Algeria - part 3

There were five routes south across the Sahara. The first, crossing from Morocco to Mauritania near the Atlantic coast, was at that time closed. The second involved passing through the Polisario refugee camps of western Algeria, and as best as I could determine involved an intimidating level of permits and general paperwork, with consequent lengthy contact with Algerian bureaucracy at its most corrupt, and little likelihood of onward southern travel beyond the camps.

My preferred choice was the Route du Tanezrouft, due south from the rather pleasant town of Adrar, where I was now staying briefly, and on to Mali and Timbuctoo, which despite its “Is That It?” reputation I wanted to be able to say I had visited. Discussions with locals and travellers in Adrar, however, were not encouraging. The Touareg (the desert dwellers on the borders of Algeria, Mali and Niger) were rebelling, and westerners were being murdered on sight, so they said. Certainly those who claimed to make the journey regularly said they were no longer going that way.

That left the other reasonable option as the Route du Hoggar, a few hundred miles further east, bound for Niger rather than Mali. Unfortunately I was now too far south to cross easily to this more easterly option, and a potentially lengthy period of backtracking beckoned, commencing by taking exactly the same bus northbound as I had just taken southbound. The effort of paying at least some attention to lessons in school in which you have little interest now repaid itself. The rather splendid hotel in Adrar, in which a pleasant room cost less than a bed in an English youth hostel, featured a coffee shop with a fountain. In the coffee shop was a German girl. I bought her a coffee, dredged up some hopeless, half-forgotten, schoolboy German (my German teacher was an elderly Glaswegian – I couldn’t understand his spoken English, which made his explanations of spoken German more than usually challenging), and haltingly explained my situation. Appreciating being spoken to in her own tongue – if you could realistically refer to my efforts in this way – she revealed the existence of an Algerian boyfriend with a four-by-four pickup who was heading in exactly the direction I needed extremely early next morning.

In case you are wondering, the fifth way across the Sahara was to ignore the recognised routes altogether. Private GPS navigation was then rather a novelty, but occasional affluent travellers with their own vehicles were equipped with it. One British group, a trio of camouflage coloured British Army surplus Landrovers, selected this option, and succeeded in mounting their own western imperialist invasion of Algeria by driving, headlights ablaze in the early evening, straight into an Algerian army base. I met them later, driving white Toyotas with Algerian registrations.

 The Algerian boyfriend appeared next morning just before dawn in a pickup with enormous tyres and ultra high-clearance. He was an engineer, an oil-worker, he told me, and this was a company vehicle, not his own. This combination of highly suitable design and total lack of concern at the potential expense of any damage allowed him to drive across the open desert, by now unmistakeably the sand sea of my imagination, at extremely high speed. The vehicle had a cassette player and he had a single cassette, a medley of country and western songs. We bounced madly over the open dunes, starkly shadowed by the low rays of the early sun, to the accompaniment of repeated choruses of ‘You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille.’

He gestured at the empty horizon, somewhat worrying because it required him to take a hand off the steering wheel just as we touched a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. “Beneath this desert is a great water table,” he said. “This land could all be fertile again, as it was before the Romans. In Libya they have just such a project. But our government is useless, they do nothing. They cannot even organise pumping up the oil; they will never be able to pump up water.”

A few hours later, feeling very seasick, I was dropped off at Ain Salah (which means Salty Well), marked on my map as a settlement of some significance but in reality a few scruffy cafes by the roadside. Prospects for further transport appeared slim. However a battered car with a battered French driver parked outside the café where I was recovering over a coke. The driver got out, greeted the café proprietor familiarly and ordered two coffees and a fanta. I am sure I would be too embarrassed to do this in English, but one of the effects of speaking a foreign tongue badly is that one has to dispense with nuances and say what you actually mean as simply as possible. (I have a feeling England might be an easier place in which to live if we were all required to communicate with each other in Outer Mongolian for a year after a month’s crash-course.) I greeted the battered driver, and asked if he was heading south, and if so, could I have a lift? He looked me briefly up and down, and nodded. He would take me as far as Tamanrasset, several hundred miles further south. He introduced himself as Henri.

