The Western Sahara Route; Onward

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THE WESTERN SAHARA ROUTE


In the Czech Republic at Christmastime I met a Dutchman who was a thousand years old. His leathered skin hung off once-sharp features in great Byzantine folds, and his voice groaned out in thick English, terribly slow and breathless. I asked the man of his travels and he told me quite solemnly that he had been everywhere.

Twenty; at twenty, he told me, he had crossed the Sahara on foot from North to South.

"Why?" I asked him.

He leaned forward and fixed me with grey eyes.

"Because," he whispered at me, smiling; and when he started again at last his throaty voice came through -- "because I wanted to see a Negro, by God!" and he burst into raspy laughter.

Well, ever since that the urge has been incubating in my mind to cross the Sahara. Not because I've never seen a Negro, of course. I prefer to think that I do things purely out of fear of my own insufficiencies. And "crossing the Sahara --" well, the utterance, the act, holds a certain mystique to it. A certain evocation of tribulation by sands and sun. A certain unequivocal proof of toughness for me to post on my man-resume.

But I shall say that these days the crossing is less a trial of stamina and hardiness, and more a trick of logistics and foreign currency.

Of the three traditional trans-Saharan routes out of Morocco -- Route du Hoggar, Route du Tanzroft, and The Western Sahara Route -- the first two are completely impassable since the closure of the Algerian border. And of the third, Lonely Planet's "Morocco" guide declares, "The trans-Saharan route via Mauritania is now the most popular route from North Africa into sub-Saharan Africa, and hundreds of adventurous souls do it every year." Well, I'd go further and say that now that the Moroccan government is pouring money into Dakhla and surrounds to cement its status-quo territorial claim to The Western Sahara, the route has become just plain easy, and you hardly need to be "adventurous" to attempt it. But this is just a small example of the misinformation which can be found in the travel literature on the subject.

Don't get me wrong -- you do have to be tough to travel independently in Africa. No mini-shampoos and moist towelettes here. But as far as difficulties go, this section of the trek is relatively straightforward.

The path begins in Laâyoune, Morocco, which is a bizarre -- almost eerie -- transplantation of populace into the middle of endless stretches of hammada. Characterized by its perfect flatness and uninspiringly greyish scrub brush, this hammada is the Sahara I yet know, and not the rolling dunes of Arabian lore. Here for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers, a planar projection dotted with scraggly freckleforms of inexplicably determined tufts stretches golden to the dim horizon. The windblown sand slowly burying each one. Fourteen hours of this exact same picture I bear on the evening bus out of Marrakesh, and only in the stretch between Tan Tan and Tarfaya do things get interesting.

Here at last the road sweeps over to the seashore; but the desert plains do not simply slide peacably into the waves. Instead nearly always a jagged shelf is cut abruptly out of the surface -- the ocean's bite -- and crumbling slabs of shale collapse some five to ten meters onto a strip of dramatically isolated and untouched beachsand below. Even under the poor ashen light, the lapping water here shimmers adamant cerulean in its steady beating arrival.

At least three separate times, we passed the most dramatic scenery of all -- the battered and crumbling saltcrusted forms of perfectly intact shipwrecks, perched unpresumptuous directly on the shoreline: unbroken relics guarding or guarded by the undulating demarcation between inhospitable desert and the saline Atlantic waves. The cape of Boujdour is said to be one of the most treacherous in navigation; and here sit its casualties. Untouched by man for there being no man here to touch them.

Then, after so many tea-stops in bewilderingly desolate rest areas, a real city rises up. This character Laâyoune is the largest city in the Western Sahara, but while there one can't shake the feeling that it's more or less deserted. No one seems to be on the streets, and of those that are, half are from one military outfit or civil unit or another. They stand in the back of speeding, dilapidated pick-ups in their (ironically) green fatigues, and fix you with grim stares. Every one the same. The shops all seem to be shut down, and those that aren't don't really seem to want you to come in.

