8. Algeria 1 - Escorts to the Desert

Day 32, May 15th.  Oran.  24-29C, sunny

It’s nearly 10am.  We emerge from our little metal box and walk rather wobblily to the outside deck of our ship, squinting like moles exposed to the sunlight.  All is calm now: we find that we’re anchored off the coast of Algeria, a few hundred metres from the entrance to Oran’s port, waiting in the now paper calm, glistening Mediterranean, to be granted entry to the port. 

Despite the sea breeze, the deck is one massive smoking terrace, so we head back inside, to find breakfast.  Sadly, we’ve missed that boat.  The Spanish attendant behind the metal grille tells us that due to regulations, they must close the canteen before the boat approaches Algerian waters.  I point to the two croissants sat on a plate next to him and ask if I can feed the hungry children with them, he looks apologetic and says no.  So we’ll have to deal with Algerian port and customs authorities without coffee or breakfast, to add to the feeble quantity of sleep garnered during last night’s stormy crossing.

Our four-hour entry to Algeria goes something like this:

1.        Join the melee of van drivers looking for the correct deck on the ship (not straightforward).

2.        Wait in car in ship for 30 minutes whilst someone opens the stern doors, whilst sampling Algeria’s finest (heavily subsidised, 14p/litre) diesel fumes.

3.        Reverse off ship, with everybody else, at the same time.  At least until enough space appears to execute a rapid three-point-turn, again with everybody else.

4.        Drive off boat, enjoy mini-celebration as we’re recognised as foreign tourists and waved past long line of vans.

5.        Continue mini-celebration when we discover we’re first in the line at passport control.

6.        Celebrations muted by extensive (friendly) interrogation in Arabic / French about our intentions and accommodation in Algeria for the next fortnight.  Call our fixer to assist.

7.        Celebrations further muted as we’re ordered to park up to one side, whilst my passport becomes the baton in a leisurely relay race of officials, and then vanishes.

8.        Rejoice as our guide in Oran, the lovely Younes, turns up to assist in proceedings.

9.        Eventually ushered into customs hall; all car doors opened for customs search.

Slightly shaky moment as customs officer asks if we have any beer (we’d crammed our fridge full of the stuff before leaving Spain).  “Personal consumption only” we reply, as casually as possible.  He opens the fridge.  Luckily our cunning camouflage layer of fruit and tomatoes on top of the beer does the trick.

10.  Get waved through to exit.  Hurray!

11.  Hurray cancelled.  No ‘customs clean bill of health’ form yet.  Passport taken again.

12.  Told to join car X-ray scanner queue.  Sit in queue for 30 minutes.

13.  X-ray complete, clean bill of health issued.  We’re free to go.  Hurray!

14.  Hurray paused.  Official with my passport has disappeared.

15.  Finally, passport and all other documents finally repatriated. 

16.  Meet our secret police escort (they’re the ones in the smart jeans and trainers, with fake Armani T-shirts and sunglasses) and follow him in his white Skoda to our hotel, via stops to buy car insurance, and much needed late lunch.

Oran is Algeria’s second city, a charming but dilapidated mass of heavily crumbling French grandeur, palm-lined avenues, shabbily built apartment blocks, unfinished (yet lived in) apartment blocks and a handful of newer, glistening neighbourhoods.  Like most other Algerian towns and cities, it is strewn with litter, more than a few collapsed buildings, and random piles of rubble.

After lunch, we collapse into our hotel, to sleep for a few hours.  The accommodation for our entire stay in Algeria is pre-booked via an agency, in line with the terms of our visa – making it the most expensive leg of our trip, despite the low cost of living once we’re here. Prudently we’d decided to spend tonight in the Royal Hotel - Oran’s best hotel, suspecting we might need a bit of recovery after the ferry crossing.  How wise…

I spend an hour with Younes visiting a local garage to try to get the car’s overheating issue fixed, but to no avail.  We’ll need to try again in Algiers, or elsewhere. 

Later, Younes (and S’ah, our secret police escort) takes us on a walk through the city and we get our first glimpses of this diverse, complex, super-wealthy, corrupt, and hugely welcoming country.  He explains that our police escort is a legacy from the 1990’s civil war and the beefed-up security that’s imposed itself on the country since then.  Ostensibly for our own safety, the government is still suspicious of foreigners, so the police are – in the friendliest manner possible, it has to be said – employed to ensure we’re not spying or engaged in other illicit activities.

