The Libyan Tuareg author, Ibrahim Al-Koni, tells the tale of Asouf, a solitary goatherd who is the guardian of Wadi Mathendous. The similarly reclusive mouflon (barbary sheep or waddan, right) feature heavily and symbolically. His father died trying to hunt a mouflon, and Asouf once escaped from the Italian occupiers by changing into a mouflon and heading for the hills. One day aggressive modern hunters (one of them telling named Cain) come to Wadi Mat’, and insist he leads them to any remaining mouflon in the Messak. One presumes there is some kind of allegory being played out here. Cain is a voracious meat-eater. Asouf is a veggie. One is the incomer ravaging the desert, the other lives very humbly, at one with the environment. Nice though it is to read something in English by an indigenous writer of the Sahara, and even a Tuareg, the themes were not that subtly evoked and I spent more time picturing the well-known Fezzanese settings than acquiring any deeper meaning other than: nomads – good; modern man – bad. But don’t take my word for it – readers with better tuned sensitivities may get the message.
As a young boy Sven is captivated by a rare Swedish travelogue describing the well diggers of Touggourt in Algeria. Later on he becomes influenced by the writings of André Gide and other literary types who also spent time in North Africa. And so it seems a rather lame deal is struck with his publisher: go to North Africa, retrace the travels of some of these writers and cook up a polemical Sahara travelogue on the way.
As a selective literary colonial history of North Africa the book is OK. After skimming over St Exupery (which proves the author does not get the desert) he finds himself to Smara in the midst of the Polisario war while following Michel Vieuchange who arrived after much hardship and increasing self-delusion in 1930, disguised as a woman. The quest for Smara matched Timbuktu or Mecca at that time and Vieuchange spent just three hours there before dying on the way back to Europe. Lindqvist seems no more impressed with the place after a less strenuous journey, tellingly quoting Vieuchange “Decisions are made in Paris. They are carried out in the Sahara” Perhaps this was his conclusion on the Desert Divers project?
The Western Sahara may not be the most inspiring destination and to the author it’s as ugly and wretched as the romantic motives of the nineteenth-century intellectuals he catalogues. To underline their vanity he details the mind-boggling cruelty and atrocities committed by the French across northern Algeria which occurred right under the noses of the wandering writers like Gide. The curious fantasist Pierre Loti is ticked off and a couple of chapters of this short book seem to paraphrase Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. Why? Probably because the author liked him and the subject matter. We also get a graveside visit followed by the received text on the self-destructive life of Isabelle Eberhardt. Adopting local male dress and having turned native and Moslem with a fanatical compulsion, she at least gets off lightly in the author’s critique, being aware and rightly hostile to the vicious colonial enterprise around her.
But as a wilderness the Sahara really never gets a look in. His travels in Algeria get no further south than El Golea (another dump, in his opinion). Worse still, some chapters are separated by interminable short dream or magical realist sequences – surely the naffest literary device of all – while important questions like “How many muscles are there in a life?” are pondered over with thankful brevity. Meanwhile the autobiographer in him can’t resist recounting a lame childhood anecdote about how he was once lowered into a well to retrieve a ball. He didn’t nearly drown but he could have done and it was dead scary.
As a description of the Sahara this book barely bothers to scrape the surface. As a selective study of Saharan writers it’s lightweight and self-indulgent.
I wanted to be Saint-Ex, the flyer who does not abandon a friend in distress in the desert. I became Vieuchange, the desert wanderer who lies his way into continuing his journey, because he ‘had wanted it in Paris’.
At a time when LP can afford to produce loss-making guides to destinations few other publishers would touch, along with the new LP Afghanistan comes Algeria, the first English-language guide to that country for decades, if not ever (LP’s long out of print North Africa Shoestring from the 1980s covered Algeria but was always a bit lame).
It’s a slim book and the guide section is only about 100 pages but the Sahara fills about half of that and there’s plenty more on the practicalities of desert travel in the front and back sections. I’m not expert, but in the populated north the little-visited riches from the Roman era match those of Tunisia and Libya and get a good account. This will probably be the most genuinely useful section of this book that will help open up that area (security issues in the northeast notwithstanding).
