Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling throughout Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts below.

We arrived in Algiers in late October 1976, a few days after the government had painted over its French-language street signs. Only the Arabic remained, even at the visitor center. Plenty of locals were befuddled; we couldn’t find a thing. I wrote in my journal that “Algiers is big and white-buildinged and teeming with people, all stacked up, one upon the other, on steep hills above the port. We don’t like it much.”

Here’s what we did like: Spending a morning at a travel agency arranging a trip to Djanet, an ancient oasis city surrounded by geological wonders and neolithic cave paintings. Our dream to drive across the Sahara had been dashed, yes, but we could still see some of the great desert’s finest sights.

This adventure involved our driving 180 miles south to Ghardaia and then taking a small plane another 900 miles deep into the Sahara. It wasn’t easy. We arrived in Ghardaia only to be told that Djanet was closed to tourists. The next day’s officials said no, it wasn’t closed, but we probably wouldn’t get on the plane because reservations made in Algiers are not accepted in Ghardaia, though we could come and see if we wanted to. We came. The plane was 11 hours late. Mike remarked (to me) that if Air Zaire had been Air Peut-etre (air perhaps), then Air Algerie was Air Peut-etre Non.

Miraculously, we made it. “31 October, Djanet. We’ve arrived! And it‘s absolutely lunar. We got off the plane into a thick gold-orange stillness; everything felt muffled. I looked back at Mike as he came down the rickety steps. He was blinking and then pausing and looking all about, wide-eyed, stunned.

“The drive into town by Land Rover was eerie. We were in the back, with a tarp over us for sand protection, so we could see only out the rear, through the veil of sand kicked up. Everything we saw, we saw through swirling sands: The square, thick-walled mud buildings, the date palms and all the men with their turbans and robes and swathed faces. Now we’re in a sort of straw hut with bright striped blankets draped all over, to keep the sand out — sort of. The AMOUNT of sand is astounding. It is everywhere. It is thick in the streets, soft under our feet as we walk.”

2 November, Tamrit, Tassili: “We’ve arrived at our first camp, after several hours of hiking through astonishing rock formations.

“On gentler slopes, the rocks were seamed like quilts, from long-ago rivulets of rainwater. As we neared the camping site, we came to fluted rock formations like those in Bryce, but rounder.

“We’re situated here in their shade now. The weather is perfect and the sky a brilliant blue. Half an hour ago we saw a wizened old Tuareg man out with his three hobbled camels.”

3 November, Safar, Tassili. “Our guide and our donkey tender are sleeping in the sun, and Mike is making coffee. Carter is president-elect, and I am happy indeed. We woke up for long stretches, beginning at midnight last night, to listen. We listened through breakfast and packing the donkeys, and we carried the radio with us for this morning’s hike, in the Pende bag, the antenna sticking way above our heads. At 8:30, Mississippi pushed Carter over 270. We were gazing at a lovely painting of a cow and calf as Carter gave his brief acceptance speech. The future seems one of possibility, if not surely of promise, and I am excited at the prospect of watching the new developments.

“The paintings are delicate and particularly interesting in what they say about this area long ago. The people appear to have been herders of fine cattle. And there were dogs, large wild cats, giraffes and camels.

“If anything, these fascinating tales of the ancients are overshadowed by the countryside, which is magical. Here, rock is everything. This is not to say that the landscape is unvaried, but that the rock is so versatile. Sometimes the rock is in brown columns that you would swear are mud — fat and thick, with mud’s slick, dull sheen and with thin waists as if spun on a potter’s wheel. Sometimes they’re harder-looking and deeper brown with golden crust like raisins going to sugar. Sometimes they’re like sheaves of wheat or like the pages of a slightly opened book. Sometimes the rocks show brown-orange beneath a cracked black exterior, like a baked spice cake. Their silhouettes, orange against deep blue sky or black against silver moonlight, look like a serrated knife or (closer up), a big-city skyline.

“There was also a marvelous canyon, reminiscent of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, only made grander by the majesty of the landscape around it.

“Most of the paintings are found where semicircular chunks fell out of vast boulder columns and left a rounded overhang. The effect of this is an immense gaping mouth with a dropped lower lip. And it is in this kind of shelter that we found the best preserved paintings.