We dine on some average couscous, and roll into our extraordinarily comfortable beds by 9pm, exhausted.  At 10.30pm, some moron from room service calls to inform us that our first load of laundry is ready for collection.  It’s the first of a bewildering number of late-night phone calls to our rooms, during our stay in Algeria. 

Day 33, May 16th.  Oran - Algiers.  24-29C, sunny

Excellent night’s sleep despite the interruptions, followed by a five-star breakfast.  Our best for the next fortnight, as it turns out.

Younes and our escort take us on a walk through the city’s Ottoman castle (the 14th century Chateau Neuf or “New Castle”), a deserted, reasonably intact maze of mosaic-lined courtyards, halls and porticos.  We admire the opera house – Younes is particularly keen we see this; Oran has a proud tradition of performing arts – then board a tram to the city’s (Swiss-built) cable car station.  We don’t pay for the tram, courtesy of our (not so) secret escort – a quick flash of his ID and no-one pays for anything.

The cable car takes us to near the summit of the nearby Mount Murdjajo, which provides a great vista of the city below, stretching round the enormous turquoise bay in front of us and disappearing into the sandy horizon of dried-up lakebed to the south. 

Younes – an IT professional by trade and an occasional guide in his spare time (for the fun of it) – youthfully explains the history of the Santa Cruz Kasbah as we walk through its narrow alleys and courtyards, but by now our minds are on the 450km drive to Algiers that we must accomplish this afternoon, complete with still unfixed engine overheating issues. Younes – empathetic and attentive – gets it, and we hasten our trip back down, and commence the process of leaving the city, saying goodbye to Younes and now solely in the hands of our escort.

Outside the city limits, our white Skoda escort pulls over in a layby, and instructs us to do the same.  A few minutes later, two green-uniformed motorbikers from the gendarmes (military police) arrive, dismount, and come to talk to us through the car window. With cheery smiles, they exclaim “Vitesse! Vitesse!”, and then hop back on their bikes.  Our secret police Skoda gives a solitary wave and “Goodbye” from the window and drives off; we’re now in the hands of the gendarmes. 

We set off – one bike in front, one behind – at great speed.  Sitting at 85-90mph (much faster than we feel comfortable going in the truck in its current state) we can just about keep up with the forward escort, who continually gesticulates for us to keep up, with his hand.  The rear escort sits right on our tail.  Both have their lights flashing and use their sirens to clear the fast-moving traffic – if only we had a car that could do it justice!  They have brand-new, high-powered BMW bikes, and are evidently delighted to have an excuse to give them a run out.

They are the first of 13 different escorts today.  Every 20-40km or so, as we move between gendarme jurisdictions, we are pulled over, and must wait for the next escort to turn up.  Sometimes this involves a frustrating 10-minute wait on the hard shoulder; on two occasions we’re delighted when their coordination enables a ‘flying change’ – where the escorts rotate without us having to stop.  Some escorts are lightning fast, others, in older cars, are more sedate.  Some aggressively clear traffic for us, others sit in the slow lane.  To a man, they are charming, courteous, friendly, and keen to ensure our comfort and safety.  The effort, coordination and resources required on their part, to accompany us, is massive.   But the frequent stops and pauses make a long afternoon’s drive even longer, and it’s dusk before we reach the outskirts of Algiers.

But we don’t mind today.  For now it’s a novelty, plus if anything had happened to our car today, we’d have had immediate assistance.  As it transpires, the engine temperature behaves itself, except for a few long, uphill stretches, where the gauge rises but soon recovers.

Our final escort meets us at the Algiers city limits and takes us into the centre, to our hotel.  This one is verykeen on clearing traffic: with sirens blaring and lights flashing, we cut a swathe through the late rush-hour traffic, with our hazards on.  The boys are shrieking with excitement, and we’re giggling in unison.  It’s their highlight of the trip so far.  For a moment, we feel really rather important.

We’re dropped off at the Hotel El Djazair, where we continue to feel like royalty, and after a quick turnaround, we are driven out to supper to meet Atman, our fixer, his wife Fatima and close friends. 

Somewhere, in a civilised restaurant in the middle of Algiers, we feel like we’re guests at a French society dinner party.  Atman, a dainty, grey-haired gentleman with a kindly, statesman-like aura, was the Minister for Tourism in the 1990’s before the civil war, and is possibly one of the most well-connected people in Algeria. 

