost of my hotel.

The Belgians: whoops, missed

Central African Republic - part 2

I was dropped off at Sibut, a small town of low, brown-white houses set around a patch of red-earth mud, sleepy in the noon sun. Three ragged girls came to stare at me, the eldest, aged perhaps seven, clutching a large blunt knife. Their mother, arriving to chase them away, asked what I wanted and showed me the track to Mobaye. “You can wait here, the van will come soon,” she said, pointing to a welcome patch of shade under a broad tree.

Villagers at Sibut

To my surprise, the van did come soon, and passengers appeared as if summoned by a witchdoctor from the silent houses. The van itself was a small Toyota pickup of great antiquity designed to carry three people and perhaps a couple of goats in the back. There were more than twenty passengers in addition to the driver and his teenage son, so adding my rucksack to the great pile of luggage, I stood on the footplate at the back. There was little danger in this, for the Toyota could manage barely quicker than walking pace downhill. Uphill the younger men took turns to stroll to ease the load, and easily outpaced the van.

The Sibut bus service

 We had travelled maybe four miles of earthen road when something snapped inside the engine and we ground to a halt. Undisturbed, we dismounted while the driver and his son, after inspecting the damage, cut long strips of bark and set about tying back together whatever had broken. Someone plucked ripe wild avocados from plants growing near the track, and offered them around. I was the subject of many curious stares but no one ventured into conversation except to borrow my penknife for their avocado. It was very peaceful with barely even the hum of insects from the brushland through the hot, humid air to disturb the silence. The vast blue sky, the red-brown earth, the tall green of the plants, the battered Toyota a dazzling white in the vertical sun, the vivid costumes of the women: it was Africa painted by Van Gogh. Half an hour later we were on our way again, bumping sedately over the mud.

Perhaps five miles later, the engine gave out again, and we freewheeled downhill into a small village. There was more agitation this time, which was calmed only by the reappearance of the driver’s son with a villager holding a pair of two-litre plastic oil cans. They proved to contain not oil for the van but palm wine for the passengers. I was invited to join them, – “you have also paid your fare Monsieur” – rusted tins were handed round to drink from and a measure of thin yellow-white liquid poured into each.

The drink tasted largely of tin can  (I tried some elsewhere from a plastic cup and it still tasted metallic) but it was potent stuff; tongues were loosened enough to permit a detailed interrogation to begin. After some while we arrived at the inevitable “how much do you earn Monsieur?” I reduced the real figure by a factor of three, but it still brought envious looks. Of course I had to pay a great deal in taxes, probably more than half, I offered in mitigation of my unreasonable wealth. “Taxes are just theft by the government, to pay for guns and soldiers.” Maybe so in the Central African Republic, I agreed, but in England they pay for schools and unemployment benefit. This last concept fascinated them and I explained further under detailed questioning. There was much discussion in their native tongues before the follow up “what else do your taxes pay for?” I told them about the National Health Service, back home not necessarily a topic of great British pride. Out here it was a source of wonder. They listened, questioned, talked heatedly amongst themselves: was I really telling the truth? “C’est une vie sans peur!” – it is a life without fear -, cried one man in the end, convinced but amazed.

The van was mended, a state which lasted approximately five minutes, just far enough to be within pushing distance of the next village. The sound of women beating wooden pestles with giant wooden mortars pulsated through perfectly round mud-brick houses with straw roofs; coffee I was told on enquiry, grown further up in the hills. This time the passengers, sour with palm wine were less easily mollified. It was evening, we would have to stay in the village, our van driver should pay for our dinner. He was not in agreement, but twenty to one was difficult odds to overcome. Village children chased a pair of chickens down the track which, after much shouting and clucking, reappeared in our stew as night fell. After dinner we were shown to a pair of empty huts and fell rapidly into palm-wine induced stupor.

In the morning our van was, allegedly, mechanically sound once more, the driver and some villagers having worked all evening. It would not, however, start. The solution was apparently to roast the battery over a fire, which rather surprisingly did the trick. It stalled a couple more times on the way, and each time the lengthy roasting process resolved matters. About ten kilometres from Mobaye something else went wrong in the innards of the Toyota. We gave up and walked the rest of the way. A journey of twenty-five miles had taken twenty-eight hours.

Central African Republic - part 1

The leg through the Central African Republic from the western border to the capital at Bangui was perhaps the only stage of my whole journey where I mildly regretted not having my own transport. The minibuses were slow, cramped and uncomfortable, it was difficult to see out due to a combination of cracked windows and rain, and there was usually little to see anyway except the jungle growing tall on both sides of the road. Just occasionally, however, we would climb a few hundred feet up, the vegetation would break for a moment, and there would be a brief glimpse of a huge vista of empty land covered in trees from one horizon to the other, illuminated by shafts of light as the sun fought its way through the storm-clouds. We broke down quite frequently but never, it seemed, anywhere with a view.

A frequent event

My neighbour for part of the route was Bernard. He was a teacher, well-qualified he claimed, but unable to get a desirable job in Bangui because “my family is not well connected”. Forced to work in the remote provinces, he was heading to the bright lights of the capital for entertainment during the summer holidays. I shared the cost of a room with him at an overnight stop. Its only furniture was an extremely long single bed, with a rather serious design flaw: instead of cross-ways slats, it had length-ways slats. With a mattress this might not have been so unfortunate but of course there was none, and with just a thin sleeping-bag thrown over it for padding, it was impossible to lie in any position where the slats did not dig in sharply somewhere. I slept instead on the comfortable mud-floor, leaving Bernard with the bed. Due to complications with finding the right change, I had paid fractionally more than my half share of the room price, and moreover I had bought him a warm Fanta at dinner, so he protested that this entitled me to claim the bed; I was quite certain that it entitled me to claim the floor. When I woke next morning, he was still fast asleep… on the ground not the bed.

The Fanta had been necessary to cope with the food. The only choice was sticks of some sort of dense, dark, barbecued flesh. Probably it was goat, but it looked like snake and it was definitely venomous. A small skewer was sold accompanied by about a teaspoonful of chilli-powder in a twist of paper, for dipping in an attempt to make it edible. The vegetable accompaniment was manioc, a grey white tube that looks, smells, feels, and (OK I am guessing here) tastes like a condom. It was also sold accompanied by chilli-powder, for the same reasons.

In the next town, drowning the food with warm beer from a street bar in preference to warm Fanta, I met a middle-aged Frenchman who had lived the majority of his life in Centrafrique. He had come over with “the Legion” he said (there was still a huge French military presence), and then stayed on. The country was going steadily downhill, successive governments worse than their predecessors, despite the regular coups and revolutions each promising a better future. “Il faudra que quelque chose changera” he stated determinedly, gesturing with a fist – something has to change. I asked why, if things were so bad, he did not return to France. “I know no one in France,” he replied, “it is thirty-five years since I was in Bordeaux. How would I live there? My wife is African. I cannot go back.”

The French connection was even stronger in Bangui itself. Back in Algeria I had met a young Frenchman turning around after his vehicle had irretrievably broken down even before attempting the Sahara crossing. On learning that I might end up in Bangui he had scribbled an address and a rather cryptic note in the back of my diary: “Hello Marie, please give lodgings to this guy, I will be back when I can, Jean-Pierre ‘the devil’”. Having nothing to lose I presented myself, was offered a reasonably priced bed with clean white sheets and a splendid mosquito net, and discovered that this was the capital-city hostel for the VP, the French equivalent of VSO (voluntary service overseas). As the VP offered an interesting alternative to doing military service it was not short of volunteers, and when a group of them returned in late afternoon they cheerfully invited me along to the evening’s entertainment.