 The reason for the second coffee and Fanta appeared shortly afterwards. Henri made part of his living driving battered ex-taxis down Algeria, across the desert and through to sub-Saharan Africa where they could be sold for a substantial premium. As I subsequently discovered, this was a regular occupation for a significant group of people, although one told me later that the trade was becoming more difficult, both as Algeria grew politically more challenging and as the alternative of shipping vehicles by ferry from Hamburg to Togo became cheaper. Neither then nor now could I fathom the economics of it. Even if the vehicles themselves were assumed to be free, the price paid in Niger did not seem to cover fuel or travel expenses back to France. Be that as it may, Henri had decided that, as he was making this particular trip during the Easter holidays, he would bring his wife and young son along – the wife could drive her own vehicle which would pay the cost of her trip. The reason I got a ride so easily was to provide a co-driver for his wife. This particular holiday plan was not proving a complete success with her, she was having difficulty with the tiring boredom of the long drives, and their six-year-old was not a particularly easy travel companion. If I could drive (I could), I would oblige them by taking on some of the easier driving from her – I should follow Henri closely at all times, and I would only drive where the road was good, OK?

 Theoretically there was a metalled road to Tamanrasset. In practice it was often badly damaged, or missing, so it was more sensible to drive on the sand. There was sufficient traffic on the route, particularly military and heavy lorries, to pack down the sand into a hard surface. Often this was a better surface than the tarmac might have been, but equally often the traffic had made it washboard. Thankfully I was not allowed to drive these stretches, during which the whole car shook and the steering wheel vibrated horribly. Henri’s wife clung to it grimly, and muttered through clenched teeth that this was not a trip she planned to repeat, especially in a car with already damaged wheels (what damage, I wondered? No previous mention had been made of any problem).

We pulled up for lunch at an isolated roadside café which served surprisingly good omelettes. Extraordinarily, clouds appeared suddenly and it began to rain. “I have been making this journey for twenty years,” exclaimed Henri, “and never have I seen it rain.” I had visions, encouraged by vague memories of the B-movies of childhood which for some reason seemed to precede a showing of Chitty Bang Bang with a documentary about desert wildlife, of flowers blooming suddenly in response to the moisture in the sand, but ten minutes light shower produced no such response.

The best omelettes in the Sahara.

After driving for twelve hours (fifteen in my case including the manic Algerian boyfriend), we arrived in Tamanrasset, a town which the English colonial back in Marrakech had cheerfully described as the ‘end of civilisation as we know it.’ The sheer size of Algeria is conveyed by a simple statistic: Tamanrasset, still some 400km from the border with Niger, is further from the capital at Algiers than is London. After a night in another extraordinarily cheap hotel, I began the hunt for my next ride which needed to take me out across the open desert.

Algeria - part 2

Sitting in a mixed group of Americans and Europeans is always an opportunity to reflect on how much more we Brits have in a common with someone from say France than from America, once the language barrier is overcome. No European of my experience, will, for example, discuss their treatment for minor psychiatric disorder or sexual technique in mixed company of 24 hours acquaintance, both topics which Americans seem to regard as mere conversation makers. (Although having said that, the most alien working culture I have subsequently experienced is that of Sweden, where everything must be performed collectively. A Danish colleague commented despairingly to me: “ask a Swede a simple question and he calls a meeting to agree an answer.” Even allowing for Danish prejudice against Swedes – Danish joke: what do you call a Swede with a sense of humour? A German – I found this to be both true and completely different to the working culture of the UK, US or even say India.)

Among a small group of highly educated young Americans, it was also astonishing to discover how few had any languages included in their schooling. Spanish obviously, Chinese or Japanese maybe? Only one of six had some elementary Spanish to her name. OK, the USA is a big country: Los Angeles is further from New York than Bulgaria is from Birmingham, and how much do you know about Bulgaria? Go on, name Bulgaria’s current Prime Minister? In a café whose menu was in Arabic and French only, this mysterious educational gap at least offered the Dutch astronomer - who spoke 5 languages fluently, as all Dutch people seem to do - and myself minor opportunities for amusement. “What sort of sauce,” demanded one of the Americans, “is ‘Hamburger à cheval’ in?”

