THE SALT ROAD
I thought it was about time I posted some of the research photos I took during my Sahara trip in March: you can find them on this site under Inspiration; or at flickr.com. The mini-album is called The Salt Road, and if like me you love the serene beauty of the desert, I hope you will enjoy these photos. You can go straight in by pasting this address: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22646443@N06/
It was a truly inspirational trip, but also at times alarming, not least for the fact that the Great Desert starts only a day-and-a-half's drive away from our village of Tafraout; which explains those days we sometimes endure when desert winds swirl over the town, enveloping everything in a cloud of sand, days when even the sheep and goats take cover and everyone stays indoors.
I learned a great deal on this desert trek, which was at times (as any proper adventure should be) highly uncomfortable -- riding a camel for any distance takes some practice and fortitude; sand gets in everything, and I do mean everything; temperatures soar and plummet; sleeping in a bivouac is not everyone's idea of luxury -- but the rewards were immeasurable. I've never seen so many stars in my life, except perhaps while sleeping out in Desolation Wilderness in northern California, watching them wheel overhead; on the Sahara, though, the desert peoples have entirely different names for the constellations, drawing on their own mythologies and cosmology, and everyday experiences. You'll find the Scorpion and the Dragon where we see Orion and Cassiopeia, the Seven Daughters of the Night which we know as the Pleiades.
Camels are fascinating creatures (though you have to be wary of their poisonous bite and their tendency to spit pure stomach bile); you end up admiring their stamina and patience, their remarkable adaptability to different terrains. One considerable lesson learned was that the Sahara is a vast, vast wilderness of many different characters. Rock plateaus, sharp stony wastelands that stretch for mile on endless mile, scrubland dotted with acacia and tamarisk, vibant oases, dry river beds snaking across the landscape; and then the great ergs, the sand-seas which are at once the most beautiful and most hostile of Earth's wildernesses.
We had deliberately avoided the heavily-touristed area of Merzouga, where David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia was filmed, opting instead for the lesser known and wilder area area of the Moroccan Sahara due south of Foum-Zguid, the Ch'gaga. The visit was spoiled only by the area of the desert close to the Algerian border where quad-bikers and day-trippers treat the Sahara with no degree of respect, regarding it as no more than a big beach or pleasure park. They forget where they are as they churn up the sand with blithe oblivion, frightening the camels that pass in their age-old silence, destroying the serenity of the place. We came upon one group of trippers whose 4x4 had gone off-piste and jarred a passenger's spine so badly a disc had been displaced. Very painful. They asked if we had a satellite phone. We didn't. They were desperate to call the rescue services, order a helicopter in order to get their wounded compatriot to a hospital. Our guide laughed hollowly. There are no rescue services. And, despite what you may have seen in the film Babel, there are no helicopters. Nearest city? Marrakech, 6 hours' hard drive away: bad luck. There was an army checkpoint about 40 minutes' drive away back along the desert pistes: that was their best and only chance. We rode on, sobered. We were a very long way away from safety and civilization; but then, that was the whole point of our visit.
Now, some months later, the landscapes are still vibrantly alive in my head as I write THE SALT ROAD, a story that like the desert pistes, snakes back and forth between the medieval nomadic life of the Tuaregs and modern 'civilization'. 80,000 words written, and I'm maybe halfway. It's a long one, a proper epic; but the story spans millennia, so that's not a short tale to tell!