We headed to a Lebanese-run restaurant, with a full Lebanese-mezze meal, served entirely free of charge; the ingredients were presumably expensively sourced from the inevitable French supermarket. (The troubles in Lebanon had driven something of a diaspora, although it was difficult to understand why anyone with a free choice would select the Central African Republic.) The tables were then cleared away, diesel generator power up, the sound-system turned to full volume, disco-lighting switched on, the bar opened-up by a large group of staff, and a further free bottle of beer mystifyingly issued. Rather baffled by this gratuitous hospitality, I awaited developments. After perhaps half an hour, minibuses began to arrive outside, and disgorged their contents: large number of French soldiers with a week’s pay to burn. Local girls in extremely short skirts or skin-tight jeans began to drift in looking for customers. The reason for the free hospitality became clear: our group of volunteers included a number of young Frenchwomen, and their presence helped create the illusion for the soldiers that the nightclub was better than just a clip joint. There were clearly some regulars; around midnight the dance-floor cleared suddenly, the music changed, and a burly soldier and lithe African girl proceeded to give a spectacular exhibition of rock-and-roll dancing.

Next evening, after a disorientating visit to the cinema to see an English film dubbed into French with English subtitles, I was invited by the same group to “our house in the country for the weekend”. A small contribution to the cost of food and drink was requested, and in the morning we set off in a couple of battered vehicles via the supermarket. A couple of hours from Bangui, we pulled up in a village outside a nondescript concrete building. The driver disappeared inside, and emerged with an extraordinarily well-groomed girl in tow. His girlfriend he explained. I assumed she was another French volunteer, until she introduced herself in French but with a strong American accent. The building was the Central African training centre for the US Peace Corps, she explained, and she was the training manager. She would bring the new recruits out, but please would I remember that they were forbidden to speak any language other than French, except for 30 minutes each day during their evening meal. They trooped out, mainly rather bewildered looking girls, and a surreal conversation ensued in first-form French. They had each volunteered to work in Africa, but had not nominated any country preference or else their preference was “full”. Accordingly they had been assigned a country at random, in this case one that they had mostly never heard of until receiving their posting. (Advice to young American gentlemen: should you wish to enjoy almost unlimited time in the isolated and exclusive company of numerous attractive and educated young American ladies looking for supportive companions, learn a little French in advance, and then volunteer for a Peace Corps placement in Africa).

I was slightly reluctant to leave, but eventually we headed on to pick up a trio of post-training “placed” volunteers, young women despatched in pairs to isolated villages in the middle of Africa where they were expected to educate the local population. In one case, the girl’s partner had become ill and so she had a territory to herself, based out of a small, if solidly built, village hut. She looked glad of the company and appeared to enjoy the weekend, but she told me later that she had grown to appreciate the quiet of the jungle and was not sure she was looking forwards to her time as a volunteer ending, despite the seeming futility of the actual educational programme she was supposed to deliver.

As I talked to these volunteers, this theme recurred over and again. Mostly they were enjoying the unconventional freedoms that remote Africa brought them (especially the French, muttered the Americans sourly, because they received double the monthly allowance as VP work was considered equivalent to military service and not simply volunteering), but they found it difficult to believe in the actual work itself. The reason was consistent: they were supposed to be educating the local population with new skills, in a sort of “train the trainer” scheme, but instead ended up simply performing the tasks themselves. “I am taking a year out in the middle of training to be a vet,” one told me, “I should be teaching these people the fundamentals of animal medicine. Instead I am a bush doctor patching up wounded sheep.” The Peace Corps programme was mainly focussed on nutrition, essentially trying to get the villagers to eat their greens, a task one of the girls compared with the similar training of her baby sister except that the locals could just ignore her and say no. Evidently they preferred their regular diet of venomous goat and rubberised manioc.

Cameroon

Cameroon was wet... very wet. Double-checking a map online to write this, I have just discovered that a village close to where I first stayed in the country is listed as one of the five wettest places on earth. It certainly was while I was there. Travel on unmetalled roads was slow and tedious as they turned into swamps. Travel on metalled roads was slow and tedious as the foot traffic which would normally have stayed in the verges strayed out onto the carriageway in an attempt to avoid the worst of the mud.

There were compensations however. Cameroon boasted a Guinness brewery under licence, the drink was still being sold under the “Guinness Is Good For You” slogan, supported by the traditional Toucan-advertising, and was available bottled in most bars and cafes. Coffee and chocolate are both significant cash crops. For a couple of days I indulged in a dark brown diet.

Being English was a significant advantage. The biggest (non-political) event in recent Cameroon history was the (soccer) world cup of 1990. Cameroon began gloriously by beating the reigning champions Argentina in the opening game, and were eventually knocked out in a quarter-final which finished 3-2 to England after two English penalties in extra time, and despite Cameroon probably objectively playing the better. Penalty decisions are invariably a source of controversy, and on discovering my nationality every citizen aged 13 or over wanted to discuss them in detail. Although football is by no means my preferred sport, fortunately I had watched the match. By the end of my time in Cameroon, I could discuss those penalties fluently on a second-by-second basis. It helped to pass the tedious journeys through the rains, and discussions that could switch mid-sentence from French to English – Cameroon has both as official languages, a legacy of the post first world-war partition of the previously German colony – helped to add to the time-passing value.

Being unable to orientate myself in the rain on arrival in Yaounde, the capital, I opted for a short taxi ride. As the taxi pulled away, someone shouted a warning through the window “that man has a knife monsieur, get out”. Travelling light has its advantages. (Nine kilogrammes, or about 20 pounds, of luggage including a sleeping-bag saw me around the world for a year. Compare your suitcase weight next time you check-in for your flight for a week’s holiday). At the next traffic pause I did get out with my bags, before the driver could react. An alternative taxi took me more sedately to the landmark of the inevitable capital-city-aid-agency-workers’ French supermarket, from where I was able to get my bearings and locate a place to stay. Tired from the wet journey and another Guinness, I fell asleep at dusk, only to be woken abruptly a couple of hours later by an incessant, and extremely loud, bass beat: the roundabout just along the street from my ground-floor room apparently doubled up as the Saturday overnight street disco. Dancing in the streets, OK, singing in the rain, maybe, but singing in the torrential and continuous downpour seemed a bit unreasonable. I was surprised the wiring didn’t simply fuse.

For the journey northeast, hopefully into a slightly less damp region, there was a train with magnificent new sleeping carriages. The ticket office only seemed to open for a few random minutes at a time, requiring most of a day spent in a nearby café spying on it before seizing the moment and sprinting over before the window shut again. I was lucky and secured a sleeper ticket, sharing a compartment with a junior air-force officer going home to visit his family. The majority of the remaining passengers in the carriage appeared to be well-to-do French tourists, heading to the drier north intending to shoot things in various private game reserves.

The border with the Central African Republic (CAR, or more euphoniously Centrafrique in French) was a slow, dripping clearing in the jungle, with the usual queues of patient trucks negotiating passage. The CAR border guards evidently felt the need to supplement their income, and had devised an unusual way to do so. A medical checkpoint had been added to the usual steps of checking documents and looking hopefully through luggage in search of confiscate-able items of decent resale value. Yellow fever vaccination? I had the standard issue certificate. How about cholera? The nurse had refused to inject me with it, pointing out that the vaccine was now reckoned to be useless and probably actually increased susceptibility. She had, however, been prepared to salve her conscience and issue an internationally valid certificate of cholera vaccination after injecting me with a microscopic quantity of saline solution; as she pointed out, it probably increased my immunity when compared with receiving the vaccine itself. Then how about meningitis? There was no recognised documentation for this, and it must have brought in a steady income for the border guards. I was equal to it: I had a letter on impressively headed notepaper, bearing the names of multiple doctors and signed with a dramatic flourish. The guards admitted defeat after a few minutes half-hearted argument regarding translation (meningitis in English = méningite in French, close enough for victory to be mine), and I was waved through.

