Between 1988 and 1990, I cycled 33,000 kilometres from Nordkapp to Cape Town. The journey became my second book, På cykel genom Afrika—Cycling Through Africa—published in Swedish in 1991.
“Inshallah.”
God willing. The Algerian answer to life’s questions and to those peculiarities that lie beyond human understanding.
Inshallah
Ever since I first saw a picture of the Sahara in a Tintin book as a boy, I had wondered what it would look like when I finally saw it with my own eyes.
I felt a certain anxiety as I approached the ridge. Since touching the outskirts of the Sahara in Morocco, I had built up a picture of the Grand Erg Occidental which I was sure exceeded anything possible. There are few things more destructive in an adventurer’s life than a dream collapsing when it meets reality.
On the other side waited a sea of golden dunes.
I stopped and drew a deep, respectful breath. At the foot of the dunes lay the brown village of Taghit, so small that it appeared in danger of being swallowed by the undulating hills of sand stretching 450 kilometres towards the east.
Only then did I understand that I had entered the world’s largest desert and one of the driest places on Earth.
The Sahara stretches five thousand kilometres from west to east. For centuries it formed an almost impenetrable barrier. Travellers either sailed around it or followed a small number of caravan routes through its interior. Even with motor vehicles, it remained difficult country with few dependable roads.
The Sahara still belonged to camels and fatalists, to the Tuareg and Bedouin who understood its moods and accepted its meagre gifts.
It had also drawn thinkers and prophets into its silence.
During my days in Taghit, I walked alone among the dunes. Within minutes, I could no longer see the oasis. Without my own footprints to follow, I might still be out there.
Yet it was among those rolling hills that my troubled mind finally became quiet.
It was the silence.
It was so complete that I imagined I could extend my index finger, draw a line through the emptiness in front of me and hear it happen. My remaining worries about the Sahara disappeared. Everything would work out. Perhaps somewhere in that great emptiness I might even find answers to the questions about life and death which had driven me from Nordkapp.
That feeling lasted until the morning I prepared to leave Taghit and ride the fifteen hundred kilometres south.
The rim of my rear wheel was full of cracks.
I was a very long way from help.
The Wheel That Could End the Journey
The discovery pleased Carl enormously.
I had met Carl and his girlfriend Mandy in the no-man’s-land between Morocco and Algeria. When I first saw him, he was standing behind a palm tree stuffing French francs into his seat tube in an attempt to smuggle black-market currency into Algeria.
They were cyclists too.
Carl was a tall Englishman with a narrow, unshaven face and a prominent nose. After two weeks alone on Morocco’s High Plateau, I was delighted to have somebody to speak with again.
I soon learnt that this was his second bicycle journey through the Sahara. The previous year, he and another Englishman had cycled across the flat, stony Ténéré Desert. According to Carl, they were the first people in history to do it.
It had been a journey of hunger, thirst, anxiety, sandstorms, illness and endless arguments. Carl spoke frequently about the achievement and even more frequently about how much he disliked the man with whom he had made it.
By the time we reached Taghit, I had decided that Carl talked too much. I told him I wanted to be alone.
He did not take it well.
Now he crouched beside my rear wheel, examined the cracks and smiled.
“That cannot be repaired,” he said. “You’ll have to go home to Sweden and get a new one.”
I wanted to tell the hawk-nosed little bastard not to worry because my sponsors would send me a wheel within a week.
But I said nothing.
For half an hour, I cried.
I had left paradise and entered the country of hopelessness. The loneliness which had followed me through Morocco returned. Once again, I wondered whether there was any reason for Mikael Strandberg to exist on this planet.
Algeria did little to improve my mood.
During my time in Morocco, I had complained about the limited selection of food. I had dreamt about the endless shelves of provisions which I imagined would be waiting in socialist Algeria.
I must have suffered a moment of total confusion. Had I forgotten what I had seen in Cuba, Romania, East Germany and the Soviet Union? I had visited Nicaragua and found exactly the same thing.