As is fashionable, 4x4s get a jab on p.71 for creating too much dust which kills coral and so on, but you wonder how much dust Saharan tourists as passengers or drivers actually contribute compared to travelling or working locals? It’s a bit like the current debate on flying and is probably based on Andrew Goudie’s dust-raking ‘Toyotarization’ article that hit the broadsheets a couple of years ago. The LP has a point though, travelling at a slower pace is much more rewarding as long as you strike upon a good area. So it would have been nice to see more than a couple of paragraphs on the practicalities of choosing and undertaking a trek with camel support. That’s what an LP-er will be after down south which is divided mainly between Tam and Djanet. They don’t say much about travelling on the ground between the two which, following any number of routes, would the ultimate A to B tour of the south (as opposed to a loop).
Oddly, the fairly obscure Tassili d’Immidir gets a mention, but the more accessible and better known Tefedest does not. Maybe the author flew into In Salah and had to dig up a hinterland counterpart to Tam’s Hoggar and Djanet’s Tassili N’Ajjer. The problem is the three towns/regions don’t seem to hook up into a homogenous entity known as the Algerian Sahara. The book proposes what you can see out of each town rather than linking the three, perhaps because that’s the form with fly-in tours; the main way most will experience southern Algeria under the current restrictions.
Independent travellers will be frustrated or put off by these restrictions; fly-in Saharan tourists get what they’re given (in Algeria, as good as it gets) so the book won’t get much of a practical work out. Braver individuals can try and hire a driver/guide – it’s a good idea in the less-safe Roman north I reckon. This is where the guide pays off and for the background information alone, it’s worth buying to learn more about Algeria the country as opposed to the Algerian Sahara.
Al Qaida de Maghreb Islamique; Contrabande au nom de l’Islam Mohamed Mokeddem (Casbah, 2010)
I picked this up in Algiers airport for 1200D (€12), having seen it mentioned on the forum. It’s in French and I surprised myself with how much I understood; perhaps have being familiar with the subject helped. But I dare say I missed many of the books nuances so what follows is a bit vague.
It kicks off with an account of the origins of the notorious and now dead Abou Zeid, real name Mohamed Ghader (pictured on the cover), as an impoverished member of the Arabic Ghader clan living near Deb Deb, close to the Libyan border. Here he sets himself up as a successful smuggler of low value goods from Libya while getting married and divorced a few times. He’s painted as a rather withdrawn and even sociopathic figure who gets caught, goes to prison, gets radicalised and proceeds to rise up the ranks as the GSPC relocate to north Mali around the turn of the millennium. The book them jumps around chronologically, referring to recent kidnappings of the Spanish and Austrians (all listed here) as well as brief profiles of hostage negotiators and intermediaries like the influential Ould Limam Chafi from Burkina and Malian Tuareg warlords Iyaf Ag Ghali and the late Ibrahim Bahanga (the former of who is on the march again in 2012). It covers the establishment of the GSPC’s rearward base in northern Mali and gives an account of the 2003 event when 32 tourists were grabbed in the Tassili N’Ajjer in southeast Algeria.
There’s a little new information here and an odd lack of place names and other details such the enigmatic escape route to Mali and, a few months later, the subsequent flight of the gang to Chad with the ransom money where they were caught by Tubu rebels after a lethal exchange with the Chadian army. Court testimonies of a few captured kidnappers follow. Then it seems accounts of later abductions are repeated, seemingly lifted from the Ennahar website which the author ran. The origins of AQIM’s links with Al Qaida are also detailed.
Overall it comes across as a bit of a hastily completed book – not helped by the fact that a chunk of pages in my copy (with the original ‘dollar bills’ cover) are misplaced. I can’t say I learned that much new of interest, apart from the origins of Mohamed Ghader. A bit more research and detail in that vein may have been made a better read.
In a line: must have been a great adventure so should have been a better story…
An interest in pre-Islamic tombs of the Sahara lead me to Secrets of South Sahara (£15 on ebay), Mark Milburn’s account of a solo expedition ostensibly to the western Aïr mountains near Arlit in 1976-7 to study these monuments. I figured it would make a more digestible introduction to the subject than the many dry or technical academic studies easily found on the web which anyway tend to be localised and/or specialised.
I was familiar with the name and am sure I once read another book of his, but Secrets… seems to be the only one available. Mark Milburn was also mentioned in the Sahara Handbook (1980) as an explorer and scholar of Saharan pre-history, through in this book he never describes himself as a professional archeologist or academic, and comes across as merely a curious and well-read enthusiast. That may be incorrect or have changed since, as even today Milburn contributes many papers to publications in Spanish, German and French on the subject, including the now defunct Sahara Journal as recently as 2011. In fact you get the feeling he may have helped found SJ and even helped fund research in the Sahara. It’s hard to be sure about any of this as there’s little about [Dr] Mark Milburn on the web. He is perhaps a man of means.