On the other hand, the Moroccan government is clearly subsidizing huge development projects here. So, besides the generally embellished military edifices (which, of course, I was forbidden to photograph), the city is dotted with expansive and pristine plazas, decorated mosques and rows of the bright red Moroccan flag whipping tautly in the harsh Saharan gusts. The whole effect is rather pompous, as such efforts often seem under the scrutiny of the western eye; but in this case this is not due to any quality of the work itself, or even to the simple point-counterpoint between the poverty of a people and a government’s self-indulgency, but to the unshakable reality that Laâyoune’s noble, even impressive attempts at ostentatiousness do little to disguise the fact that it’s a shit town on the edge of the desert.

So, the very next morning I set out for Dakhla, the most southerly town on the Moroccan coast.

In Dakhla (that’s really a very westernized spelling; a proper transliteration should be more like Da’la, with the apostrophe a gutteral stop [someone who knows Hassaniya Arabic please correct me if I’m wrong]) things were a bit more lively, though I can’t imagine why. Now I was even more removed from anything even remotely familiar: on the edge of a world or even encroaching on the no-man’s-land dividing it from another. Indeed, no population center lay within a 500 kilometer radius of me. And this filled with brutal, inhospitable desert.

Here I also met a rather eccentric 44 year-old Frenchman named Lionel. The circumstances of out traveling together are still somewhat mysterious to me, as he speaks not a word of English, and I very, very little French. But so it would be that for the next several days “Liou” would be my mouth and ears - bartering and information-gathering on my behalf. I suppose it was the simple necessity of our being the only two foreigners around unstable enough to make this trip in July which forced us together.

So, the next day we did it. We crossed the Sahara. It cost about US$25 by taxi.

I don’t mean to disappoint anyone who was expecting ten-thousand camel salt caravans, exploits with veiled Arabian princesses, and saber duels with blue-robed Tuareg rebels, but as it turns out the whole affair wasn’t even worth putting ink to paper for. Okay, yes, I was hot, sandy and uncomfortable; but this had more to do with being squashed into a 1980’s Peugot sedan with six other Arabs than stumbling blinded onward in search of the next oasis.

ONWARD

In Nouâdhibou - my end of the Western Sahara route - I remained for two nights as Frenchy dealt with the decidedly more Western Union after hopefully being taught the rather obvious lesson of why you should never travel with just an ATM card as your only recourse to funds: there are no ATMs in Mauritania.

That done with, we headed to catch a ride on the iron-ore train between Nouâdhibou and Choum.

I began to feel ill at the “train station,” which consisted of a three-walled cinderblock structure set beside the tracks in a pocket of semi-dunes and petite plateaus. A sign declared in curt French that it was obligatory for the train to stop here. As if on some more spiteful days the conuctor might give the proverbial finger to this crowd of rheumy old women, 15 year-olds, and donkey carts heavy-laden with nondescript bags, their porters braying in protest at their bound snouts and the wind whipping up sandblasting cyclones to pelt their sad and starving underbellies.

Wrapping my face in Batik cloth to stave these unapologetic gusts, I lay in a place without trash. (These are few.) Even with my jacket zipped to the throat, this became too cold to bear; the wind here is sharp, and the fever now its bitter ally. I had to retreat to corner and await seated the ironpede’s brusque and juggernaut arrival. And at last, come it did. With squeaking metal, the hot and cataclysmic explosions which issue forth percussively in high decibel off expanding and contracting rails. Boxcars swaying and trembling on down the line. The perfume menagerie of smelt and sunbaked tar and the cancered skins of desert climes suddenly rushing in to surround me as the train’s halt was finally ground out.

For one long second there was stillness. The air fumigated off each iron wagon, and the cooling locomotive discs sighed.

And then madness broke loose. Elbows, fingernails, unfurling turbans, and screaming toddlers were at once on my every side. I was jostled and bumpered and outright shoved. No one had warned me of this. Mothers were literally tossing their sons through the single open doorway, and wielding babies as weapons in the crowd. I took my cue from the others who actually had tickets and began waving mine in the air. This cockfight, apparently, was for those who were going to board the train for free - simply because there was no force to stop them. Further down the line, adolescents clambered spiderlike up the corrugated sides of the ore cars, and could be seen falling headfirst into their uncertain depths. Bags of personal effects and anonymous wares were catapulted in afterwards in high-topped arcs; then the next wave of dark-skinned bodies would follow. We of the tickets fought our way through the crowd with the conductor fighting off our competitors at the door.

