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.

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”.