Queueing at the border

They were missing a trick: there was one vaccine which I definitely did not have. When the nurse had asked for a list of countries I planned to visit on my trip, I pointed out that I didn’t really know. In the end we settled on a list which seemed to promise a comprehensive portfolio of standard travel immunisations. She then scanned a lengthy printout: “are you planning to visit southern Tanzania?” Maybe, maybe not, I shrugged, and asked why. “Do you want the bubonic plague vaccine?

Nigeria - part 2

The Redemption Hotel International was featured in my guidebook, offered “breakfast and varied hot menus” and boasted a prime location next to the inbound long-distance minibus stop. It had a single room, whose double bed was already occupied, inappropriately in such a religious country by a (presumably) unmarried couple of fleas, attested to by occasional but not prolific bites no matter which half of the bed I chose to sleep in. There was electric wiring and sockets in every room, but no actual electricity; each evening a generator would be run for a couple of hours, powering a flickering black and white television through the evening news and an electric lamp to illuminate the evening meal. The family who ran it – Mr George, his wife and her sister – were charming hosts and even better cooks. Full board accommodation including three excellent home-cooked meals every day cost around five pounds despite the artificially inflated currency, and as I needed feeding up after my recent illness, I took most of my meals there.

Management and staff of the Redemption Hotel International

The food consisted mainly of a variety of mildly spiced stews, usually based on fish or chicken, accompanied by either rice or a very filling green staple with a texture halfway between mashed potato and play-dough. I was told this was made from cassava, but when writing this I have browsed the internet to find pictures of something similar without success – nothing I have seen has quite the same intensity of green colour. It was not very varied cuisine, but the possible permutations were increased by a variety of fresh fruit for dessert. My favourite was mango, ripened at source a completely different fruit from mango ripened in a supermarket, soft, properly juicy and sweet, and very messy to eat. Fortunately, although there was no running electricity, there was ample running water, and failing that I had only to step outside and hold out my hands – the rainy season had begun in earnest.

To pass the time, I took the ferry across the river delta to visit some memorials commemorating the early days of the slave trade and a then succession of subsequent 19^th century local rulers or Edidems (under British overlordship), splendidly named Eyo Honesty the Second through Eyo Honesty the Sixth. The passengers were mainly tired looking housewives, already on their way home after early-morning shopping in Calabar, weighed down by heavy bags, and a fertile audience for the hypnotic patter of a salesman trading in some sort of tablets. As far as I could tell they were either slightly out-of-date vitamin pills or possibly aspirin, but if his act were to be believed, they were capable of curing anything from headaches to heart-disease. Business was brisk.

Otherwise the wait for my Cameroon visa was peacefully restful, with only occasional minor interruptions by local policeman eager to make a lucrative “arrest”. My passport duly bearing a systematically misspelt stamp (including of the words Cameroon and Calabar), and mindful of only a couple of days remaining on my seven-day Nigerian visa, I caught the ferry to Oron, whence boats to Cameroon allegedly departed. The alternative option was a bus. My guidebook mentioned a minimum seven official police checkpoints on the way to the border (implying an uncountable number of further unofficial checkpoints) – checking out the sea-route seemed an effort well worthwhile.

Oron was a smuggler town, and strangers were not welcome. Wandering the few yards down to the beach in search of the passport office, I came across various small boats being loaded. Their crews unequivocally proposed that I return to my hotel and remain in there until my boat departed next morning. A determined lady marched me up to the passport control, and then firmly suggested that I followed the crews’ advice for my own good.

The international boat to Cameroon proved to be a fifteen foot dinghy powered by a small outboard motor steered by a very short man balancing on the stern, three patched inner tubes for its dozen or so passengers being provided as its life-saving equipment. As we set off down the flat-calm of the river delta, it seemed slow but unthreatening. More alarming was the customs-control gunboat which swiftly detected us, demanded via siren and load-hailer that we halt immediately, and then boarded. A “duty” was payable… Happily this was the only such obstacle en route, which to me totally justified the choice of boat over bus.

After a few hours we came to a small island, a few thatched huts visible through tall grasses and mangroves. Rounding the cove, it became clear that it was not some rural island backwater, but rather the largest spirits warehouse in West Africa. I have only once seen more strong alcohol in a single location, and that was in Tesco’s national UK distribution centre. There were cases and cases of the stuff, mostly premium export branded whisky and brandy, but with a wide selection of alternatives, especially gin and pastis. Presumably it was the principle source of “duty-free” supplies to most of Nigeria. My fellow passengers fortified themselves at one of several bars, but I was relieved to see the boatman resisted this temptation.

A couple of hours later, many of the passengers were regretting their choices of aperitif as we left the twin shelters of the delta and island and entered the open Atlantic. The weather was still tranquil light rain with little wind, but the rollers were high enough to obscure the view of the coast, and we seemed to be quite far out to sea. I surreptitiously took possession of one of the inner tubes. I am no sailor and not at all knowledgeable about such matters, but a fifteen foot outboard open dinghy did not feel like the best option for an ocean voyage.
It was almost dark when thankfully we finally landed, apparently in the wrong place. A cheerful official met the boat and asked us if we had purchased tickets to Limbé (we had). This was Idenao, he explained, two hours back up the coast. The boatman would now refund us the difference in price. After a brief, sullen protest, the boatman did so. I had the impression it was a regular and ritualised transaction. The official’s smile broadened as he stamped our passports. “Nigerians are all thieves. Welcome to Cameroon”.

Nigeria - part 1

Of all the countries I have been (80+ and counting) Nigeria is the only one to which I never wish to return. Endowed with vast reserves of oil, it should be a moderately prosperous country despite its 170 million people, instead of which its highly urbanised population live in a poverty exacerbated by systematically relentless corruption.

My problems began at the frontier. I had been issued a visa valid for a month, but in a gesture of solidarity with his fellow officialdom, the border guard arbitrarily reduced this validity to a week – I could get an extension in a variety of ways, all of which involved significant contact with Nigerian bureaucracy. By the end of the day I had decided that under no circumstances would I spend more than a week there, despite an expected 2-3 day delay while I obtained a visa for the next country Cameroon.

The driver had come prepared with a pile of small denomination Naira notes in the glove compartment of the car. Beyond the border stretched a broad dual carriageway along which heavy lorries and buses thundered, an abrupt transition from sleepy Benin, but every few kilometres the traffic was slowed to walking pace by a police checkpoint, marked by a plank hammered full of upturned nails to choke the traffic down to single file. At each one, the driver placed a note in the palm of his hand, shook hands carefully with the armed policeman, and the Naira mysteriously vanished. In this way we made reasonable speed.

Occasionally it seemed he misjudged the appropriate sum, and we were summoned out of the car. Generally the driver handled these situations with diplomatic astuteness (usually by dispensing another small amount of cash), but on a couple of occasions something went more seriously wrong. On the first, we were marched into the police station, where my luggage was searched and, on discovering my camera, I was loudly accused of being a spy. (They also discovered my lucky owl, a small stuffed toy presented to me by my parents before a previous journey in South America to keep me safe. John le Carré makes no mention of lucky owls in any of his novels). This was rather alarming but my driver muttered in French to be quiet, and then proceeded in the local language to establish that the “fine” for spying would be twenty dollars, swiftly negotiated down to ten. As Nigeria also sported one of the dreaded currency declaration forms, which the police had neglected so far to check and thereby discover I was still carrying a significant quantity of cash, I quickly agreed pending any higher demand. The second occasion was more disturbing, as we were marched at gunpoint into a small room, I was again accused of being a spy, and we were then left to stew for half an hour, before the policeman returned still gesticulating dangerously with his gun. I was by now quite frightened, but bizarrely the (apparently) standard twenty dollar fine was demanded, once again reduced to ten after discussions which still involved waving the gun around and periodically pointing it at me. Thankfully after passing around Lagos, which I had decided to avoid as its evil reputation suggested that as a lone traveller I would be excessively vulnerable to, at the very least, sudden separation from my rucksack, the checkpoints settled down again to the routine handshake process.