The first Algerian town gave me a shock. There was almost nothing to buy. The empty shelves offered tins of sardines, tomato purée, rice, couscous, salt and large quantities of powdered milk. Everything cost three times as much as it had in Morocco unless one possessed Western currency and knew how to use the black market.
The towns disappointed me even more. Morocco’s bazaars, with their smells of myrrh, herbs, leather and food, had been replaced by grey concrete.
The damaged wheel forced me to turn north. I had to reach Laghouat, northeast of the Grand Erg Occidental, and from there hitchhike to Algiers to collect a replacement.
The journey to Laghouat was merciless.
Once again, I climbed onto the icy plateau of the Saharan Atlas. The road was steep, patched and uneven. Bush desert and mountains covered by a decimetre of snow surrounded me. An icy headwind blew constantly while the sky opened for hail, freezing rain and snowstorms.
Whenever the weather briefly relented, I carried the bicycle and luggage through boulder fields normally dry for most of the year but now buried beneath a hard crust of ice.
The cold was so severe that I dared not stop for lunch. I was afraid I would freeze.
One thought dominated everything:
What am I doing?
I often felt ready to give up. The conditions had been brutal since Nordkapp. There had been headwinds, cold and cycling which felt like one long struggle to move forward.
Then I remembered the silence, the space and the happiness I felt each evening when I stopped pedalling, put up the tent and crawled into my warm sleeping bag. I knew what a privilege it was to move by my own strength through places most people would never reach and to experience greatness, silence, the whisper of the night wind and almost every human emotion within such short, intense periods.
I knew I was growing as a human being.
That was what kept me moving when I doubted most.
Six Cars in One Week
I saw six cars during that entire week.
The first stopped in a snowstorm. The driver brought me inside and prepared three small cups of sweet, strong coffee while I sat in the warmth.
The second driver gave me one hundred dinars, a bag of dates and several oranges.
The third gave me ten loaves of bread.
The remaining three all gave me something useful to eat.
During a hailstorm, I reached a village consisting of five houses and a long well built from mud. The inhabitants stared at me suspiciously but allowed me to replenish my meagre supply of water.
I was starving.
When I asked whether there was any food to buy, they silently shook their heads. I left disappointed.
An hour later, I heard a moped approaching from behind. I stopped and recognised one of the suspicious villagers.
He pulled alongside me, opened his coat and handed me three freshly baked loaves of bread and a plastic container filled with hot soup.
I tried to pay him.
He smiled, waved away the money and rode back towards the village through the hailstorm.
Belkacem, Redha and Salah
Laghouat appeared a grim place in which to spend a week waiting for a new wheel.
I noticed Belkacem immediately among the crowds of unemployed young men moving sadly through the streets. He was built like a bear. A great black beard covered his face, a baseball cap sat on his enormous head, and his round body was wrapped in a gigantic camouflage jacket decorated with hundreds of cloth badges.
When he noticed me, his face opened in a tremendous grin.
I discovered that he worked nights as a guard at the hotel where I had landed. It was a grey, freezing and depressing place which reminded me of a prison without windows.
I closed the door to my room and wondered how long I would be trapped there.
After one dreary hour, somebody knocked.
Belkacem entered with his friend Redha. Between them they carried a heater, tea, sandwiches and Arab sweets. Redha was dark-haired, well dressed and spoke English, which greatly reduced my dependence on frantic gestures.
For the next week, wherever I went, one of them accompanied me.
If I bought stamps, telephoned Sweden, stocked up for the desert or visited a hammam to wash and sit in the steam, Belkacem, Redha or their closest friend Salah insisted upon paying.
Every day, they served me three enormous meals in their homes. They bought presents for my mother and brother and assured me that I was never alone. If none of them could entertain me, they drove me to another friend’s house, where tea and food immediately appeared.
When it was time for me to leave, they paid my hotel bill.
They also gave me a shesh, an eight-metre length of cloth which could be wrapped around my head and face against the sun, wind and sand.