“The figures have such delicacy and grace, their movement so clearly though so simply implied. They run and pull back bows and prod cattle and kneel with one leg under and the other out. These painters are prehistoric El Greco’s, choosing elongated limbs for their thin humans, and for their animals as well. Some of the cattle, especially, are fine, with their lazy-strong movements and the giraffes too in their gangly grace.

“We call our guide Euell Gibbons because he knows the plants so well, and when he saw how interested we were in them, he began to share his knowledge. We’ve picked grasses for a fine sugared tea, and full, flat leaves that crunch and melt like an ice shaving in the mouth and taste of lemon. We’ve found leaves that stick to our clothes like Velcro and others that are spiked like a grasshopper leg. We’ve heard which plants camels eat, smelled various bouquets, and early this morning we crunched on the tiny leaves of a plant that Euell said would help settle our stomachs. Maybe. But the bitter taste was so unsettling to my burning lips and tongue that I had to spit for half an hour to soothe them.”

5 November. “Today’s morning sand walk was easier because it rained last night. It does rain in the desert — pretty much, it seems. We had to pull our bedding in close to our knees and throw a poncho over it, because the wind blew the rain in under our overhanging cliffs.”

6 November, back in Djanet. “I’ve had my cold shower and am now detached enough to look back in utter joy at another of our greatest adventures. Tassili ranks up there with Okavango and the Ruwenzoris as unimaginably wild, beautiful and bracing experiences.”

Now only a brief visit to Tunisia stood between us and the end of our Africa days.

Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts (for free) below.

Getting Miles (and us) onto a train from Mali to Dakar and a boat to Casablanca was a trial. But the delight in our travels surely did return when we hit Morocco.

I wrote my father from Marrakech on October 14, 1976: “Oh how lovely Morocco is! In Casablanca we bought beautiful local roses and grapes and apples at a market and headed for the highlands. Halfway to Marrakech we caught our breath at the majestic swath of mountains etched across the sky — the snowy Atlas range.

“Then Marrakech — Marrakech of the orange groves and olive trees, golden buildings and cool October air under a warm sun — a sun to seek out rather than to hide from. In the medina market we strolled, on the evening of our arrival, appreciating the leatherwork and blankets but buying only some of those luscious olives arrayed around the seller in his wooden stall: heaped vats of green, black, golden and rosy pink olives. And next to him the date-and-nut man, engulfed by mounds of shelled almonds, pecans, peanuts, figs strung like popcorn and dates, dates, dates.

“We slept in a real live campground, waking in the shade of an olive tree and heading back to the market to buy a blanket because — oh! Wonderful to say — we were cold! Then today, the most striking scenery, crossing the Atlas range, the driest I’ve ever seen, with fertile valleys green with mint, and the massive dry bulk of 11,000-foot peaks towering over them. A fine impressive pass (with a snow barrier) and then, sooner than we knew, the desert. At sunset, glowing pink so I could hardly see to drive. We’re camped out in it now, the winds shaking the car as we sip hot chocolate.”

The next day we drove up into the astonishing Todra Gorge. “We woke up in our snug, handsomely blanketed bed in this kingly canyon, then drove along wonderful western-rugged lands, down a particularly lush valley.

“Then we headed toward the oasis town of Erfoud, passing our first dunes, where we set up camp. We showered, cut Mike’s hair and settled in. The red-golden sands were breathtaking in the sunset. And just now we’ve been looking at the splendid skies: the richest view I’ve ever seen of the Milky Way and old familiar constellations, including Orion — just the belt, lying right above the horizon: Orion of our ski trips, Orion of the northern hemisphere wintertime!”

Then 19 October, parked “in a wonderful evergreen forest just out of Azrou. In the space of a week, we have seen more variety in scenery than I can recall ever having seen. From the bustling port city of Casablanca to farm and vineyard country to Marrakesh the magical, across a bleak high-mountain pass into a crusty dirt-gravel desert, into a magnificent canyon, through lovely date-palm-oasis country, back up through massive gorges, across another dry pass, into evergreen trees and a real ski area, a third pass and now this lovely forested mountain resort country.

“Yesterday several times we saw Bedouin tents pitched in the mountain plains. Today, we will pick up our repaired tire, then drive along a Michelin-green road toward Fez.”