Marrakech is no more than a large tourist trap. Having said that, the nightly circus/fair in the Fna, the main central square, is still good entertainment, and we had a prime position. Our rather scruffy ‘hotel’ included a rooftop café with occasional service, enjoying excellent views of the snake charmers, jugglers, pickpockets, kebab stalls, water sellers in costume, beggars and bewildered package tourists.

An elderly Englishman with colonial vowels was also staying there. He had spent 20 years living in Libya, spoke Arabic fluently, and having apparently warmed to me for no good reason as a kindred spirit, announced he would take us to find beer. After much enquiry, we found ourselves in a dimly lit den, full of locals breaking one of the Prophet’s prohibitions (although in some interpretations of the Qur’an only wine is actually forbidden – perhaps they had chosen an appropriate translation), the kind of place no tourist could find. One of the Americans then announced he didn’t drink alcohol, grudgingly accepted that he would be unable to obtain caffeine-free coke, and settled on Fanta – always a disturbing option in the developing world, where it is a brilliant carrot orange, sickly sweet, and presumably full of additives banned in the west. The old colonial demonstrated further cultural distance by ordering it with a delicate sarcasm quite lost on its consumer.

A lengthy bus journey took me over the Atlas mountains to the splendidly named town of Ouarzazate. In brilliant, but still in April not actually baking, sunshine it was a beautiful journey with many stops for the passengers to get out and take tea or cakes, and for the bus to take time to recover from its last climb. High up the air was crystal clear offering magnificent views of brown and grey of scrub and mountains contrasting with lush green of oasis valleys filled with palm trees.

Local livestock transport.

I was the only tourist in Ouarzazate that day, and despite my evidently unpromising appearance, the owner of the local carpet shop decided it would at least relieve his boredom to feed me mint tea and make a half-hearted attempt to sell me a kilim. Somehow I have found myself in many carpet shops over the years, occasionally quite intimidating experiences where large men blocking the light from the doorway imply that it would be a good idea to purchase something in order to be allowed back onto the streets. Should you ever wish to purchase an oriental carpet, I can, however recommend the shop in Ouarzazate. To my uneducated eye the specimens were magnificent and the owner informative and pleasant. Others had clearly felt the same – he showed me a French coffee-table book of photographs of North Africa in which he and his array of wares occupied a prime double-page spread. He explained how to count the number of stitches per centimetre, a crucial measure of quality, and how to tell whether the carpet was silk or not – both by the way a tiny thread burnt but also more spectacularly by how the colour changed when held up to the light in different ways. I felt quite guilty in the end not making a purchase, but my budget barely stretched to food, transport and accommodation and certainly did not run to six-foot silk carpets at 50 stitches per centimetre.

The bus journey to the Algerian border was slow and hot. Boarding was a lengthy process as all luggage had to be strapped to the roof, in approximately the correct order to allow it to be retrieved as passengers got off. Once all bags were securely strapped down, a goat had to be winched up and tied safely. This particular goat clearly had an especially acute fear of heights, struggling forcefully against efforts to lift it, and then peeing lengthily over much of the luggage, to the displeasure of the passengers most thoroughly affected. When we eventually got going, I rather envied the goat its fresh air and uninterrupted view. The bus was stuffy, most people drew curtains against the sun, and we stopped continually. The road ran dead straight through a completely barren valley bordered on either side by a low ridge of ochre hills. Despite the complete absence of signs of human habitation, passengers were continually dismounting, requiring a lengthy retrieval of their luggage (or goat), and tramping off through the dust bound for the hills.