The boys, despite their exhaustion following a six-hour drive and a busy morning in Oran, manage to keep their eyes open, thanks to numerous visits to the buffet table’s pudding section.  Atman and his friends are hugely engaging, although it’s a proper test for our conversational French.  Fatima explains that their children live in Paris – they moved there for their education and now find the re-acclimatisation to Algerian culture and attitudes too conservative for their liking.  Despite their super-liberal outlook, Atman and his wife are content to retire in Algiers – which, from our experience so far – certainly appears to have an old-school civility about it.

Day 34, May 17th.  Algiers.  24-27C, sunny

After another much-needed nourishing sleep and a slightly less-good five-star breakfast, we meet Moncef and his two children, who are to take us round Algiers today, in a taxi.  Moncef is divorced and has childcare duties for the weekend, so Mehdi (10) and Safiya (15) accompany us.

Being the weekend, the traffic is light and our driver (it’s so lovely to have a day off driving) can take us around swiftly.  We walk through the ancient, steep streets of the Kasbah, still cleaned by donkey, and admire the view of the gleaming white city sweeping down into the Mediterranean from the Church of Notre Dame Afrique. 

At lunchtime, Moncef buys some truly awful take-away pizzas and we retire to the delightful Botanical Garden Hamma, and eat pizza, peanuts and ice-cream under the shade of some of the parks many Ficus (Banyan) trees.  Fuelled by pizza, the children run off to climb trees.  Only Algerian children don’t climb trees – whilst Ralph and Laurie enjoy a much-needed climbing fix in the banyans, the boisterous Mehdi becomes ever more frustrated, whilst Safiya agitatedly insists the boys come down, saying it’s too dangerous.  Mehdi eventually resorts to throwing sticks at the boys, in frustration.  During the rest of the day, we learn much – in a beautifully unfiltered manner – about Algerian culture and opinions from Mehdi, as he intermittently plays and argues with our boys.  He is notably vocal about Algerian’s support for Palestine and their hatred of Israel, something that is hinted at by numerous others we talk to in the country, but always with adult discretion.

After lunch, we visit the Martyrs Square to admire the colossal, imposing, Soviet-like structure of the Maqam Echahid – a sweeping, concrete monument that commemorates Algeria’s eventual, bloody victory over France in its War of Independence (1954-1962), in which 1.5 million Algerians lost their lives.  Algeria continues to have a fraught, complex relationship with France to this day – briefly but over-simplistically summed up as a legacy of its language, a love of its people and a hatred of its government.

We finish our tour with a visit to Algiers’ Great Mosque, completed in 2019.  It is – unlike the claim of Morocco’s Hassan II mosque – the world’s third biggest mosque (behind Mecca and Medina), capable of holding over 100,000 worshippers.  

Built by a Chinese company at a cost of nearly 900 million euros, it proves that oil and gas wealth trumps all when it comes to modern mosque building p*****g contests; the Moroccan’s part royal / part people funded effort never stood a chance (albeit it is far prettier).  During its construction, many in Algeria discreetly murmured the money would have been better spend on four new hospitals; they’re right.

Finally, back at our hotel, we make the most of being able to order beer on the hotel’s delightful terrace, overlooking sweetly scented gardens of blue jacaranda, white frangipani and purple bougainvilleas, interspersed with regular wafts of cigarette smoke from the heavy drinking Westerners around us, who are attending a Unicef conference in the hotel.  Exhausted, we don’t make it beyond the hotel’s (extortionate and distinctly average) restaurant this evening.

Day 35, May 18th.  Algiers – Bou Saada.  22-33C, sunny

Fully rested, we make a prompt start and leave our palatial (literally – it actually used to be a palace) hotel by 10am.  No police escort this morning – we don’t know why, but it means we can kick on.  Atman has arranged our guide in Ghardaia to have a Land Cruiser specialist look at the car when we get there in a few days’ time, and after the successful 450km sprint to Algiers, we’re feeling more confident anyway.

We head south, through green hills and rolling wheat and barley fields, past innumerable, large and very ugly new towns.  Outside the two big cities’ we’ve visited, every town has been the same – a mass of newish, half-built, air brick and reinforced concrete houses and apartment blocks, rebar protruding from all points like angry punk hair, no rendering or painting to finish, and inhabitants clearly inhabiting.  There’s a near total absence of pavements, anywhere – just flattened rubble and earth at the sides of the roads.  We try to avoid generalisations, but it would appear that modern Algeria – culturally – just doesn’t do aesthetics. 