There must have been some order here, though, because we all ended up not only on the train, but with seats as well. This wasn’t saying much. I’ve seen more comfortable sofa cushions in West Texas lawns. All the windows took three or four grown men to operate on their decomposing bearings, and mildewed rubber hung from unhinging doors. The kid next to me was from the ex-Spanish Sahara, so he and I were chatting some. This was a relief, as I was sick to the gills of French (come to think of it, that’s probably what my fever was from: an auto-immune reaction to the French language). When I told him that my travel guide reported this to be the longest train in the world - in number of cars (2.3 km worth) not length of tracks - he just laughed.

“Eso dicen todos los libros. Que es el tren màs largo del mundo. Pero ninguno pone aue es el tren màs feo del mundo.”

This made me laugh because it could have been true.

“Ya; has visto el servicio?”

“Sì,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval; “lo has visto tù?”

“Sì.” I had just returned from the din of pestilence under discussion, “y luego voy a sacar una foto, para que todo el mundo sepa como es.”

“Cuidado,” he admonished gravely. “Se va a romper la camera.”

I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to converse with someone, but the fever became too much for me. Again I hid my face in Batik and crawled to the corridor. I lay to one side on the filthy, sticky ground, and buried my head in my shoulder-bag to bear the 12 hours of my already weary skull being jackhammered by the vibrations of this unsteady locomotive.


THE ADRAR PLATEAU


In Atar I am three nights recovering strength from my illness, which there at the camp was jokingly referred to as “Turistica.” This - the camp, Bab Sahara - was a good place to recover for the clean facilities and the nice people, but the weather was hellish. The temperature, I mean. Every day it climbed over 45° Celsius in the shade. In the sun was far, far worse. And if the westerly wind hit you it was like a blast furnace, scalding you with a burning silicate dust.

So on the fourth day, by then impatient, I went to Chinguetti, where it was even hotter.

But now I was in the golden Sahara of fantasy and film. The old quarter - housing today only 200 people - lay half-buried in brilliant sands tumbling outward like some metamorphic egg carton in every direction but the way we had come. Unmortared walls of blackened or auburn flagstones sat fallen or crumbling, separating this patch of sand from that in the gentle duneside. Or on the outskirts, walls lay hidden where as in an hourglass the piling of sand marked the steady passage of time. Across the flat Wadi I wandered, famished, in the less evocative cinderblock alleyways of the Ville Nouvelle. “Hotel Fort Saagon - Restaurant - Fast Food” advertised a faded scrap of plywood. I thought this was funny for some reason. Perhaps the hunger. A huge, foreboding iron gate once painted a milky green stood barricading this fort, but as I approached the wind swung it open slowly. A metal leg drug against a concrete guiderail, grinding loudly. I stepped through and the door slammed shut. Glancing around, I thought the sign should have more appropriately forewarned: “Empty Fucking Courtyard - More Sand - More Trash.” Crossing the grounds strewn with buzzard carcasses and plastic bags, I convinced myself that the place really was interred, and walked back to the gate.

It won’t, I thought. But it did: creaking open in its abrasive slide the gate bid me step through. The wind slamming it shut at my passage.

The next day I paid for a camel and the guide services of two Arabian boys. They were to take me five kilometers north, to a small oasis, returning in the late afternoon or early evening.

