

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.