Strangely, throughout the entire country (and barring the protected kasbahs / medinas / Roman ruins etc) we don’t see a single old building, or old town.  We never really get a clear answer about this from any of our guides, but it appears that earthquakes, the War of Independence, and the 1990’s civil war really took their toll on the country’s infrastructure.  Everything has been rebuilt (or is still being rebuilt), very rapidly and with little thought to how it looks.

Halfway to Bou Saada, on a bumpy dual carriageway, or aircon packs up.  So we drive the final two hours in the sweltering heat, windows down, stuck to our seats with sweat.

Bou Saada, on arrival, is identical to the general description given above. We bump through the dusty streets, following Google Maps to the Hotel Kerdada – the general sketchiness of the town enduring until about 20 metres before the hotel’s entrance.  But once again Atman has delivered; Hotel Kerdada is a true oasis: a French-built colonial hotel completed in 1913, with palm and pine shaded, heavily scented gardens, and a huge swimming pool.  Nearly cooked, Ralph is in the swimming pool before we’ve checked in and got the keys to our room.

We have another guide here – Aissa – who we meet late in the afternoon for a whistlestop tour of the town and surrounding area.  Most famous here is the city’s palmery – a mile-long, dense, meandering swathe of palm trees that surround a little river in a narrow ravine, at the very edge of the city.  It is spectacular – but would have been so much more beautiful 50 years ago, before it became clogged with plastic and rubble, and the once clear water in the river below not polluted with sewage from illegal settlements nearby.  Aissa bemoans his country’s attitude to litter – and doesn’t express much hope for things changing rapidly in the future.

Next, we drive out to the ancient desert village of Alik, around 20km to the south, in the beginnings of the Sahara.  It is, and remains, the only old, original featured Algerian village we find.  It’s still very much inhabited, with locals tending their crops and vegetable patches, in little gardens behind white stone walls.

A few local boys are ambling around, selling tea and roses, when we arrive.  They greet us with lazy smiles, whilst Aissa jokes with them.  We walk down to the village spring and take a drink from the cold, clear water rushing up out of the ground, then enter the village’s 1,000 year old mosque – a tiny, mud and wood built building, far more intimate and welcoming than the vast ego-maniacal prayer halls we’ve seen so far.

We climb to the top of the village and sit on the steps of a disused mosque, overlooking the village and its little gardens and crops beneath us.  The stillness, coupled with the sounds – a little birdsong, a donkey braying, the desert wind idly blowing through the trees below us – is profoundly soothing and relaxing.  Even the boys stop ragging around for a few minutes to take it in.  We stay for ten minutes, but could have stayed for much longer. 

Later, we follow Aissa as he drives his other clients today (representatives of the Bangladeshi High Commission) to a traditional restaurant in the middle of town.  We’ve just sat down in the semi-covered / part open air courtyard of the restaurant, tucking into local cheeses, yoghurts and camel milk, when a violent hailstorm erupts. 

Amidst the lightning, hailstones the size of large marbles pound the courtyard.  A wind blows up and deposits a fine layer of sand over our starters.  We hurriedly take refuge in a covered room at the back of the restaurant; barring a couple of bruises sustained by Ralph as he tries to collect hailstones, we’re unscathed – which, sadly, is more than could be said for our starters.

Day 36, May 19th.  Bou Saada - Ghardaia.  22-38C, sunny

We start our day with a heavenly swim, followed by a less-than-heavenly breakfast.  These have been consistently deteriorating since we left Oran.

Most urgently this morning, Aissa takes me to an aircon mechanic in Bou Saada.  Within five minutes and for a cost of 3,000 Algerian dinars (about £12.50), our aircon is refilled with refrigerant gas; ice-cold air is once again blasting from the vents inside, and our journey south into the Sahara has suddenly got a lot more comfortable. 

Aissa is kindly determined that we complete as much of Bou Saada’s sights as we can this morning, before departing.  We’re already realising that, with the sheer scale of this country, plus the escorts and general quality of the roads, our 12 days here is going to really test our stamina, if we actually want to see anything of the place.

He whisks us round a museum dedicated to Etienne Dinet (French artist who went native and lived out his years in Bou Saada – extraordinary life-like paintings), then takes us into the kasbah.  The highlight of the morning is a visit to the ancient mosque and a meeting with the kindly, welcoming, and gently spoken imam, who shows us round his chambers and teaching areas, explains his routines, and is happy for Ralph to make a video with him to share with his teachers.