Camelback - now this is travel fit for a prince! In a horse saddle, one sits in a sort of cocksure readiness; but a camel saddle is more like a throne. I sat in it at an arrogant height above the two kids walking ahead, leading my beast through the heat. Every camel step dropped his hump forward and then backward with a mechanical fluidity, forcing my hips to be carried in their perch suggestively in time. But my back had to stay straight, and in this motion my arms lay still, resting on the leather of the saddle at my sides. This all acts to give the rider a sort of haughty poise, and one can not help but begin to feel like royalty.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself thrust five centuries back in time, but unmoved here in space. My linen shirt ripwaving in the wind the flow of an indigo Tuareg robe adorned in the chest with thick golden threads. The heat sits on me like paste. I breathe deeply and the hot air is dry and malleable in my lungs. If I open my eyes now there are ten thousand camels stretching behind me to the horizon. They come steady, rhythmically parading over the dunes laden with bricks of salt and burlap bags of grain. The riders nimbly cut through the beasts of burden, wielding flexible reeds polished from slapping against coarse camel hide. Berbers cry out in Hassaniya to the black porters dressed in rags stumbling and dodging thick hooves below. Silver glints off the rings of my fingers, and the percolating waft of incense mixes with the heavy aromas of sweat and camel droppings in my nostrils. Sand crunches. The flying dust beats against my veiled face.

But for the rushing of the wind in my ears, all is quiet.

By eleven o'clock we reach the oasis, where we will remain until three that afternoon. At first it angered me that I was paying for five hours to do nothing, but honestly the heat prohibits everything in that time of the day. Walking into the sun is like being lashed with a whip. The heat just drops on top of you like that. You never stop sweating. For five minutes, maybe, if you can find a spot with a good steady breeze in the shade and just sit there motionless. But after a while you realize that the drying probably just makes you stink the worse and you give up on that and live with the sweat.

For all that, it's not so bad though. Fifty degrees celsius is not certain death. Just forget about doing anything while the sun is high.

When the afternoon came, we dared to venture out and set back towards Chinguetti. On the way, we stopped at what could have been a permanent village or a nomad's camp. The kids had relatives here, it seemed, and they offered me tea.

Now, I swear, I was cast into the fifteenth century. The woman sat pounding out maiz and sifting it with flour in a bowl, while the old man lounged by with his yellow teeth jutting out at awkward angles. Kids ran around in various stages of undress, frightening off the goats and then coming back to collapse under the shade of the hut -- which was constructed entirely of dried reeds. They offered me raw palm dates and peanuts, which were thrown out on the mat we were sitting on. Every time I stopped chewing I was reminded of their presence and encouraged to eat again, despite my insistence that I really couldn't eat another date. (I really couldn't.)

The children had clearly never seen a camera before, and they were absolutely amazed. They insisted that I take their photos over and over again -- but they always held something with them, as if it were too awkward just to stand for a photo by oneself. After taking each picture, the children would come swarming around me to see it appear on the tiny LCD display and then roar with approval. A large rabbit-toothed woman who seemed to be a friend of the family would then get this grave look on her face and tsk the children away, demanding me over to see what had been produced. When I showed her the picture then, she would laugh and laugh and point at the old man and the old woman. First I would show it to the man. Each time he would first glance at it warily, only to let his face erupt in amusement as he saw the thing; and then he always turned away shaking his head naw it ain't real and chuckling to himself and waving me on towards the woman. She in her turn would just stare at it and stare at it until I was the one who felt awkward, and I would draw it away and turn back to the children. One regret I have is that my camera chose this moment to start acting up, and several of the better pictures I took were not saved.

Back in the ville, the sun is setting and the citizens have taken to the sandy fields and sand plazas and streets of sand. Soccer balls appear, donkey carts squeak by and vendors call me to their wares. Monsieur! Monsieur! Mon Ami! It is telling of the season that I already know that there are exactly five four other tourists in Chinguetti, and I have already met all of them in other parts of the country. Very few travel in Mauritania in July; but really, the evening is quite peaceful, and not at all uncomfortable. The sun drops swiftly as it will do at these latitudes, and I finish a meal of plain spaghetti and tomato sauce in the dark. I go back to my Auberge and drag a matress up to the roof, since it is too hot to sleep inside a bulding. The sand blows over me gentler now, but still I bind up my headdress. The stars above me I have seen before, but have not compare in Western lands. The Milky Way is a luminescent smear through the swirling and blurry eddies of starlight. The sand is still blowing, and I drift away into another Saharan night.

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