After an overnight stop, the Figuig border crossing itself. Leaving Morocco took about 90 seconds. Entering Algeria however, required 90 minutes. This was caused by the first appearance of a dread document: the currency declaration form, on which one was required to list all holdings of foreign currency in cash or travellers cheques. As I was carrying five different currencies at this point this had required a complex stock-take the previous night. The official purpose of these forms is to allow the government of whichever country insists upon it to artificially over-value its currency and require all travellers to exchange money only at the government-set exchange rate. Their effect, in practice, is to ensure that the most lucrative black-market money-changing operations are always run by the border guards. These fortunate individuals are on to a doubly good thing, as the currency declaration form allows them to assess precisely the worth of their customers, and if appropriate require ‘gifts’ to help the transaction along. I was fortunate, being merely required to change a certain amount of leftover pesetas into Algerian dinars at a moderately disadvantageous rate.

There was no transport away from the border, so I walked a few hundred yards to the nearby village and tried hitching. I was picked up almost immediately by a two French couples, holidaying by trying to cross the Sahara in a small removal van and accompanying small car, who offered to take me to the town of Bechar.

Before setting off they insisted on me joining them for lunch, for which, in true French fashion, they produced a table and chairs from the van, some bread, reheated beef bourgignon, and a bottle of excellent red wine, served properly in glasses. I discovered my 90 minutes at the border had been trivial – they had been there for 3 days of protracted negotiations about spurious duties needing to be paid on their wide variety of home comforts.

The border seemed to mark the beginning of the desert proper. Where there been dry hills, features, scrub, there was now just flat, stony wasteland. I rode alongside the driver of the removal van. Once safely underway, he performed a complicated manoeuvre resulting in the removal of both socks without ever slowing down or letting go of the steering wheel. He held them up ceremoniously, before hurling them out of the window into the desert, crying “Hello Sahara, Goodbye Socks!”

Despite my attack of nerves the overnight bus journey south from Bechar was remarkable only for a single curious incident. A slim figure wearing the wrapped turban of the deep desert boarded at a village, and headed to join the men at the back of the bus. The turban remained in place, obscuring all but his eyes – unusual but not completely remarkable behaviour. Some hours further south, however, the bus was boarded by police who led the man quietly away. I asked other passengers what was going on. The man, they explained, was actually a woman. The reason for her arrest was less clear. One group maintained she had run away from her family without permission, another that she was a terrorist – the offences appeared, in the eyes of these passengers, to be approximately equivalent.

Algeria - part 1

I sat on a bench in the market square of the unremarkable Algerian down of Bechar, close to the Moroccan border, becoming increasingly nervous. Unaccountably, the tree-lined square boasted a loudspeaker system which piped soft, familiar music: Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits. It did not calm my nerves.

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail. Nottingham to Nairobi, overland. The first leg of my intended trip around the world and just the minor hurdle of crossing the Sahara immediately ahead. I reread my guidebooks with a jaundiced eye. In the euphoria of planning the trip, watching Shirley Valentine twice in the company of some friends who were planning a year in Australia, resigning from my job, it had all appeared fairly straightforward. Lots of vehicles crossed the desert apparently. You just had to find one and clamber aboard. In the shade of a palm, the guidebook wording was suddenly more ambiguous: “Some travellers have reported that it is possible to...”; “at some times of the year it may be feasible…” The ridiculous thing was that I was not even faced with this challenge yet. My panic attack had been brought on by purchasing an overnight bus ticket to travel between two quiet provincial towns, not exactly either a novel or high risk action.

The trip so far had been far from high risk or novel either. A brief stop in Paris, bathed in spring sunshine, to acquire a visa unobtainable in London had given me my first brief taste of Africa. I had entered the waiting room of a gloomy consulate and sat down quietly in a corner. This, it transpired, was a serious breach of good manners. The correct etiquette was demonstrated by the next two arrivals, who entered, said good morning loudly to the room, and then circled it shaking hands with every occupant before finally taking a seat and silently waiting in turn.

A rather different process had been followed by the Consulate of the Republic of Burkina Faso in London. It transpired that this imposing title belonged to the dining room of a middle-aged Englishwoman living in Battersea. She had asked me which country I wanted a visa for – apparently she was the honorary consul for several -, extracted the necessary paperwork from a boxfile labelled “Burkina” in black felt-tip, and cheerfully stamped my passport on the spot in exchange for a fee of ten pounds.