After a quick tour round a local craft market (Nina snaffles a lovely locally made bright yellow shawl for £16) we’re back at the hotel at 10.30am to meet our police escort.  We have one today – don’t know why – it just is what it is. 

As it transpires, they’re late.  We finally leave at 11am, a little annoyed, given we’ve got over 500km of Sahara to cross today, before we reach our most southerly destination in Algeria, 50km south of Ghardaia. The escort situation gets even more irritating when our first shift dawdles out of Bou Saada at a snail’s pace and then stops after barely 20km, initiating a 10-minute wait for the next jurisdiction to take over.

But finally, we start to make better progress, including a rapid 80km stretch with one escort before lunch.  At lunchtime, they pull over in a small town and leave us in the hands of some new gendarmes, who are casually sitting at plastic tables under the shade of an olive tree, at the roadside. 

Cheerily, they make it clear it’s going to be at least half an hour until the next escort arrives, so we make the most of it – popping across the road to buy some coffees and local snacks, and borrowing their chairs to sit on so we can eat and drink in the shade.  The gendarmes are fascinated by us, our country and our house.  We show them photos of our garden back home (including some in the snow); the sight of all that greenery – against the backdrop of the sandy yellow eternity that surrounds us here – makes them all gasp, laugh and chatter excitedly amongst themselves. 

The local baguette boy drives past to deliver their lunch orders; they share their baguettes with us.  We accept gratefully – we don’t want to have to stop again for food, given the distance we’ve still got to cover.  Warm chicken and herby tomato flavour – not bad, in the circumstances.

Finally, our next escort turns up, and we understand the delay.  It’s a convoy that is already escorting the French consul to Ghardaia, and we’re to hitch on with them.  This is actually good news; we now make less interrupted haste due south.  That said, the lead driver maintains a very strong pace, we have to manage the car’s engine temperature very carefully in the searing desert heat, falling way behind the main convoy as we coast up the hills.

We finally make it to Ghardaia at 6pm and pick up our latest guide, the cheerful and knowledgeable Abdallah. He’s with his driver Murad, a Land Cruiser expert, who takes a quick look at our car and immediately calls and instructs his own mechanic to come out tomorrow to the farmstay where we’re staying, to diagnose and fix the problem.

Abdallah rides with us for the final 50km (he describes it as ‘not far at all’ – Algerians, like Americans and Australians, are immune to large distances) and we reach the Farmstay Habib at 7pm.  It’s in the middle of the desert, a collection of guest cottages and dining / reception rooms on top of a hill, surrounded by the farm’s lands – irrigated by their own aquifer.  It’s an extraordinary sight from the top of the hill – beneath us are olive groves, date palms, wheat fields, grass fields, stables and greenhouses – all of which are in turn surrounded by the hazy, yellow eternity of desert. 

Relieved to have made it, Nina and I polish off a decent chunk of our smuggled-in Spanish beer – beautifully cold from our fridge.  Our hosts have cooked us a magnificent traditional meal of local yoghurts and cheeses, soup, bread, chips, grilled meats and watermelon.  We eat ravenously and swiftly – but not fast enough for poor Ralph – who is asleep at the table before the watermelon arrives.

Day 37, May 20th.  Ghardaia.  26-38C, sunny

What should have been a beautifully restorative night’s sleep is disturbed by four girls who are also staying – who insist on intermittently pacing up and down in the gardens outside our rooms, chatting until 4am.  With hindsight, we’re not sure why we didn’t tell them to shut up.  Luckily, the boys sleep through.

Delicious breakfast and good tea and coffee makes everything OK though.  Our mechanic arrives at 7.45am and immediately diagnoses the problem with the car – the viscous coupling on our fan isn’t working.  He will try to replace it, or fix it in situ.  Either way, he’s got it in hand, which is a mighty relief, given these distances and temperatures – this really isn’t somewhere you want to break down, police escort or not.

Abdallah plans to show us Ghardaia today.  Over supper last night, we had reduced the scope of his sightseeing ambitions for us from five ancient cities to one (he conceded that once you’ve seen one, you’ve basically seen them all) and a trip round the local market. 

Nonetheless, it’s still 50km – nearly an hour – back into Ghardaia.  We’re glad to have another day off driving. 