"Señor Optime": a small owl arrested for spying 

Next morning I stood outside my hotel, recovering from a cold shower (I hate cold showers even in the hottest stickiest climates, but there was inevitably no hot water) and trying to figure out from a wholly inadequate map which part of town I was in. A fellow guest introduced himself: he was a professional footballer playing for a team in Sweden home to visit his family during the summer break, and could he help? I explained that I was trying to figure out where buses departed to Calabar, a town in the Niger Delta area whose main attraction was the alternative Cameroonian consulate not in Lagos.

He very generously offered to drive me to the minibus station, helped find me a seat, and then passed the time waiting for the bus to fill up by showing me squad photos. Twenty years on, I can’t remember either his name or the team, so if you happen to be a Nigerian footballer from Ibadan playing in Sweden during the 1990-1 season reading this, then thank you for your help!
I was allocated a rearward facing seat, my back to the driver. My neighbour, in the centre seat, was a man in his late twenties, clean shaven and dressed in a dark suit and tie. No sooner had the bus started than he extracted a bible which he studied deeply, occasionally underlining passages, making small grunts of agreement as he did so. After a couple of hours, it became apparent that he had not selected his seat at random, and that his bible study was preparation for the religious service he now proceeded to conduct. Some stirring revivalist preaching went down quite well with the rest of the passengers, who chorused “praise the Lord” and “amen” appropriately in a rather subdued manner, but what really got them into the spirit were the hymns. Most were sung in English and everybody joined in enthusiastically, but we were travelling from Yoruba to Igbo areas, and the preacher occasionally successfully suggested a hymn in one or the other of these languages. Once he asked if anyone knew any Hausa hymns (the Hausa are the dominant group in northern Nigeria, and are almost exclusively Moslems), which raised a laugh but no tunes. It was almost cliché Africa, as the hymns were well chosen, and the passengers clearly knew them all well enough to sing parts in harmonies, with a bass voice at the back making an especially beautiful contribution.  I am not a religious person, but the whole experience was quite moving, and to these people the message of Christianity clearly had meaning to them in a deep way: if you live in Nigeria, then the next life can only be better than this one.

Togo to Benin

Something was the matter with me. I sat in my relatively pleasant room with its view towards the sea feeling unenthusiastic. The walk along the beach-front into the city-centre, objectively both rather beautiful and scattered with local colour, had felt merely tedious. The only thing I felt like eating was ice-cream. The only reason to walk to the city-centre was the German-run ice-cream parlour. A small vanilla scoop there cost twice the price of a decent meal in a local café. I felt ill after eating it.

Morosely, I flicked through the traveller’s health appendices of one of my guidebooks, but found nothing helpful. I went out for another walk but returned after a few hundred metres. I couldn’t be bothered with it. I picked up the other guide: “…symptoms include loss of energy and appetite, general malaise, pale-coloured stools, sulphur smelling belching…” I heaved a sigh of relief, and headed for the nearest pharmacy.

My (minimal) understanding of the human immune system is that it is optimised, from birth and before, either to be good at dealing with germs and bacteria or to be good at dealing with parasitic infections, but not both. If you are raised in a clean, modern western city, and made to wash your hands before every meal as child, then you probably don’t major on the parasitic infections side of things. Based on my experiences as a traveller, I seem to be an extreme case.

The recommended treatment was the antibiotic metrodinazole, branded as Flagyl. Thankfully it was stocked in the nearest pharmacy, and this being Africa, no prescription was required in order to purchase it. My guidebook suggested a dosage, and lacking any other information, I followed its advice. With hindsight it is possible that its recommendation to “take three on the first day” may not have meant three at the same time. Be that as it may, no parasite could have survived the resulting conflagration in my guts.

My symptoms matched those of the parasitic infection giardia, most easily contracted from eating undercooked infected food. It was not difficult to understand how this might have happened. I had left Marc with his hangover quite early in the morning, and walked down to the Ouagadougou bush-taxi park. Evidently I was already too late. I should have come at dawn, I was told. Nevertheless, if I was prepared to wait, eventually a minibus would fill up with passengers and head south towards the Togolese border. No taxi ever leaves with an inch of spare passenger space, so these situations are simply a question of patience. Quite how much patience is very hard to determine, as all the passengers know that the vehicle won’t leave without them, and so keep wandering away. As the day wore on towards lunchtime, the most edible-looking food on offer was “brochette”, basically a barbecued goat-meat sandwich. From its taste, it could quite easily have been undercooked, infected, or any other dubious verb-ed. I only swallowed one mouthful, but that was probably enough.

Eventually we set off, apparently in completely the wrong direction. A few of the passengers ventured a small protest, but the driver was unmoved. We turned down some sandy back streets, carefully steering around the goats, and eventually pulled up outside a small house. The driver disappeared inside, and emerged triumphantly bearing his lunchbox, which he had forgotten to pack earlier. Evidently he was wise enough not to try the brochettes and stuck to his wife’s home-cooking.

We headed extremely slowly towards the border. There were villages every few kilometres, and at each one it seemed a passenger needed to get off, which meant also finding his or her luggage on the roof, and lowering it down. As it was unthinkable to travel any distance with a spare space, a new passenger had to be swiftly picked up, with associated reverse process for luggage. We finally arrived around dusk. The border was still open, but by the time passport formalities were completed, including a rather hopeful search of my rucksack, all transport on the Togolese side had ended for the day. I could purchase a ticket for the dawn bus, and did so, but there seemed to be no prospect of accommodation. The only food option was more brochettes, which looked as though they had been there all day and certainly smelt like it. However there was a vacant concrete bench so I slept on it with my rucksack for a pillow. Fortunately there was no possibility of getting cold.

The journey down to the capital Lomé was tiresome but uneventful. One of my guidebooks suggested a hotel which managed both to be cheap and reasonably pleasant and to actually exist when I got there. The city itself was much like other African capitals with two exceptions: the presidential palace was by the attractive beach but the improbably grand “Hotel du 2^nd Fevrier” was not. Apparently it had been named in honour of the nationalisation of the phosphates industry (Togo had had a relative shortage of violent coups to leave it with other significant dates), and towered high over the rest of the city, a glass and concrete white elephant. Nobody seemed to be staying in it.

Getting in the catch: beach at Lomé

Possibly due to feeling ill, I found it a difficult town to like. More pressingly the Nigerian consulate was inexplicably closed. Lacking a visa, a 2000km detour via an unstable Chad beckoned. Feeling somewhat better after my first violent encounter with the Flagyl, I decided to press on to Benin to complete my recovery and visa collection.

I had only once previously been a motorcycle pillion passenger, finding the experience simultaneously thrilling and alarming, and disliking the heavy helmet. In Cotonou motorbike taxi was the preferred means of public transport. Without a helmet, but with my rucksack strapped loosely to my back continually throwing me off balance, it was simply alarming.

The rainy season was approaching, it was stiflingly hot and humid, and I still had a craving for ice-cream. Presumably these cravings are caused by a lack of elements normally present in the diet. On a previous journey across South America, I had started to dream about a bowl of Weetabix, and later on this trip I became desperate for a pint of Guinness. I don’t normally care much for either ice-cream or Weetabix. The Cotonou French patisserie boasted such frigid air-con that it presumably made its surprisingly cheap ice-cream without the need for expensive additional refrigeration.

