Saharan Margins
by John Stuart Clark
Friends were impressed, sort of. When asked if I was taking a winter break, they got a smile and the reply, "I'm off to the Sahara."
"What, on one of those four-wheel drive safaris?"
"Nope. On me bike."
As jaws thudded to the ground, I assured them I was not trans-navigating the
great emptiness, just going for a nosy round one corner of it, curious to see,
smell and hear what the mother of all deserts is like. ('Sahara' is a derivation
of the Arabic word 'sahra', meaning 'desert'.)
"On a bicycle? Camping?"
About then, they recommended counselling. I agreed, sand dunes are stubbornly
resistant to the forward motion of thin tyres powered by human muscle. It is
also true that most pedals across the Sahara belong to expeditions undertaken
by extremely together or extremely reckless cycle explorers, neither of which
was an appropriate description for my sedate approach to touring.
I bluffed it out, conscious I was riding into the unknown, confident I would
do nothing stupid, satisfied I had prepared myself for a hairy time.
Fundamentalists in Algeria ruled out entry into the largest slab of the Sahara
in North Africa. I had enough to contend with without bringing politics into
the equation, so Lybia and Egypt also fell by the way. To reach the Moroccan
desert involves first crossing the Atlas Mountains, and states south of the
25th parallel required all sorts of visas and jabs I hadn't the time or money
for.
Tunisia, however, offered cheap flights, easy access to the Grand Erg Occidental
(one of the vast seas of sand dunes) and the Chott El Djerid, a large salt lake
bordered with palmeries and oases, dry for at least ten months of the year.
In the 14th century this wasteland swallowed up thousands of camels and their
attendants who strayed from the trail marked with palm stumps. I had no wish
to join them, but to experience such a forbidding place was a must.
Tunisia is also possibly the friendliest country in the Arab world, an important
factor when crossing an alien landscape following off-road (piste) routes that
feature on your map and nobody else's. A rapid scan of discrepancies between
cartographic publishers at Standfords London map shop indicated local help was
going to be crucial to staying on course, and not wandering onto the thin salt
crust of the chott.
From the Mediterranean coast to the desert is a steady slog in winter. Warm
south westerlies skim across the Sahara, gently squeezing between the Jabel
Tebaga and the foothills of the Dorsale mountains. They are unstinting, grow
stronger in the afternoon, then die as you crawl into your sleeping bag and
die. (Mohammed's Law!)
Under wheel the tarmac was coarse but okay, when it was there. When it more
often than not wasn't, passing two-stroke scooters kicked up enough dust to
transform me into a powder puff drag queen, but it was a ride worth tackling.
There is a night train that will whisk you blind into Gafsa, the gateway to
the desert, but I needed a couple of days to acclimatise.
It wasn't the weather which, during a winter's day, ranges between a warm British
spring and a cool summer. It wasn't the money, the culture, the food, or the
language (French and Arabic). It was the desire to travel towards the desert,
to see its margins and discover how the arid wilderness of sand dunes emerges
from the dry fertile farming country of the coastal plain - how the Mediterranean
mutates into the African.
On the map there were just six communities between Sfax and Gafsa, a distance
of 169 kilometres. On the ground there were that many in the first 25 kms -
small farming settlements, the grandest encompassing little more than a mosque,
cafe, store and a handful of homes, all whitewashed. As I rode west, the distance
separating villages grew in proportion to the amount of dust whipped up by the
ubiquitous 'put-puts'. Between each, parade grounds of olive groves disappeared
over the horizon, the gap between ranks of gnarled trees growing at an equivalent
rate.
Land was becoming poor and cheap the closer I travelled to the desert. By the
time I creaked into Gafsa, I was riding through scrub - slim pickings for the
few flocks of lop-eared sheep that were now the sole indicators of landuse.
Signs of human habitation had whittled down to a rare adobe dwelling seen through
binoculars, with maybe a donkey enclosure woven from olive tree prunings and
palm fronds. Now and again, out of nowhere, a child appeared beside the road
to gawp, or a snarling dog gave chase. My Dog Dazzler saw heavy action.