Later the same day, I continued the letter: “We are camped again in the shade of olive trees. This morning’s drive was lovely — through Ifrane. a delightful mountain resort, where we stopped at a patisserie to sit outdoors with tea and look at all the townfolk who came for the French baguettes, which they call flutes here, and the round Kesra bread, which we’ve been buying for about a dinar a delicious loaf.

“Then we drove down through another lovely mountain town full of parks and orange-tile roofs and are now in the process of showering and settling in, preparing to see Fez. Oh, the warm sun, the cool air, the green hills, the golden leaves and deep blue, cloud-fluffy sky.”

From my journal on 23 October: “We’d been told that Fez’s old town is incredible, and it’s true: Miles and miles of stone passageways, shops, houses, door after door with little brass hand-shaped knockers. We spent a fun afternoon and evening there. On the whole though, I’ll take Marrakech, where we twice ate shish kebabs in the nighttime square with musicians performing about us, the merchants hold sway amid their multi-colored offerings and the mountains are always in the background. In any case, Morocco is a favorite country now, a land packed absolutely full of good things.

“We came into Algeria yesterday evening. Our traveling today took us through farming country — mainly vineyards, and the vineyards were all fall-colored. We passed through Tlemcen and saw a fine old Moorish tower in ruins. Along the road we bought our sink-full of purple grapes, sweet as can be, for one dinar. When we eat them, our hands turn winey red. The grapes themselves are a kind of frosted blue — like blueberries.

“The border crossing was unobjectionable. On the Algerian side, we changed money and bought 21 days of insurance in addition to the usual formalities. Funny, both sides asked if we had ‘anything special to declare…? Hashish?’

“We’re on the Mediterranean now — a long way from Kinshasa! Tomorrow’s drive is along another road deemed beautiful by Michelin. When I mentioned to a policeman that we planned to take this road because we had heard it was lovely, he said, ‘Oh yes, by all means, there are many refineries there.’ Fortunately the refineries now are behind us.

“We got up at 1:30 last night to hear the final presidential debate. I liked Carter’s comments on the environment, the cities, energy policy and race relations. Neither man is inspiring, but Ford is worse than wooden. He sounds like a robot programmed to inarticulate.

“I enjoyed the drive yesterday. We talked about interesting subjects, among them what would happen if one of the great powers suddenly decided to disarm unilaterally. What are the goals of the space program, and do they justify expenditure levels? And what are our own hopes for America? Among mine were many things which fit under a quality-of-life banner: flexibility of working arrangements — i.e., shorter work week, two-people-on-one job, more imaginative half-time options; increased childcare availability and quality; attention to the arts, their support and development; an increase in the lands set aside in national parks, forests, wilderness areas; more city and state parks; a network of bike paths and creative attention to modern transit methods to cut down on reliance on autos; a real national examination of what we want our educational system to be.”

We seem to have been re-engaging with the world we’d be returning to. But there were Africa days still to come. Algiers was next — and then a glorious trip back down into the Sahara. We would fulfill a piece of that original dream, after all.

Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts (for free) on this site.

From my journal: “Thursday, 21 September 1976, God-knows-where, Mali: Yesterday afternoon, we suddenly found ourselves without a horn — and without a battery. Absolutely dead. We pulled over. Got out the books, checked the fan belt and the electrical system connections. Our hydrometer, bought in South Africa. had busted in Kinshasa — no way to check the battery. Our battery head cleaner brush, also bought in South Africa, had been lost, and we have searched in vain the last several cities for baking powder to clean the battery. We had noticed that our supplementary battery has been dying, so we had unhooked it yesterday morning, and we found water under it.

“Now we figure it must have something to do with the generator failing to charge either one. We’ve been reading all we can but we can’t determine whether it would hurt a faulty generator if we just push start and try to drive to Bamako (150 kms at least). We’ve cleaned the battery as well as we can — difficult because it’s too large for its location, since it’s oversized — none of the right size having been available. So here we are, it’s hot as hell and there are tsetse flies all over. We’re both badly bitten from yesterday. And we’re so isolated that I don’t know how we would find anyone to help push start us.”