During my stay, I rarely saw anybody middle-aged in the streets of Laghouat. I saw almost no women. Most of the people outside were young men and children walking to or from school.
Salah explained why.
“We lost at least a million people and one and a half generations of men during our eight-year guerrilla war against France,” he said. “Now two-thirds of our population is under twenty-five.”
Unemployment was everywhere. None of my three friends saw much of a future. Salah had travelled in Europe and wanted to study in Canada. He believed Algeria was doomed to fail unless something changed.
“You can see what it is like,” he told me. “There is hardly any food and no advanced technology from Europe or America. What will happen when all those under twenty have finished school? How will we give them work and food? Nobody can live in the Sahara. But the worst thing in Algeria is the sadness. There is absolutely nothing to do. We only stare at television.”
After their generosity, what I remember most is the weariness among the young men.
It was with sadness that I left Laghouat.
I did not travel far.
Ten kilometres outside the town, I fell from the bicycle and vomited bile in forty-degree heat. I was sick as hell.
Belkacem had warned me during the magnificent farewell dinner the previous evening.
“Eat only a little of each dish,” he said. “There are more coming.”
I ignored him.
I ate every plate as if it were the final meal of a condemned man. Ten rich courses arrived.
The merciless Sahara had begun.
The Cities Beneath the Road
I was riding through a flat, sandy and deafeningly silent desert towards the holy cities of the M’Zab when I noticed a strange smell.
Then I heard isolated words drifting through the emptiness.
I stopped and looked around.
Nothing.
According to my bicycle computer, the cities should have been there, but the horizon remained empty. I moved forward a few metres. The smells strengthened and the voices became louder.
Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, an enormous crack opened in the ground before me.
Thousands of sounds and smells rose from below.
I jumped from the bicycle and sat on the edge.
Inside the immense fissure lay one of the holy cities of the Chebka du M’Zab. Ghardaïa stretched as far as I could see. The Mozabites had created a remarkable civilisation in the desert. Houses painted blue, yellow or white climbed around hills crowned by mosques. Narrow, dark alleys wound between them and brought to mind the mysterious Arabia of my childhood.
At one of the valley’s campsites, I encountered two kinds of motorised Sahara traveller.
The first wanted to cross the desert in a few days, boast about it afterwards, sell their Peugeot or Mercedes in West Africa and make a profit.
The second travelled in expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles carrying names such as EXPEDITION OPTIMAL: PARIS–ABIDJAN across their doors. They usually stopped when they saw me. After filming and photographing the unexpected cyclist, they gave me water and stared in amazement.
Their own grand expeditions appeared slightly less heroic when they discovered a man riding alone through the Sahara without anything written across the side of his bicycle.
Before long, they all began the same conversation.
“Are you out of your mind?”
It did not matter whether they spoke French, Spanish or English. The warning that followed was almost identical.
“Have you never heard of the Devil’s Garden? It is at least eight hundred kilometres between Tamanrasset and Arlit. There are no oases and no life. Where will you find water? Where will you find shade from the fifty-degree sun? Haven’t you heard about all the people who have disappeared there? Thousands! And they travelled by car. Turn back while you still have time, you madman.”
They continued until they believed they had convinced me.
I had heard of the Devil’s Garden and felt a certain anxiety about what waited there. But first I had to reach Tamanrasset.
Even Belkacem had possessed his own terrifying story.
Whenever the subject of the Sahara arose in Laghouat, he placed both hands on his enormous head and trembled theatrically.
“The Plateau du Tademaït is terrible! The sand-filled winds are violent, and the cold crawls inside you and paralyses you. It is deadly. That is your greatest obstacle on the way to Tamanrasset.”
He would then recount, with great passion, his journey across it in a lorry.
Twenty-Two Litres
I crossed the Plateau du Tademaït under the brutal, sand-bearing northeasterly wind called the Harmattan.
By extraordinary good fortune, it struck me in the back.
I almost flew.
