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.