From Paris I also captured a particular image of western prosperity, history and culture: that of the lights from the cars along the Champs Elysees viewed in early evening from the Place de la Concorde, which I romantically intended to contrast with… well, with whatever I discovered in Africa. Less pretentiously, I took great schadenfreude delight, pausing briefly between trains in Bordeaux, at watching the rush-hour commuter traffic crawling over a Garonne bridge. They had all spent a tedious day at work and were now jammed together battling to get home. Hah.

The only real hitch had been in Toledo, in early April a quiet town before the tourists started again at Easter, and which I had chosen as a peaceful and familiar stop in preference to the rigours of Madrid after two successive overnight trains. I had wandered out at night for a meal and then found afterwards that I had no idea which direction led back to my hotel. The high walls and narrow streets of the mediaeval old town became like a maze and in the end I arrived at the wrong gate in the walls. I tried a couple of times to find a reasonable way back, but in the end decided the simplest way was to walk right around the walls, a lengthy and tiresome trek which involved descending back to the plains below the hill and climbing back up to the main gate near the station. It did not bode well: if I could not find my way around a small town, how was I going to find my away around a small planet?

In Algeciras, a surprisingly smart city considering its main function appears to be the facilitation of the illicit import of marihuana and Moroccans into the European Union, I bumped into Dave from Dewsbury, who explained that he was heading for Budapest where he hoped to catch the train to Moscow and thence the trans-Siberian to Beijing. I pointed out that he was heading the wrong way, but he seemed unconcerned and suggested visiting nearby Gibraltar. Ten days after leaving England for my grand world tour, I found myself sitting outside a pub eating overdone roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, washed down with a pint of John Smiths bitter. The only un-British features of the experience were that the sun shone and the air was warmer than the beer.

Next day I took the ferry to Tangiers. I have crossed several borders marking cultural divisions – Turkey to Bulgaria, the USA to Mexico, Hungary to the Ukraine, China to Pakistan for example – but none in my experience quite compares with the brief boat trip from Spain to Africa for the abruptness of the change. Tangiers, its harbour rather pretty seen from the ferry with its white buildings rising up a hill towards the medina, actually is a scruffy town, half smuggler village, half tourist trap, but step down any side street and it is undeniably alien. Morocco is also noticeable for the relentlessness of the hassle from its touts, and this begins the moment you step down from the ferry. If unprepared, as were my new acquaintances from the boat, an American couple and a Dutch astronomy student, it can be quite distressing. On my first visit with a friend some years earlier, we had stayed exactly as long as it took to get on the next boat back. The solution is usually to appear to know where you are going and stride boldly ahead. Unless you are the only possible victim, the hassle will usually give up quickly in search of more vulnerable prey. Putting this stratagem into play, I led a march up the hill and we discussed the options for the Marrakech express. There were two trains, the sensible overnight express with cheap comfortable couchettes, which left at midnight, or the uncomfortable, uncertain and inconvenient stopping train involving a 2am change in Casablanca but which left Tangiers at 5pm. After 40 minutes experience of the pleasures of Tangiers, my companions immediately outvoted me three to one and we purchased tickets for the earlier option.

First sight of Tangiers.

It was Id El Fitr, the end of Ramadan with its daytime fasting, and a major feast in the Islamic calendar. The conductor sat down in our compartment to watch the sun set, marking the official beginning of the celebration. “Sun gone, now you party,” he instructed us as he clipped our tickets. The rest of the train took his instructions reasonably seriously, but evidently many of them were on their way to visit family and friends for precisely this purpose and practiced moderate restraint in anticipation. However the occupants of our later open, wooden seated, carriage from Casablanca to Marrakech suffered no such constraints, singing loudly to the accompaniment of much wild laughter, offering us cakes and drinks, letting off party-poppers, and generally creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a special rugby train. Their songs in particular, although in an incomprehensible Arabic dialect, had repetitive choruses which we were occasionally taught, and were often accompanied by gestures for which I believe anthropologists use the word “universal”.