The plateau was a lifeless hammada, an immense stone desert swept by cold winds. It took me a day and a half to cross its three hundred kilometres on a route which changed constantly between broken asphalt, gravel and deep sand.
Football-sized stones blocked the road. Usually I could weave between them; occasionally I had to stop and roll one aside.
Other vehicles travelled along the kilometre-wide pistes beside the broken road. For long periods, the only evidence of traffic was a distant column of dust rising to the east or west.
There were said to be scattered wells every twenty kilometres until Tamanrasset.
I required neither water nor company.
When I left Laghouat and entered the desert, the last of the painful loneliness disappeared. The vast surroundings filled me with calm and allowed me to think clearly about what lay ahead—particularly the Devil’s Garden.
My bicycle could carry twenty-two litres of water.
In normal circumstances, twelve litres would last one day once the heat approached fifty degrees. The Devil’s Garden was likely to require a week. Every day on the road towards Tamanrasset, I reduced my consumption by half a litre until I reached six litres per day.
That would give me one extra day.
I was almost disappointed when the Plateau du Tademaït ended. The miserable road dropped steeply into country resembling the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful, but I would have preferred more time alone on the plateau.
At its edge waited the oasis of Aïn Salah.
The Harmattan deserted me there.
In its place, I received a violent headwind.
Worse still, Aïn Salah contained Adam.
“Hello! My name is Adam. What are you doing?”
He stood steaming in the heat.
“I’m trying to tempt that large beetle out of the sand. You may have seen its tracks outside your tent this morning.”
I continued tapping the sand rhythmically with my index finger. We stood among the enormous dunes surrounding the red oasis.
“A beetle? No, you idiot. That is a small lizard.”
Adam crouched and drew a copy of the tracks with his finger.
I stared at him. He must have sunstroke.
Then the sand collapsed into a small hole and a black beetle, half a decimetre long, burst out.
My index finger had successfully imitated the female’s sexual invitation.
“You are a strange fellow,” Adam said. “I suppose you are the one planning to kill himself by bicycle in the desert. Is that your machine at the campsite?”
I nodded and wondered what a man like him was doing in the Sahara.
Adam intended to cross it on a Puch moped.
He was thickset and balding, with a round, bearded face, bitter eyes and the air of a man permanently offended by life. He claimed that he had been a famous chemist in Austria until his employer stole a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery and destroyed his career. South Africa had refused him entry for lacking a visa. He then attempted the journey in a Land Rover, which broke down outside Ghardaïa and was stripped to its shell while he searched for help.
Now he was trying again on a moped.
Adam did not have one kind word for anybody. Even after I fed him, he criticised the way I lived and described it as irresponsible.
The Algerians had taught me that in the desert one had to stay together, even with an enemy. But I remained an ordinary human being. Before I had rested properly, Adam drove me from the oasis and back into the heat.
Unfortunately, it was not long before I found him again.
Near the entrance to the Gorge d’Arak, he sat inside his tent, sheltering from the burning sun. He was wearing a suit and tie. His sunburnt face looked bitter, his lips were split and his rear tyre was punctured.
“Nothing but bad luck!” he shouted when he saw me. “The solution I found in Aïn Salah will not hold. It keeps coming loose. Hell! And where did you go? I have searched for you. I must have passed you last night. Do you have water? Can you give me some solution? These damned people are too stupid to manufacture anything properly.”
“You can have water. That is all. I need everything else myself.”
“You have nothing to eat?”
He sounded like a fledgling calling for its mother.
I shook my head and gave him half my water.
“I do not understand what you are doing in the desert. You have no idea how to survive. Look at that—you are carrying a three-litre container. Madness! Try learning something from the local people you hate so much.”
I left him to his fate.
During my short time in the Sahara, the Algerians had willingly shared their knowledge with me. I wore the shesh Belkacem had given me and covered every part of my skin to keep away the wind, sand and sun.
Every hour, I stopped beside the wretched road, brewed mint tea and ate dates for energy.
I needed them.