Next day, donning my “official shirt and tie” (very rumpled after residing at the bottom of my rucksack), I set out extremely early for the Nigerian consulate, aiming to be first in the queue and also, since the official shirt was rather thick, to avoid the midday heat. Arriving well before it opened, I spotted a coffee stand along the street, where the witchlike old-woman who ran it was just brewing up for the day. Water was just coming to the boil in a large cauldron, into which she carefully spooned a prescribed quantity of Nescafe. Two small tins of condensed milk followed, accompanied by careful stirring. She was now ready to dispense, scooping out a cupful and then pouring it flamboyantly from high mug to low mug to cool it down to drinking temperature.

The Nigerian consul complemented me on the official shirt and tie - “many people who come here dress like tramps” – and promised that since I had made the effort to be smart, I could have my visa the same afternoon. I did not yet feel quite recovered enough to face Nigeria, and sought out some entertainment while I waited another day or two. Posters for a “battle of the reggae bands” in the covered stadium looked promising. There were three different ticket prices, so I opted for the middle, the correct decision as the more expensive seats were entirely occupied by the local elite, the men looking very hot in suits, the women in full African-style finery.

The music, mostly cover versions of Bob Marley played very well on indifferent instruments through impressive speakers, was quite good. My neighbour was less impressed, haranguing me during an interval in extremely rapid French featuring the word ‘injustice’ repeatedly. As I understood it, the battle was actually a competition, with a quite decent cash prize for the winners. As my neighbour saw it, it was all a sham, the elite at the front had decided the winners beforehand, and furthermore the ticket prices had been designed to ensure that nobody else could afford to sit where they could influence the judges.

I shot the sheriff but I did not shoot his deputy plus corrupt judges: Nigeria beckoned.

Burkina Faso

My hotel was very close to the western road out of Niamey and a long way from the bush-taxi park, and so I decided to try my luck on the road. I quickly realised this was a schoolboy error – no long-distance shared-taxi was ever going to start out from Niamey anything less than 200% full. I was just contemplating the hot trudge back across the city when a vehicle pulled up and the driver asked where I was headed. The border with Burkina Faso I replied. And then where? Ouagadougou. “No problem, get in, I will take you to Ouaga.”

Marc was the West Africa IT support division of a major hotel chain. The support call-centre was the study in his home, and whenever an issue was not soluble by telephone, he would travel to the hotel, driving or flying as the distance demanded. The back of his car was filled with cardboard boxes containing a rather random selection of bits of PC. If I understood correctly, he had just been to clear a paper-jam in the printer in reception in Niamey Novotel, a round trip of over 1000km, accompanied by his girlfriend: free hotel rooms were a perk of the job.

I asked why he chose to base himself in Burkina Faso of all places. Surely there were more sophisticated options, such as Cote d’Ivoire or Senegal? “I am a native,” he replied. “My father was Brazilian, my mother was French, and I was born and raised in Burkina. Three passports!” He held them up.

“Where was I planning to stay in Ouaga?” This was an interesting question. My guidebook mentioned several pleasant sounding hotels or guest-houses. The only problem was that they all cost at least five times my budget, partly due to the inflated value of the CFA. It also mentioned a couple of unpleasant sounding places, where I was left with the impression that I would be lucky to retain any of my possessions after a night or two’s stay, even if I was not actually expected to pay by the hour. Based on this, I had tentatively planned to avoid Ouagadougou altogether, either by not arriving in the first place or by travelling straight on after I got there. This was too much for my French to explain, so I settled on “don’t know” as a simpler answer. Marc and his girlfriend exchanged some incomprehensible joke which included mention of the viler hotel options and much laughter; I caught the gist. “You can stay a couple of nights in my house.”

We continued at high speed down an empty road. After the border, the countryside slowly became greener. “Proper” African villages began to appear by the roadside, round mud-brick huts with conical straw roofs, full of straying goats. I would like to have stopped to take in the scenery occasionally, especially as we crossed the bridge over the White Volta, but for Marc this was a commuter-journey, to be endured not enjoyed.

His house turned out to be a pleasant whitewashed bungalow down a side street within walking distance of the centre of Ouagadougou. It had a staff: a sad-eyed housekeeper named Jean, whose first two tasks that evening, Marc instructed, were to pour beers and then take my laundry. My harissa-stained garments from the Sahara crossing had defeated previous efforts, and I had planned to give them to an opportune beggar, but bemused by the whole situation I included them in a rather sweaty bundle.

Marc drank two beers to my one, and explained what a wonderful place to live Burkina Faso was. We then drove over to his girlfriend’s (identical looking) bungalow on the far side of town for dinner. Marc drank five beers to my two, while the pair of them explained again what a wonderful place Burkina was. Their explanation was less than clear, and appeared to revolve around drinking in bars and/or shooting animals, mainly in neighbouring countries rather than Burkina itself. Marc then drove back through the unlit streets, and poured himself a huge scotch (I declined). Ouagadougou was a marvellous place to live, he asserted in case I hadn’t already understood, downing another large gulp of whisky.

At breakfast he looked somewhat worse for wear, compounded by an early morning support-call into his helpdesk. My laundry was in much better condition, immaculately presented by Jean with my T-shirts miraculously harissa-free and actually ironed (when had he found time to do all this?). Jean then disappeared briefly and returned with fresh French bread to accompany the excellent coffee.

I headed into “wonderful Ouagadougou” to look around. It is the only capital city I have been in with more goats than people (mental-flash image: Thursday 5pm, boarding the Piccadilly Line Tube at Leicester Square). There were indeed some bars, occupied by the usual aid-agency workers with their four-wheel-drives watched over by badly tipped young boys. There was a French supermarket, less splendidly located than the one in Niamey. There was a small cathedral and a smaller mosque (unlike the surrounding countries, Burkina Faso is not predominantly Islamic). There were dusty streets lined with dustier shops. There was not much else. I found the bush-taxi park in preparation for next morning, and returned to the house.

Not much to photograph: bush-taxi park.

In the living room was a piano, a missed pleasure, and since Marc was still out I played for a bit, watching the geckos scamper across the walls. Jean came to watch, and when my limited repertoire was exhausted, I thanked him for the laundry and asked about his life. He almost smiled, and told me that he lived with his family a short distance away. He was lucky to have this job, the patron was very generous, it paid well, and there were many side benefits: Marc often threw away good stuff.

Marc returned carrying in some boxes of miscellaneous PC spares, swiftly downed a first beer, and was embarking on the second: “What do you think of Ouagadougou?”

Niger - part 2

I have read somewhere that the only lasting global legacies of the colonial British Empire are the sport of soccer and the expression “fuck off”. This was not the case for the French colonial empire in West Africa. It was not yet relevant to look for its legacies because, for most intents and purposes, it was still in existence.

The focal point of central Niamey, the capital of one of the poorest countries in the world, was a large French supermarket, apparently stocking exactly the same range of produce as might be found in Lyon or Bordeaux, although for double the prices. There was a large French Novotel. The French Embassy acted as the representative for many of other countries in the region, as I discovered when I went seeking visas for my intended later destinations. The French Army maintained a base. The customers in the supermarket appeared to be mainly French or Quebecois – it was far too expensive for the locals, who shopped in the open-air petit marché opposite – sweeping up in gleaming white four-wheel-drive Toyotas sporting the logos of major international aid organisations.