Aside from sand, sky and space, the only element of nature that seemed to increase
in the transition from dry to parched landscapes were the birds. The desolate
borders of the Sahara are home to a baffling variety of larks and wheatears,
most noticeably the crested larks that hopped onto the road to check me out,
ran in front for a few seconds, then bogged off for a snack. Holes in the veld
no doubt led to the Shangri-Las of gerbils, lizards and desert rats, but I saw
none of them.
A skulking prairie fox gave me a wide berth one evening, and left its calling
card during the night. Except for encapsulated in key fobs at souvenir grottoes,
I encountered no scorpions, spiders, mosquitoes or snakes. Had it not been for
the herd of camels I spied in the distance, grazing in the flood plain of the
Oued El Melah, it could have been a Spanish plain. My first night wild camping
in the desert it had the audacity to rain.
Rumbling away from Metlaoui, I was beginning to think the white sands that graced
so many tourist posters were somewhere way down south. Suddenly the road plunged
through less than a hundred meters. From the crest it ran straight as an arrow
into the heat haze of infinity. Far off, tufts of stubble were the crownings
of date palms and the oasis where a hotel bed awaited. A car pulled over and
an Arab teacher of French handed me a bottle of orange juice. "Tres courageux,"
he kept repeating, as I pointed to my goal, "Tres courageux."
So far the journey had been plain sailing. Yes, I had been hassled by kids and
had the odd run-in with a drunk Lothario or miserable bastard, but when every
other vehicle pips an 'Assalama' ('Hello'), when folks never tire of waving
and shouting 'Bonsoir' before midday, it was hard to feel anything other than
at ease in the country.
The Tunisians are not used to free-range travellers, particularly cyclists.
They can't imagine why anybody wouldn't want to be zapped from one 'touristique
zone' to another by convoys of white 4x4s. I was dogged by their dust clouds
for the duration of my sojourn in the desert, and discovered I had become a
sight of special scientific interest to package trippers who really thought
I was out on a limb. People do get stranded and die out here, but they are always
ill prepared motorists.
At a sign pointing to water (which wasn't there), I posed for a self portrait
with an up-turned bidon. A screech of brakes followed by billowing dust, and
a gaggle of blotchy Germans were seen rooting through their white charger for
bottles of mineral water. I was fine, I explained, but thank you. In fact I
was barely ten minutes from a village, a troglodyte village where the locals
still live underground, but they had totally missed it in their hurry to hit
the next hot spot.
The oases of Tozeur and Nefta are both sizable towns and far from the stereotype
of three date palms and a Berber tent pitched beside a puddle. Set within a
depression, Nefta's oasis is particularly stunning, but it is the great chott
they reside beside that deflects the independent traveller's attention. Like
a big damp depression in an endless Mablethorpe beach, the evaporated salt lake
extends to a horizon that belies the earth's curvature.
I crossed on a tarmac causeway laid by the army - 78 kms of seminal cycling
that the convoys rattled off in half an hour, never tasting the salt in the
air or testing the quicksand. Here I ran into Brazilian Luiz Simoes, one of
the world's most respected wilderness cyclists, and joined his party of six
Spanish compadres for a few days.
They weren't the first foreign cyclists I had encountered. I caught sight of
a German bloke in Tozeur on a loaded tandem with a six year old 'stoker' using
kiddi-cranks, and his teeny bopper daughter on a solo. Then there were the three
dayglow lycra clad Italians we saw coming from 250 kms away, and the English
couple dressed like they were nipping down the beer-off. But that was all. Tunisia
has yet to be discovered for the cycling treat it is.
Our route out of Kebili was anybody's guess. Cross referencing maps with the
Spaniards, the Italians and the British, no two charted the same rough roads.
There were three possibilities, all pistes, none likely to be waymarked. We
were heading into the ergs of the Occidental, beyond the oases, where the only
vegetation is rows of palm fronds, pushed into the ridges of dunes to prevent
windblown sand obliterating the track.