As an account of desert travel just prior to the Golden Era when things got easier for a decade or so, the book itself was rather unsatisfying and inconsistent in pace. To be fair to the author, you get the feeling it was poorly edited by the American publishers who may have had little understanding of the subject or knowledge of the area. And there is no map! – always short-sighted with a book like this, so I’ve made a rough estimation on the left, based on his account. As you can see, he covered a fair amount of ground in Algeria and Niger.
The book starts with an overdetailed account of his descent from Germany to Spain to collect his desert gear stashed there. At times it reads like a diary and you’re left thinking, who cares what you had for breakfast or what letters you’ve received and from whom, let’s get on to the south Sahara. Already, an intense dissatisfaction with his vehicle is evident, as well as the people who service it, parts availability and so on – and it recurs right up to the very last paragraphs. It’s so bad he cannot even bear to utter the identity of his despised diesel, but from the photos it’s clearly a leaky-roofed 88” Land Rover. This scorn is perhaps more understandable when he admits that a previous expedition was curtailed when a gear lever snapped off at the base (a not-unknown flaw on Series IIIs). His was towed back (afaict), but you get the feeling that temperamentally Milburn and Land Rover should never have walked down the aisle. Anyway the mid-1970s were the ‘Leyland years’ – the subterranean nadir of British automobile manufacture when shoddily assembled ‘Monday-morning vehicles’ were made three days a week. The other two days they were on strike.
This preamble drags on into protracted to-ing and fro-ing across the Morocco-Algerian border before he finally gets allowed in, followed by much grumbling about Algerian inefficiencies and inconsistencies. The county was then in the midst of its paranoid, Soviet-backed episode which I too recall from my early travels there, a time when even photographing telegraph poles (a hobby of mine at the time) risked arrest. The Western Sahara war between Morocco and Algeria was just kicking off in late 1976 too, and there was some doubt that the Algerian border would be open at all, or that there was access to the Grand Sud.
One of 3 huge antennae tombs between Routes F4 and F7 in SW Morocco
On his travels he meets other tourists exploring the Sahara, and near In Salah teams up with a driver with similar interests. They set off east along the piste towards Amguid village to check out old tombs. The gnarly stage beyond Tin Habedra well was one of a few episodes where the author managed to evoke his majestic surroundings – elsewhere the grandeur passes un-noted. Once in Amguid, the two set about searching for tombs and paintings; MM himself treks up the escarpment for a better look over the many crescent tombs he finds below but here, as later, he admits difficulty in getting a good photo of an entire structure when alongside it at ground level. It’s something I’ve found myself; they look so much more impressive on Google Earth or from a drone (left).
From Amguid they nip down in the rain towards In Ecker where they encounter stragglers on the second Abidjan-Nice rally (precursor to the Paris-Dakar). Then a diversion west takes them out past Silet for more tomb and rock-art spotting around the twin peaks of Tioueine.
There are more shopping difficulties, intransigent clerks and tedious permit apps on the lean streets of Tam (also my impression in ’82), then it’s off to Niger. On the piste down to In Guezzam I was surprised to read of the mass of crescent tombs the keen-eyed Milburn was finding, seeing as this was a well travelled route and I’d never heard of such reports from others. Perhaps most are too focused on getting to the other side. Google sat didn’t uncover much either, apart from a collection 140km northwest of In Guezzam as well as a few more a few kilometres northwest of the border post.
In Arlit there’s more admin to unravel before stocking up and setting out with Bazo, a Targui guide, to explore a region to the northwest of town. You suspect this may be a place Henri Lhote (of Tassili frescoes fame – often cited in SoSS) had reported on in the same year, and which may have been a revised destination for Milburn once his planned visit to the Western Sahara got nixed by the impending war. Accompanied by the agreeable and sharp-eyed Bazo, all sorts of fascinating discoveries are made in this little-visited part of the Aïr; it is the core of the book.