The currency, the CFA has a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (and now to the Euro), and backed by the French treasury. Theoretically CFA stands for Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community), but previously the ‘F’ stood for Francaise, and before that the ‘C’ for Colonies. Not much seems to have changed apart from the name. Over a dozen former colonies still use it. Its exchange rate is artificially high, although to howls of outrage from the ruling elites of these technically “ex”-colonies, the exchange rate was abruptly halved from 50 to the franc to 100 to the franc in 1994. There was real substance behind the local jokes: “Question: what is the capital of Cote d’Ivoire? Answer: Abidjan. Question: and what is the capital of Abidjan? Answer: Paris.”

Away from the French imperial centre-ville, Niamey was a very quiet town. In part this was a consequence of the daytime heat. (I have often wondered if the protestant work ethic could have evolved anywhere with a decent climate.) Apart from the 4WD Toyotas, motor traffic was light, consisting of battered taxis and the occasional grunting goods truck. An iron bridge spanned the Niger, already broader than the Thames 1500km from its delta. Their disapproving mouths appearing contemptuous of the trucks, tall camels swayed regally across, bundled high with crops.

River Niger at Niamey

Animal hides were laid out along the river banks, being cleaned in preparation for tanning. Occasionally a small group of men would bestir themselves to soak the hides again in the river and then beat them vigorously, before themselves plunging into the river to cool down again. Further along the banks, small groups of women laundered cloths in a similar manner, beating them clean and setting them out on the ground to dry. It was often quiet enough for their chatter to carry several hundred metres across the river.

I wandered down the main boulevard towards the old Presidential Palace. Although a guard waved me half-heartedly over to the other side of the road and away from the walls, and despite a history of coups and takeovers, there was none of the paranoia evident in other regional capitals – it was simply too hot to attempt anything as strenuous as a presidential assassination.

It was my birthday. I decided I had earned the minor treats of a pizza in the (French-owned) restaurant down by the banks of the Niger washed down by an almost cold beer, and a then bar of chocolate from the supermarket for desert. That night I was violently sick.

Niger - part 1

The journey down to the capital Niamey is something of a blur. It started conventionally enough. After asking around, I located a shared-taxi (the standard method of intercity transport in remoter Africa), and we set off in the early evening, just as temperature began to drop from the blistering heat of mid-afternoon. It appeared that we would travel through the night and avoid the worst of the day-time temperatures. On a “how many passengers per square inch of seat space” (logarithmic!) scale of 1=Japanese Shinkansen train to 10=Indonesian minibus, we were at around the 7 mark: fairly comfortable in other words, with no more than double the number of people in the car than would be considered reasonable – or legal – back home. My fellow passengers were a cheerful bunch, generously sharing their small bag of cakes with me. The road was metalled, with only light to moderate pot-holes. It promised to be a pleasant enough journey, especially by comparison with the rigours of the Sahara.

Unfortunately we made it only about 10 minutes from Arlit. Although the road was reasonable, it was apparently necessary to weave from side to size to take advantage of the smoothest patches of tarmac. The weaving had to be synchronised carefully with any over-taking. Since the road was long and straight, these manoeuvres had to be synchronised further with the light traffic coming in the opposite direction. And under no circumstances must any driver ever be thought a wimpy girl’s blouse and give way to any other driver.

I was fortunate that I was in the back seat, well-wedged into my space between my neighbours, and also that I was watching the traffic at the time and could brace myself. As we hit another taxi coming the opposite way a violent glancing blow, span around, and came to a juddering halt, some of my fellow passengers were less lucky. I fetched out my roll of bandages and antiseptic cream, and patched up cuts and grazes as best I could. One man of about my own age had a huge gash in his hand, which I suspect had gone through the windscreen. Elastoplast and Germolene were wholly inadequate – it certainly needed several stitches at the very least – but probably the best medical care available for several hundred miles.

Someone gave us a lift back to Arlit. “Did I still want to travel tonight monsieur?” The alternative was to remain in Arlit for another 24 hours: yes I certainly did. “You can go with this guy.” A huge fat man in long white robes sat behind the wheel of a battered estate. He had just purchased it from one of the Saharan traders, and was taking it to sell in Nigeria. He would get me to Niamey. There were no other passengers, and I could have the entire passenger seat to myself (almost – the car was crammed full of random items presumably for later sale alongside the vehicle) for only double the standard fare. I climbed in, shook hands and paid, and we set off instantly at very high speed.

24 more hours in Arlit?

After a few minutes we passed the accident, still surrounded by milling passengers. I realised that my water bottle was still in there. Although now dark, it was still extremely hot and dry. My driver spoke only occasionally in mono-syllabic French. Fortunately one of his few words was the command “drink” and I was able to eke out the remains of a small bottle of water for the rest of the journey. Travel-health guides are invariably full of advice to only drink mineral water from bottles where you have broken the seal yourself; this is all well and good.

I was offered a kola nut to the command of “eat”. These are chewed throughout West Africa as a mild stimulant, and give you a high similar to a strong cup of coffee, red stained teeth, and mouth-cancer. They are bitter and foul. Chewing them does not mix well with an inadequate supply of brackish water and an already dry mouth. They do, however, help to keep car-drivers alert during long journeys on extremely dark nights.

The road was empty, we seemed to pass only through the edge of the occasional small settlements, and the main events were the police checkpoints outside the entrance and exit of every town, at every province border, and at every other possible place where a checkpoint could possibly generate enough bribes to pay the occupants’ keep. My driver was well-prepared. Presumably he made the journey regularly, for he certainly seemed to have the right gift ready for each gendarme, carefully extracted from the various merchandise in the back of the car. Although I occasionally had to produce my passport for inspection, there was extraordinarily little hassle, and remarkably I was never asked for a “fee”. Evidently the double-fare also included any necessary contributions. The checkpoints at least broke up the monotony of the empty road and silent driver. It occurred to me much later that he was possibly Nigerian and might well therefore speak English, but at the time I simply thought his lack of French and my lack of Hausa made communication well-nigh impossible.

At dawn we stopped suddenly at a roadside village and I was abruptly “handed on”. I eventually came to realise that this was quite standard practice. The driver was going south to Nigeria, I was going west to Niamey, but a fare had been agreed on a handshake for the full journey. My luggage and I were transferred into another shared taxi, the fat man paid a fare to the new driver, and on we went again. (Should you ever want to experience this “handing on” process at its very best, I recommend a long journey on the delightful minibuses of Lesotho. Not only are the crews extremely helpful about handing you on to the right bus and double-checking your destination, but they invariably assisted with my wife and kids’ rucksacks, made sure the traffic was clear for us crossing the road, charged us the correct fare without asking, and generally gave lessons in customer-service best-practice that I can heartily recommend to any customer-manager looking for an unusual team-building trip).

Plastic bags filled with cool-ish water were being sold at the roadside. I was by now extremely thirsty and past caring about prim instructions to only drink from sealed mineral water bottles. I bought a round for the whole car, receiving in exchange a small piece of breakfast cake. I have no memories of the rest of the journey. After the rigours of the Sahara followed by a 15 hour journey including an accident, we arrived in Niamey where I found a small hotel mentioned in my guidebook as possessing both flushing toilets and occasional hot water in its rooms, enjoyed the delights of both, and fell asleep.

Algeria - part 6

After the regular meal of tinned sardines, harissa paste and souring UHT milk that evening, Hamdi the leader of the Tunisians took me aside. “Do you have any cash you can lend us?” he asked. “We need to purchase a new radiator to replace the one broken this morning, and there is someone here who says he has one to sell. We have no cash now, but we will repay you in Niger when we have sold our first car. He is asking for two thousand francs.”

It was an awkward moment. On the one hand they had looked after me for several days when they could just as easily have dumped me in the desert, and I did indeed have exactly two thousand francs in cash. On the other hand, while I also had travellers’ cheques and a certain amount of dollars and pounds in notes, only French francs cash were likely to be any use until I reached the nearest big city, still at least a thousand kilometres of desert and bush to the south.