Sand as fine as salt is not deterred by lines of dead leaves. It found its way
into orifices we didnŐt know we had. To lubricate a bike with anything other
than wax would have been folly. And to expect it wouldn't find a way to wipe
out the frail piste was wishful thinking. Ten kilometres out of Blidet it had
overwhelmed an entire village, the jumble of flat roofs peaking out of the desert
like recumbent headstones.
Though nobody said as much, it was reassuring to have teamed up with Luiz for
the crossing. He is of the 'extremely together' variety of adventurer, having
pedalled across the Sahara on a route where watering holes are more than 400
kilometres apart. Out here we only needed two consecutive days supply, but clearly
he wallowed in the beauty of this corner of Africa's vast emptiness as much
as the novices did.
Without him, some might have turned back where the first dunes buried the piste.
There is no riding through this stuff, no matter how fat your tyres are, but
Luiz pushed on, experience telling him that somewhere on the other side the
firm track continued. Compass skills are essential in this featureless wasteland
(which the Spanish relied on the Brit for!) and binos are useful, but a wandering
Berber who knows where he is is definitely Mohammed sent.
The desert is subtle and baffling, with few landmarks and none that appear on
any map. For those of us from temperate climes, travelling through such an extraordinary
environment can be a mystical experience. It is a disarming vacuum, seemingly
benign and very romantic. But come tea time, we come into our own, as temperatures
plummet and camel dung camp fires become compulsory. On a clear night, the canopy
of stars is awesome and the silence creepy. By 5:00 am, the temperatures are
sub-zero.
It is necessary to carry clothing and sleeping bags for four seasons. Add water
and food, and you are riding a reluctant pack horse unhappy with its footing.
Accept the occasional bout of pushing, and the cycling is remarkably easy -
flat and slippery, a lot like riding through snow. Here and there, the surface
of the pistes are corrugated by infuriating ripples across the track called
'washboarding'. To smooth the journey, a car needs to cross at a constant 70
km/h. A cyclist just suffers, more so if they are riding a standard tourer.
Fortunately stretches of washboarding are short and limited to popular 4x4 routes
we tried to steer clear of.
In the south west corner of Tunisia, the Sahara does not demand that you load
up your steed with camping gear. On many routes, hotel accommodation is rarely
further than a day away, but until you have slept amongst the dunes, the palms,
the Berber flocks, you haven't begun to experience the
full drama of the desert's schizophrenia. This place is potentially lethal,
but the only way to make sense of the extreme landscape and climate is to immerse
yourself in it.
I did the usual tourist things. I ticked off the camel ride and the souks, visited
the locations where George Lucas filmed Star Wars , and dug down for sand roses.
None were a patch on the ride across the chott or my first sighting of the Grand
Erg Occidental, when nine desert-crazed adults ditched their bikes and ran off
to play in the dunes like kids at the seaside. Time, sand and the Algerian border
prevented my exploring deeper into the wilderness but, as an introduction to
desert riding, this highly accessible bulge of the Sahara must be hard to beat.
Wheeling my sand crusted machine into Monastir airport at the end of the trip,
a security guard became curious about what I had done and where I had been.
Though it was his country, he was as impressed as my friends back at home. "Tres
courageux," he said (it was becoming a mantra) as he planted a kiss on
both my cheeks.
Courageous? I think not. Riding away from Manchester airport into the insanity
of a British rush-hour. Now that takes courage.
How
to get there Maps Guidebooks Recommendations Be totally self sufficient for bike repairs and carry spare spokes. Tunisia is full of old juggernauts and cycle mechanics who can do everything. Few have the tools to fit modern European bikes but all wield a mean hammer and chisel! Equip yourself with a Dog Dazzler, compass and a tooth or shaving brush for preventing a build up of sand on the bike. Local children are adept at whipping stuff from under bugees and out of rear pannier side pockets. Seal with gaffa tape and keep baggage tidy. |
© John Stuart Clark