Since leaving Aïn Salah, the route had deteriorated. I either travelled across hard corrugations packed with stone barriers or pushed my heavily loaded bicycle through decimetre-deep sand. A violent headwind drained what remained of my strength. I struggled forward in my lowest gear for twelve hours a day through country which became hotter and more lifeless with every kilometre.
The wind finally relented when I left Adam behind and entered the Gorge d’Arak.
After two weeks in country almost entirely without life, entering the gorge felt like leaving hell and arriving in paradise.
The vast, eroded mountain walls echoed with birdsong, buzzing flies and the movement of creatures hidden among acacia trees, bushes and great stands of the plant known as the Sodom apple.
There were scorpions as large as dinner plates.
It was a garden without water or brightly coloured flowers. Yet it showed how the Sahara’s animals and plants survived on almost no moisture. Antelopes obtained water from plants. Trees and bushes extended deep root systems beneath the earth. Seeds lay dormant for years inside hard shells, then completed an entire life cycle within days when rain finally came.
Then the gorge ended.
The hard battle against the headwind began again and remained with me all the way to Tamanrasset.
I arrived exhausted.
Tamanrasset was the final outpost for travellers continuing south, whether by camel, bicycle or motor vehicle. It was our last chance for rest, proper food and supplies before the Devil’s Garden.
After two weeks living on macaroni, sardines, dry bread, dates and tea, my immediate ambitions were modest.
I wanted to eat until I was full.
Then I wanted to sleep.
Tamanrasset
The town was a modern centre for ancient caravan routes.
Its narrow streets were crowded with proud Tuareg, Black Africans, puritanical Muslims, fashionably dressed tourists from Paris, ordinary travellers and adventurers of every description. All had been drawn to this final settlement at the foot of the Hoggar Mountains.
In the market, the usual stalls selling bread, vegetables, fruit and tinned food stood beside merchants surrounded by enormous lumps of salt transported from the legendary mines farther southeast.
At one time, a kilogram of salt had been worth a kilogram of gold.
I was putting up my tent at the government campsite on the sandy outskirts when a Land Rover drove in bearing the words TRANSAFRICA/AUSTRALIA.
“Simon! Surely you have not been waiting all this time just for me? Very kind of you, old friend!”
The astonished Englishman looked less pleased to see me.
“Mikael! Go to hell! Do you know what happened? The engine died thirty kilometres outside Tamanrasset, and I have been waiting two months for a new one. What a bloody hell. I’m going mad. And on top of that, they have taken the idiot James on as my partner. Can it get any worse?”
I had first met Simon and his companions in the Moroccan Sahara, where they had supplied me with food and water. When we parted, Simon joked that it was a pity I could not keep up with them.
“Do you remember what you said in Morocco?” I asked. “A shame I couldn’t maintain your pace. Did you honestly believe you could outrun a Viking on a bicycle?”
Simon now travelled with James, although they could barely tolerate one another. Simon treated James as a servant. James endured it because returning home would mean admitting another failure to a wealthy family which expected better from him.
Once we had finished exchanging insults, Simon pointed towards three men brewing tea under one of the campsite’s few shady trees.
“You are not the only one mad enough to cycle. Those three are British cyclists.”
They looked weather-beaten, strong and completely at ease.
For a moment, I felt that somebody had intruded upon my territory. Then happiness took over. Perhaps I would have company in the Devil’s Garden—if we could tolerate one another.
I walked over and sat beside their fire.
“Hello. Are you cycling?”
“Yes,” they answered without looking up.
“I am cycling too.”
All three raised their heads.
“Who are you?”
I knew that Algerian drivers had passed rumours about a cyclist somewhere ahead of them.
“I am the Swede.”
They stared at one another.
“Are you the Swede we keep hearing about? The man cycling five hundred kilometres every day? More than two metres tall, blond, built like Arnold Schwarzenegger—and riding a bicycle with a triangular rear wheel?”
“Good God,” I said. “I know where most of that nonsense came from. But who decided I was two metres tall? I’m not even one centimetre above 1.70.”