Hamdi knew it was a tricky request, and waited patiently while I thought it over in the quickening dusk. In the end I realized the decision was a simple one. If they were going to rob me or cheat me, they could just as easily do it in the desert. An open request here at the border indicated a very good chance of being repaid. I asked for a minute, feigned looking in my rucksack while actually extracting the notes from my money-belt, and then handed over the requested amount.

Hamdi shook hands gravely on the deal, and headed off to the “Europeans’ carpark.” An hour later he returned, and handed back the money with another handshake. “That guy changed his price when he saw I had the money. He is asking more than the price of a car, not just the price of a radiator. We will not buy from a thief!” He had clearly had a most frustrating negotiation.

The Tunisians’ frustration only increased next morning, as the inevitable border “paperwork and fees” a.k.a. “a hefty bribe to the border guards” was apparently not only more expensive than on previous trips but also took several hours to complete. Possibly their frustration contributed to the next incident.

The desert south of the border was flat and smooth. 90 mph flat and smooth. 150 km/h flat and smooth. Apart, as it turned out, from the occasional rock. Not a big rock, just a rock large enough to roll over a car doing 150 km/h when a front wheel hits it. Possibly a modern, well-built car might be able to perform this kind of desert gymnastics without sustaining too much damage. Not so an ancient Paris taxi with a quarter million kilometres on the clock.

The car completed a full roll, returning to its wheels, apparently with its engine and underside completely undamaged. However, before rolling the vehicle measured 150cm from ground to roof, after rolling only 120cm. This was all well and good for the car, less good for the driver who suddenly found that his headroom finished at the neckline.

Not so good.

We hurried back to find the grave, grey-haired driver shaken but otherwise apparently remarkably unhurt. The Tunisians began a rather heated discussion in Arabic. The driver was having none of it. Certainly he could continue to drive, he insisted in French. The vehicle was still driveable despite a tendency to steer to the left and a missing windscreen. There was not even a puncture. We should push on to Arlit while the daylight remained. With a shrug the others gave way and we continued on our route. (Next day the driver looked the same colour as his hair, and began to consume my ibuprofen tablets in quantity. I gave him a whole packet when our ways finally parted).

After several days without vegetation of any kind, the first dry, scrubby bushes began to appear occasionally again. The sand was softer where they grew, presumably indicating the presence of at least minimal moisture, and I began to fear that we were in for another long afternoon digging the Silver Monster out of the sand. Certainly others had suffered this fate, for the area was a kind of vehicle graveyard. Where once elephants might have gone into the desert to die away from the herd, leaving their skeletons white against the sand, now this was where Parisian taxis came to die.

As we approached Arlit, our small herd of ex-taxis, proudly led still by the Silver Monster, but with two of its members badly wounded, began to be hounded by jackals. “10000 francs for the big silver one,” they shouted, as they wheeled around us in Peugeots even older than ours. “I’ll offer 2000 for the car with no windscreen.” We were approaching the objective of the crossing, the great bargaining over the cars.

As I later learned, the African traders who followed us into Arlit were mostly middlemen, looking to buy cheap from travellers exhausted by the journey, and then drive the vehicles themselves down to the capital Niamey or better still, on to Nigeria, where they could be sold for a significant mark-up. Eventually one of them made a more realistic offer, and we stopped to allow a car to be examined in detail. It was the one with the damaged radiator, still on tow.

“What is wrong with it?” demanded the Africans. “Ran out of water” came the response, somewhat economical with the truth. After further bargaining which I was unable to follow (I can’t follow discussions about cars and their engines in English, let alone in heavily accented French), cash was paid, documents scrutinised and handed over, and the tow-rope exchanged. Apparently we had made our first sale, unlikely as it seemed to me.

Rather later that evening as we were heading to bed, our purchasers returned. They were not happy. They had discovered the damaged radiator. Discussion was heated. The Africans demanded to know whether car-dealing was an honourable trade or not. The Tunisians demanded to know what the problem was. “You said open the bonnet, we opened the bonnet. You said open the boot, we opened the boot. There was no problem when you took the car. If the radiator is damaged, you have damaged it yourselves by towing it too fast.” I feigned English-only, and then when one of the Africans demonstrated surprising fluency I pleaded, quite truthfully, a complete ignorance of the inner workings of cars.

Our convoy led by the silver Mercedes swept majestically into the streets of Arlit, a town of low sand-brick buildings lining sand roads, uniformly yellow-brown. We pulled up outside high padlocked gates, and waited while their key-holder was located. The Tunisians saw me looking around, and perhaps reading my expression, announced cheerfully “Welcome to Arlit, the Arsehole of Africa.”

Algeria - part 5

We camped for the night in the lee of a high rock-face, scoured by the wind into a rough crescent. Tales of deserts being baking in the day but freezing at night are commonplace. Generalising wildly from my two journeys in the Sahara, I believe such tales are a gross exaggeration. However the night-breeze can feel cold, and of course after the furnace of the daytime you are rarely tempted to start the night by climbing inside your sleeping bag. On this evening I was quite glad of the shelter of the rocks, as the wind was strong, and my hosts slept in their cars. As the wind continued to pick-up, I drifted off to sleep despite vague apprehensions about sand-storms prompted by distant memories of childhood reading, almost certainly some Biggles escapade. Nothing more serious ensued than a couple of inches of sand-drift against my sleeping-bag.

A few years later I was caught by a real sand-storm at a campsite in the deserts of Namibia. It was an utterly eerie experience. The mid-afternoon air was completely still, but a huge yellow cloud was rolling silently around the side of the next hill and creeping across the ground towards our small tent. From one moment to the next the stillness changed into violent battering at the tent. Unable to see out, it was impossible to judge the true strength of the wind, but it was quite terrifying. Opening the zip a couple of inches in an attempt to peer out merely resulted in an eyeful of blasting sand. We sat listening to the gale, hoping firmly that the wind was not strong enough to pick the tent up like a sail, for the best part of an hour. Then almost as suddenly as it had started, the wind dropped again and the sun re-appeared. Everything was covered in a layer of sand but otherwise it was as though the storm had never happened.

Progress next morning was slow. The terrain was rugged, flat stretches rare, and each vehicle in turn frequently bogged down in the sand. A new hazard was the occasional quite steep slope, up which the cars slithered, slipped and sunk. Eventually it all became too much for one of the younger drivers, and slamming his foot on the accelerator, he charged his old taxi up the hill. Inevitably he hit a hidden rock, took off into the air, and landed with an ominous crunch: the radiator was punctured, not an ideal malfunction for the middle of the Sahara. The Tunisians switched to Arabic.

After heated discussions, the only reasonable solution was arrived at, and the journey was now complicated further by the permanent need to tow one car on the end of a rope behind the silver monster. Fortunately the terrain unexpectedly eased shortly afterwards, and we were able to make relatively rapid progress. Finally in mid-afternoon the Niger border post appeared.

Easier terrain near the frontier.

The frontiers between developing nations fall into various types. In the first, the whole frontier is bristling with hostility, guards, and barbed wire. For the traveler it may be somewhat intimidating, but at least it is clear what to do and where to do it. In the second type, between friendlier nations, the main challenge is usually to find the border posts and get your passport stamped. Frequently the passport buildings are poorly signposted and hidden away down back streets, while the main focus of activity is the douanes/customs, which merits much higher priority because of the opportunities it offers the customs-officials for personal enrichment. There is usually a long, patient queue of parked trucks pointing the way to the frontier.