Like others I know, Milburn seems to be driven by an urge to uncover and classify and by doing so, understand. He shows an indefatigable enthusiasm for tracking down and logging these structures while speculating modestly on their origin and meaning, hoping that some day some pros will come down and do a proper investigation (those days seem long gone). He then shoots off back to Tam, then returns south to spend time in the Laouni region north of In Guezzam with another guy and where, surprisingly, many more ancient discoveries are made among what you presume are the outcrops of Gara Eker. Then it’s back up to Tam and alone up to In Salah where he undertakes a dash over to Illizi via Amguid with some Germans, a stage that gets covered in a page or less. In Illizi they organise a camel recce of nearby Oued Djerat, the first Saharan rock art site to be well documented by Europeans back in the 1930s, and which Lhote had written about a year earlier. That done, MM manages to drive some 600km southwest to Hirafok in a day in his 88” because the route north of Illizi was closed and Tin Habedra to the west via Erg Tifernine was too sketchy alone. He then zips up to the Moroccan border, delighted to be out of Algeria, and a day or two later even more thrilled to be back in Spain. These last chapters end in such a rush when you think back to the protracted start of the book, you wonder if he’d suddenly exceeded a word count or ran out of time. A few weeks after writing this I was advised by someone who knows that: ‘…[SoSS] is deliberately misleading…’ as in, presumably, protecting new locations for later study.
So overall I was disappointed by what was an uneven read from someone who even then, had much experience of the Sahara, and has acquired much more since. It would be nice to think one day Mark Milburn may retire and write ‘Memoirs of a Saharan Tomb Grader’. Among Brits he is rare and even appears to have a lighthearted edge judging by the picture left where he suggests the direction Land Rover should have taken.
The regular grumbling about lazy Spanish, sloppy Moroccan mechanics and any number of slack-arsed or obstructive Algerians, and not least his 88″, all get in the way of what must have been a great adventure and so should have been a better story. I was surprised to be unsatisfied by Secrets of South Sahara as a travelogue, but learned enough about the enigma of pre-Islamic tombs (as well as their very profusion, once you start looking) to make it worth reading. It just reminds you how much more there is to see of the Sahara once you slow down and look closer.
The book has a few so-so photos; you’d think he must have come up with better; perhaps they were saved for other publications. The few graphics of tomb layouts are much better. The cover itself is a graphic of the intriguing ‘Air man with handbag’ which the author never saw, but mentioned that Lhote had found repeated over much of the Aïr. We ourselves found one at the popular site of Anakom (left) on the east side of the Aïr.
It was a full, two-day drive from Bit Outene at the end of our 12-day Immidir trek to the base camp east of Tam airport for our walk up to Assekrem (map below) and down again. On the way we overnighted at Erg Mehajibat (left) and stopped off for some wafers and fizz at Arak where we said goodbye to Mohamed our Immidir guide. As always, these are curt, brief affairs, but he knew we’d all had a great time with him and his crew who were now trekking back from Bit Outene with the caravan, about a week’s journey.
Just before Tam airport we were met by Ben Kada’s boss, another Mohamed, who had more juice and biscuits for us – a nice touch. He invited me into his pickup and within an hour we were dropped in a oued to meet the new Kel Ahaggar camel crew and set off scratching around for firewood which would be lean in the Hoggar. As expected, it was a freezing night at 1550m (left) and we set off next morning along a oued leading north towards a piton of rock alongside a massif, one of the many column-clad volcanic plugs which give this central core of the Hoggar – the Atakor – its distinctive look.
After an early lunch (left) we continued our climb onto the evocatively named Plateau of the Sky Wind, composed of basalt rubble the size of baby’s heads. As with many mountain treks, we gained our altitude in sudden steps rather than a gradual ascent. The Sky Wind in turn led to our camp for the night (left), a nest of tan, granite boulders overlooking the cone of Adrar Hedjrine. Compared to basalt, granite is a much friendlier rock to spend time on. Once our pitches were set and with little firewood, we hunkered down under blankets, solved problem of Middle Eastern politics once and for all, and waited for another great dinner.
We stayed on the granite next morning as Honi our guide led us up, over and down into a basin called The Palm (left), from which we scrambled back out to rest under a smooth-lipped cave adorned with pre-historic cattle images. I can’t say I recall seeing rock art painted on coarse granite before, but supposing it was at least 5000 years old, it had lasted well. I always understood that ochre and other pigments survived so well on sandstone because of a chemical bond with the rock surface – could it be the same on less fine and less porous granite? We continued our scramble and emerged on another ankle-testing basalt plateau at 2000m (left). Below us the caravan passed along an easier route and led us to a palmy spring of Tin Amelout in the Oued Amsa for lunch.