Once in the city, Abdallah leaves us in the hands of Ibrahim, to guide us through most ancient of Ghardaia’s five old cities.  Ibrahim is an elderly gentleman, complete with wooden walking stick, grey baggy trousers, grey waistcoat over a white shirt and a white Kufi on his head.  He is completely mad.  We follow him through the narrow alleyways, whilst he cheerfully shouts at us in Arabic and French, explaining what we’re seeing; every now and then pointing his stick agitatedly and shouting “PHOTO! PHOTO! WOOO-WOO!” to make it clear we should take a photo. After an entertaining but deafening hour with him, we’re delighted we’re only doing one city.

In this old city, and throughout all the old cities of Ghardaia (and much of the new town too), women are – literally – invisible.  They hurriedly shuffle through the streets, holding thick, white cotton sheets over their heads, with only one eye visible.  Abdallah refers to them as the ‘one-eye ladies’ and explains that these older – and more remote – cities are still far more conservative than the more metropolitan areas in the north.  When we stop for lunch, it’s a similar story – the only people in the busy restaurant (barring Nina) are men.

We leave Ghardaia at 2pm, aiming to get back to the Farmstay for some much-needed pool time / down time before embarking on a ‘desert safari’ later on.  But halfway back, Murad’s Land Cruiser inexplicably breaks down.  Despite his expertise and his tools, he can’t fix it at the side of the road.  It’s a timely reminder to us of the realities of breaking down here – albeit this particular situation is not remotely dramatic for us.  Abdallah calls a friend, and before long, a silent, wild-looking Tuareg local, head tightly wrapped in an indigo Cheche(headscarf), turns up in his beaten-up but still working Hilux and drives us back to the farm.

Time for a swim – in the extraordinary, hot (not warm), desert heated pool.  Hot water is gushing out of Roman-style urns, filling the vast pool with the rapidity of a Thames Water leak.  Later, we check on the car.  Our mechanic couldn’t replace the fan part, but he’s bolted the fan to its coupling meaning it’s always ‘on’ – which in cooler climes could lead to over-cooling, but won’t present an issue for us for the rest of the trip.

Later in the afternoon, we head out, in a convoy of four cars, to the desert.  The farmstay has two Hiluxes – they are taking a solitary French Algerian girl – plus we’re joined by another solitary French tourist from Ghardaia. 

We drive half an hour further south (round the corner in Algerian terms) and then head off into the desert, following a supremely talented local motorbiker who’s obviously friends with the others.  We weave between smaller sand dunes, then finally climb through deeper, softer sand, gaining height, and over and through the dunes themselves.  It’s far tougher technical off-roading than anything we dared try when solo in Morocco – but the beauty of being in convoy allows all of us to take on more challenging routes.  Our truck – fully fixed now and no heating issues – happily takes it all in her stride.

Finally, we park up in the middle of the dunes.  The boys are in heaven again – there’s a sandboard to play with, and between that, sand angels and roly-polys down the dunes, they’re entertained for hours, whilst our hosts prepare a desert meal for us.  They collect dry brushwood, light fires, knead dough for bread and let it rise, and prepare meat and put it in a pressure cooker on the fire.  The risen bread is then baked on the ground, enclosed in a mixture of hot coals and sand.  Proper tea is washed, brewed and mixed, then distributed to the rest of us, along with nuts to nibble on, whilst we lounge on the sand dunes.  We feel a little guilty, but not guilty enough to actually do anything.

The French tourist from Ghardaia leaves us at about 8.30pm; his driver promptly gets stuck in the first dune on the way out.  Much pushing and shoving won’t move him, he’s axle deep.  Luckily, our tow-rope is to hand and he’s towed out by our hosts – we’re delighted that for the second time today, the car in shtuck isn’t us!

It’s the most magical evening.  Algeria’s highs are fewer, and harder to come by, but when they arrive – like here and at Alik a few days ago – they are worth every bit of the effort.

Finally, supper is ready, at nearly 10pm.  Delicious salad, followed by a very heavy, traditional meat dish – great chunks of beef in a bread and wheat sauce.  We eat as much as we can, but the portions are massive and the bread and wheat sauce is VERY heavy. 

The boys are tired now and we’re mindful we’ve got a drive back through the same dunes, in darkness.  We bid our farewells to our hosts who are staying the night out here, and follow our magnificent motorbiker as he casually guides us, cigarette in mouth and local music playing on his radio back to the main road.