The Algeria-Niger border was a new sort to me. Set down in a flat sand-plain, the only buildings for at least a hundred miles in each direction were a collection of small huts. Presumably its location is determined by the presence of a well. A few hundred metres away, a small group of varied vehicles formed a pair of ad-hoc campsites. The Southbound campsite consisted entirely of European and Arab car dealers (plus the junketing French removal van which arrived a few hours later), with their dubious and battered ex-taxis presided over by the Silver Monster. Some distance away, the Northbound campsite was more interesting: two rugged old goods trucks were attended by a complete nomad village, complete with vast headman, retainers, wives, goats and children, attired in blue turbans and robes. Touareg, my companions insisted.

One of the Tunisians fetched his old camera and took a picture of the nomads. Instantly, as if by magic, a uniformed Niger officer materialized, snatched the camera, pulled it open and exposed all the film. Apparently the border-post was a sensitive and secure area and photography was forbidden. It was difficult to see exactly why this should be so. If I were to plan a coup in Niger, the Route du Hoggar across the Sahara would not be my preferred choice of access route. Subsequently, following the advice of my guidebook, I presented myself at a police point in the capital to apply for a photography permit. No permit was needed, I was told, but it was expressly forbidden to photograph any government buildings - presumably therefore including small border huts in the middle of the desert -, bridges over rivers, soldiers, police or lastly, women bathing in rivers. I was made to repeat this until I had the necessary French word-perfect.

I wonder how the ban would be enforced in these days of digital photography? Maybe the border guards are trained to stamp SIM cards into the sand. More likely the confiscation of easily resaleable digital cameras is one of the extra perks of an otherwise tedious and very isolated job.

The border official brusquely demanded to see our passports. He looked at mine. “English?” he asked. I nodded. “Which city is your home?”

“Nottingham, monsieur,” I replied.

“Ahhh.” Unexpectedly he suddenly smiled broadly and switched to quite passable English: “Nottingham Forest. Very good team!” In 1991 this was a genuinely true statement, so I had no problem in agreeing. I looked at the border post again, and wondered if he knew what a forest was.

Algeria - part 4

Should you ever elect to put yourself completely into the power of a group of travel toughened men, whilst carrying the local equivalent of a year’s wages in easily convertible form, and then cross one of the world’s great wastes where you could quite easily be overpowered and left to die of thirst without it being discovered for months, I can make no higher recommendation than that you choose Tunisian second hand car dealers.

I approached a pair of youngish, arab-looking men, fiddling with the engine of an old green Mercedes taxi parked on a patch of waste ground, and enquired about the prospects of a ride across to Niger. I was snapped up on the spot. As I was to discover, the journey across the open desert would involve a great deal of hard manual work, and cost-free transport in exchange for wage-free labour was considered an excellent trade for both parties.

Returning in the early afternoon as instructed, I was introduced to the full group, five men in total. Their leader, who gave his name as Hamdi, was a short man in his early forties, stocky and dark with a shock of thick black hair. After a brief visual assessment of my digging and pushing potential, he agreed with his younger colleagues and welcomed me to their party.

Initially we continued on metalled road, but after a short pause for paperwork, the real fun began. Each of the Tunisians had a vehicle, a significant investment for each man. In four cases, the cars were exhausted taxis with Geneva plates, old Peugeots or Mercedes. Hamdi and his grave and grey-haired older partner had, however, invested in something more splendidly upmarket. A vast metallic-silver Mercedes saloon, low slung, with tinted windows, air-conditioning and automatic gears, led the way proudly into the sand. A less suitable vehicle for tackling endless stretches of soft desert or the twisting, sharp-rocked passes through the hills of the Hoggar was difficult to imagine.

Within ten minutes this monster was thoroughly bogged down. Being automatic, it could not, as could the other cars, be put in high gear and eased out of the sand with merely the assistance of some mild pushing from behind. Instead every wheel had be to painstakingly dug free, using only bare hands to push back sand which rushed immediately back into place. It was rather like trying to dig a boat out of the sea. Once this was achieved, vigorous pushing against its vast deadweight might, with luck, persuade the sand to release it. It would then be driven at as high a speed as possible over the next stretch of desert, aiming by sheer velocity to avoid the suction of the sand. When this worked, progress was rapid. When it did not, the same velocity and weight ensured a momentum which gave it maximum self-burial power.

At nightfall we stopped at the last settlement in Algeria, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, which made its living selling dusty water to desert travellers from a deep well. The staple, and unvarying, diet of the journey was produced. Bread purchased in Tamanrasset and wrapped tightly in plastic bags, which nonetheless became steadily staler each day. Tins of sardines, which strangely the Tunisians appeared to have no means of opening. Eventually this problem was resolved by borrowing my pen-knife, stabbing a tin violently, and carving the lid open (a technique I was later grateful to have learned). Tins of Harissa, the hot garlicky paste without which no Tunisian meal is complete, also opened with my knife. UHT milk for the first couple of days, until it became undrinkably sour in the heat, and we reverted to the dust filled water. Unused to eating dry-mouthed, I had difficulty in getting the food down until I got the hang both of taking a scoop of eye-watering Harissa with every mouthful, which had the effect of alarming the saliva glands into cooperating sufficiently, and also of avoiding drinking significant quantities of milk or water until the end of the food.

Filling up for the journey.

Three extremely long, hot and exhausting days followed. The first was spent perpetually digging the monstrous Mercedes from the treacherous sand, on which it spent more time stuck than travelling. On several occasions the only option was to fix up a tow rope, a hazardous procedure as none of the taxis was really in a fit state for such violent activity and there was a continual threat that, rather than extricate the silver beast from the sand, the rope would extricate a crucial part of the chassis from a Peugeot.

Nightfall, however, was a magical moment which more than made up for the travails of the day. It was absolutely quiet, save for the ticking of the cooling engines. There were no insects chirruping or buzzing as often in empty lands. Every rustle of clothing or foot shuffling through the sand could be heard with extraordinary clarity. A single lorry passed by, perhaps five miles away, its headlamps occasionally visible through the undulations of the dunes. Its approach and departure could be heard clearly in the silence for 20 minutes each way. There was a half-moon which lit the sand silver and cast great black shadows into the hollows.

Having parked in a sheltered hollow after dusk, it took some minutes next day to locate the main route again and there was some slightly grumpy altercation between Hamdi and one of his lieutenants. Clearly sardines and harissa for breakfast had not cheered them up. A pattern was beginning to become noticeable too – when things were going well, the Tunisians spoke in French, even between themselves, ensuring that I could understand. When things were less good, they reverted to their particular Arabic dialect. The altercation was conducted in Arabic, not a good sign therefore.

Eventually it transpired that it was about the choice of direction. The Route du Hoggar is marked in Algeria by what the Michelin map refers to optimistically as “balises” – a grand-sounding word, which to me conjured up visions of beacons lighting the way, but in practice is an oil-drum dumped in the sand every couple of kilometres. We located a balise easily enough. The trouble seemed to be deciding which way was south. As it was dawn, and the sunrise was extremely plain in the east, this was mildly disconcerting.

Eventually south was located to common satisfaction, and a further trying morning of easing the accursed silver monster through the soft ground ensued. The ground gradually became rockier, with weird sculpted rockshapes appearing through the sand with increasing frequency as we began to climb into the hills of the Hoggar. I was extremely glad of the arrival of the lunchtime stop. The inevitable tins were produced, and my penknife stabbed into the first portion of harissa. A violent hissing sound emerged from the tin, followed half a second later by a spraying jet of red paste. Unfortunately I was perfectly positioned in the line of fire and ended up with my hair, eyebrows, and clothes, already filthy after several unwashed days of digging in the sand, artistically decorated with red-brown streaks and stinking of fermented garlic.