As we washed and waited to be fed, a group of camels including a mother and her calf wandered by. The young animal was duly snared, knocked down and trussed up with much commotion, and then branded with a bar. Initially I thought this was an opportunistic grab of an unbranded ‘cleanskin’, but it turned out the mother shared the brand of our caravan’s camels, so the crew were just marking what was theirs.
Back in the Immidir I’d mentioned to the group that our Ahaggar crew might be more tourist savvy or weary than the Ahnet bunch, because in the good years this route would have been frequently taken by tourists. Honi, his young son, brother and brother in law were old timers with the agency (unlike the Arak crew), but for some reason they remained a reserved and occasionally unfriendly bunch, as in sneering: ‘Are you looking for something?’ as I helped unpack a heavily-loaded camel at the end of a day. Even Tayub who was from around here, knew the crew and had done this route 40 times, was more reserved. The cause of all this perplexed us but was either low pay or just tourist fatigue and boredom. It certainly wasn’t us who, after a fortnight in the desert, were an undemanding and acclimatised group. As on previous occasions, it was clear that they got the gist when we talked about this [in English] and occasionally made an effort, but really their heart wasn’t in it, unlike the Ben Kada agency itself or the guys from Arak.
The odd staging, with early or very long lunches also took some getting used to. We concluded that we were following an easy, ‘starter’ circuit aimed at recently flown-in tourists, and not hardened desert vets like us. The glum crew, dearth of firewood, occasional rubbish and car tracks, plus the sometimes bleak surroundings took the edge off the walk, but as a well-bonded throng, we took it all without complaint because it sure was better to be walking out here in the Hoggar than most other things.
After lunch the guides hooked the mother and newly branded calf onto the caravan and tried to shoo away the other roaming camels who’d lost part of their troupe. Even that evening at our camp by a chilly guelta of Talmest, the herd stalked us from the ridge top, like Apache’s about to attack. At one point the young calf escaped its tether and made a dash for the ridge, but was chased and retrieved by Honi’s 18 year-old-son. As in the Immidir, the ways of camel trekking were being passed down to the next generation. With tourism crippled year by year, whether they’d get as much of a chance to put it into practise, like their aged fathers, was another matter.
Flowering Sodom AppleDesert truffle
Cooler, less arid and twice the elevation of the Immidir, there were a lot more flowers (left) up here in the Hoggar, even though we were told it had not rained since the summer. I don’t know what any of them were but we were told it was the reason the hobbled camels set off up the rubble clad hillsides for a nibble every chance they got. At one point, after burning some plastic rubbish he came across, Honi stopped at a bulge of sand and carefully dug up a dense mushroom which I realise now was a truffle (left). Within a few minutes he had a few more and pointed to where rabbits had been digging others up. Just as he said that, a big rabbit or hare broke its cover and dashed off. I’ve never seen one before out here. Grilled on coals, the mushies made a delicious snack in the lunch oued an hour or two later.
That night’s camp at around 2200 metres was a grubby oued just short of the Assekrem track. This time we scoured the vicinity for scrub to burn, and using the oued bank wall, managed to keep ourselves warm under blankets (left) until Tayub brought over the dinner. Once the tea was served, we all made a dash for our sleeping bags.
Jackals howled overnight but by lunchtime next day we were at a cleared patch of ground by a small ruin, just below the col of Assekrem. Clearly it wasn’t going to be too balmy here tonight so we figured we’d earned a night indoors up at the auberge on the pass – all the better positioned to strike out for sunset and sunrise duties, too.
Up on top (left and below) a rowdy bunch of Turkish tourists were also enjoying the spectacle. Some of the world’s well known touristic wonders can lose their magic or be over-rated, but for me, like Ayers Rock or Monument Valley, Assekrem is no less amazing, even if you’ve been here half a dozen times. As expected, the ordinary meal we got back down in the lodge underlined what a great job Tayub our cook was doing in feeding us off the back of a camel for weeks at a time.
We all bundled into one room while the Turks sang and hollered till the early hours – and then before 6am the dedicated hauled themselves up again to stake their claims on the dawn. I took off up the rock opposite the hermitage (the lump on the right of the picture, left) where most go, sat myself in an enclosure against the wind and fired the camera into the primeval scene emerging from the night. I can’t say this vantage point is any better then the usual one, except that you’ll probably be alone.