The story of the triangular wheel probably began with an Algerian driver who gave me two loaves of bread. In gratitude, I showed him the finer details of my bicycle, particularly the oval chainrings. He suddenly began stroking my thighs and kissing my hand.
He must have become so excited that he thought the wheel was oval too.
Their names were Mick, Charlie and Jeremy.
Mick was short and powerfully built, with a cheerful smile and a direct but friendly manner. He travelled with Charlie, a tall, slender young man with a dark, bearded face.
Jeremy rode alone. Thin, sunburnt and almost entirely without muscle, he gave the impression that his journey to Tamanrasset had been one long ordeal. Unlike the sociable Mick and Charlie, he preferred his own company and spent hours beneath a tree with his thoughts somewhere else.
Before I had time to know him, Jeremy secured a lift with Simon through the Devil’s Garden. They disappeared so quickly that I barely had time to say goodbye.
Mick and Charlie were less fortunate.
Nobody wanted to carry two men, two bicycles and their heavy equipment through the eight hundred kilometres to Arlit. The danger of becoming trapped in the dunes was too great.
A terrible piece of news had frightened everybody at the campsite.
Two families—four adults and six children—had been found dead inside their four-wheel-drive vehicles only a short distance from Tamanrasset. Both vehicles had suffered engine failure after becoming stuck in a dune.
Nobody wanted to take the same risk.
Charlie appeared less worried than the others. He was calm, philosophical and increasingly interested in accompanying me through the Devil’s Garden.
Eventually I convinced him.
One of history’s greatest adventures waited there, I explained, and such surroundings would allow him to grow as a human being and perhaps attain unsuspected spiritual heights.
I suspect Charlie had wanted to enter that emptiness from the moment he first heard its name. He possessed a highly analytical mind and wanted to discover what such a place might do to it.
Mick held him back.
He was afraid of dying, which surprised me because he was a brave and forceful man. I believed his fear came from the woman waiting for him in Britain. He loved her and was unwilling to lose her by entering something he might not be capable of surviving.
In the end, Mick had no choice. Nobody had room for him. Whether he wanted to or not, he would have to enter the Devil’s Garden.
Truthfully, I may also have been exceeding my abilities.
At least 750 kilometres of flat sand and stone lay ahead. There was almost no water, food, life or marked route. Rumour spoke of thousands of tracks crossing one another without offering the slightest indication of location or direction.
Unlike the two Englishmen, I had used the entire journey from Nordkapp to prepare and motivate myself for the Devil’s Garden. I believed that this extreme desert might answer my existential questions and place me under enough mental strain to confront the deepest part of myself.
While Charlie and Mick considered their decision, I travelled into the Hoggar Mountains.
A Drop in the Ocean
At 2,500 metres, the Catholic brotherhood of the Little Brothers of Jesus maintained a simple stone hermitage.
Rarely had I visited a place which raised me to such a spiritual height. The clear, thin air carried an immediate harmony. The religious atmosphere created by the hermit brothers made me understand why the life and ideas of Charles de Foucauld had inspired them.
Foucauld believed that prayer and hard work were the paths to God and salvation.
I could not imagine coming closer to God than one did there.
The country surrounding the hermitage seemed almost extraterrestrial. Volcanic basalt formations and strange rock pillars rose from the earth to heights above 3,300 metres.
Inside, I found a book in which Charles de Foucauld had described the place:
“The beauty of this region defies description and even the imagination. Nothing can give a person an idea of the forest of needle-shaped rock formations stretching before us. It is magnificent. One cannot see it without one’s thoughts turning to God.
“I find it difficult to take my eyes from this imposing view, whose beauty and attraction towards the infinite draw everything closer to the Creator.
“At the same time, the solitude and its wild appearance show how alone one is with Him—and that one is no more than a drop in the ocean.”
The Algerian rumor mill turning an oval chainring into a legendary giant with a triangular wheel is hilarious!
Lovely to read about - I was living in Algiers in 1991. What a beautiful journey you were on!