This was just one of a long string of mechanical difficulties that would dog us as we drove toward Bamako. We’d patch one thing and another thing would go bust, often at some desolate spot with no help available.

Finally, one evening, we decided to take stock. We sat down and made a chart: Dakar vs. The Desert. Alas, The Desert lost. All those months of preparation, all those sandladders and jerry cans for fuel and water, everything stored just so in our bus designed for this, everything hauled all these miles. We knew we would survive a Sahara crossing; the rules of the road (or, in this case, track) meant someone would pick us up and haul us north. But there would be no hauling Miles. Leaving him in the dunes would mean losing not just our transport but also our room and board for the weeks to come in North Africa and then the months we planned to spend in Europe.

The decision was heartbreaking, but it was clear: We must put the bus (and us) on a freight train from Bamako to Dakar, and then onto a French packet boat to Casablanca.

In Bamako, we rushed from post office to bank, tourist office, a security firm and shops of all kinds, gathering information and supplies. We sold off the jerry cans. We were ready to head west.

But first, we had one more dream to fulfill in Mali. As we ran all those errands, a mechanic had gotten Miles running smoothly again (at least for the moment). Now we would visit the mysterious Dogon civilization. In a letter to my brother, I wrote: “We had a great adventure today here in this godforsaken, dried-out, bug-infested country. We drove across 100 kms. of miserable road — sometimes piles of stones marked the route across boulders just like a mountain trail — to the town of Songha. From there, we set off to see the Dogon cliff-dwellers — an area that feels like Mesa Verde come alive. We walked about 9 miles in far-west-looking country of red rocks and scruffy plants with mesas in the distance. We descended a great escarpment, scooting on all fours down boulders and teetering scarily down large notched tree branches serving as staircases. As the valley below appeared, we saw our first village: Ireli, looking like a baked-mud fairyland, with straw roofs whose peaks reached high above little square granaries, and with rock walls making separate family and closures.

“Some of the houses are built into the lower cliffs, and among these were a few whose outer edges were supported by great forked branches. All up in the cliffs — really in every nook and cranny — are the dwellings left hundreds of years ago by Pygmies who preceded the Dogon people, who now use many of the ancient buildings as granaries. There they store the millet that seems to be growing everywhere out of dry sand and must be practically the only thing these people eat. The village was large (we figured maybe 500 people) and it was noisy in its echoes against the huge cliff wall, though we saw very few people outside. Our guide said most were indoors, which is unusual for Africa, but here they don’t have much in the way of yards.

“We did see old men sitting in ‘palaver’ huts in Ireli and in the four other villages we passed through. These huts are open-air and roofed by at least 6 feet of millet stalks stacked in alternating layers to provide cool and shade, and they have big snakes carved over the one mud support wall. Once, as we sat resting, we saw children playing on one of the big boulders, sliding quickly down the smooth tilted surface. We got a view from above of the last of the villages, as we rested by a small waterfall in the shade of kingly baobab trees with their funny fruits hanging heavily on long stems.”

This would be the last of our many grand adventures in sub-Saharan Africa. It had been a hundred days since we left Kinshasa, following our two years living there. It would be more than a week before we’d get ourselves aboard the boat in Dakar. But there‘d be nothing about that upcoming period that we‘d recall with pleasure. Complexities and disappointments and discomforts and unpredictabilities had accompanied all our travels in Africa, but never had the bad outweighed the good.

Until that week.

After a couple of days of “you can/you can’t,” “get this permit from that office/that office is closed until tomorrow,” “there is no certainty about departure times,” etc., we at last got us all onto the train. Which meant three days of rocking and rolling in Miles on a flatcar and sitting for hours, often without moving, in the worst heat we’d ever felt, with no protection from biting bugs or blazing sun. Finally we made it to Dakar — and two more days of “can/can’t/come back tomorrow/go to this-no-that agency” — simply to get Miles off the train. Followed by two more days with the auto-loading people and the insurance people and the diplomatic officials, until finally we boarded the ship. Whose stabilizing bar wasn’t performing properly. The foul results of that, I will spare you.

HOWEVER — we got to stroll around lovely Las Palmas during a brief Canary Islands stop. Casablanca would soon come into view. All of North Africa’s pleasures awaited us.

The delight was about to return.