After brekkie in the lodge, we traipsed back down to the caravan camp as arranged, but they were having a slow morning and the camels were still all over the mountainside (right), looking for those flowers. Once they were eventually brought in and loaded, we backtracked from Assekrem and set off for the three day descent, along a steep valley peppered with more flowers. Narrow clefts led over thick pools of ice, and out onto a plain we passed a nomad camp. As the day ended we set down in another oued with the Atakor’s spires behind us (left) for another freezing night mitigated by a bush scrub fire. A changeable wind rose after sunset and by 4am it was howling a gale. The empty tent I was using as a windbreak flapped remorselessly, making a racket; in future I’d be better off just huddling down under a quiet blanket like the nomads.
The secret of a good group is that they remain cheerful even after a grim night where few had slept well. Some had crawled in to share tents, and others had their tents snap over them, making an even worse din. Breakfast was delivered with stuff flying past and we then set off down the valley. Soon we joined the main, eastern arm of the car track to Assekrem which we followed briefly and then turned off at the twin ‘Mac D’s’ arches for the guelta at Afilal.
I’d never stopped here before. I think I tried to once but was shooed away by the army. Even then, I assumed it would be a grubby, rubbish-strewn dump, especially if army were camped nearby. In fact the Ahaggar national park guardian based there in an old portacabin was thrilled to see tourists and grabbed a photo with us for his next newsletter while behind us volunteers (or possibly miscreants) lethargically collected rubbish scattered around the main guelta. In fact there’s a lot more to Afilal than that waterhole and with Tayub and the lunch camel alongside, we followed the source downstream past trickling waterfalls, deep green pools and smooth, flood-washed granite until we found a wind free corner for another great salad lunch. I’ve never seen so much running water in the Sahara.
That afternoon was one of the best of the walk, not least because we put in a good 15 clicks after lunch. We followed the Afilal valley until it petered out and then crawled over low ridges into adjacent valleys and basins separated by more hills. Away from the grim basalt plateaux, we explored the granite ranges, passing a cobbled stone circle (left) just like the one we saw in Tadant oued, some 200km east of here at the tail end of SEQ in 2006. What they are exactly is still a mystery. A tomb is the most obvious answer, as these are the structures which most commonly survive, but most tombs have a focal point like a mound; this was just a very finely set flat ring of stones. It may just have been a pilot’s marker like this, but they are usually much bigger and out on the plain. Nearby, less well made examples had broken up over the years and in a nearby guelta, a flood-carved basalt pavement (below) added a natural wonder to the scene.
The caravan had taken a more direct route, but Honi was unsure where they had made camp. He crissed crossed the terrain, looking for tracks just we were beginning to creak a bit after hours of walking. Eventually we backtracked (see the map track) and staggered into another perfect camp in a oued set among beige granite boulders. Here we managed to scrape together enough acacia to encircle a fire ahead of our last day of trekking. That night it was probably minus 5.
Another great morning led us through the boulders to Akar Akar mountain to cross over the car track and get back inside the Hoggar ‘loop’. Steve had chosen to ride a camel that morning, little did he know he would be sat on the acacia plank till lunchtime, but when we caught him up he was fine. To the south lines of cones marched across the horizon in the blue haze and by mid-afternoon one more basalt rubble ascent and descent brought us above the last oued camp near the distinctive cone of Adaouda where Patrick found a fine Tuareg dagger while looking for fire wood.
I’d long wanted to try this walk and the Hoggar trek had passed through some amazing country side. But we couldn’t help compare it with the wild Immidir we’d just visited where the most conspicuous signs of man were usually 6000-year-old tombs. Tayub kept us as well fed as before, but the grumpy crew too took the edge off the experience and the sun rising or dropping over Assekrem is no less amazing for having driven up there so I’m not sure I’d do this trek again.
So, after 200 miles walking and nearly three weeks of bush camping, all that remained was a long overdue hose down at Loukmane’s house in Tam, followed by a haircut, some interneting, shopping (left) and a non-goat based feed at a resto in town. The night plane flew us back to Algiers via Djanet which gave us an extended chance to doze. A few hours later we were all on our way home while I conjured up plans for next time.
From the centre spiralling out anti-clockwise: RobUK, Rob, Diane, Hannah, Patrick, Mike, Steve (on top), Honi (below).
Sahara Overland 