This is the third part of an English version of my second book, På cykel genom Afrika—Cycling Through Africa—first published in Sweden in 1991. The journey began at North Cape in September 1988 and ended at Cape Agulhas in 1990, after approximately 33,000 kilometres by bicycle.
I was twenty-six when I entered Africa. I have translated and edited the original Swedish, but I have kept the reactions, judgements and language of the young man who made the journey. Some of them are uncomfortable to read today. I have not rewritten him to make him appear wiser than he was.
The previous article ended in Tamanrasset. The passage below begins on the sixth morning after I left the town with the British cyclists Charlie and Mick and entered the Devil’s Garden.
“How does it feel, mate?”
I asked Mick on the sixth morning after our departure.
He lay on his back, staring blankly at the roof of the tent while we waited for somebody to give the order to get up and face the day.
“It feels hard. I’ve been trying to explain all along that I’m not motivated to push a bicycle through deep sand in fifty-degree heat when we haven’t the faintest idea where we are.”
He looked sadly at Charlie and me.
Charlie and I worried about him. He often cursed loudly into the emptiness, calling our existence in the Devil’s Garden a scorching and exhausting hell.
The work was brutal and the heat merciless. From time to time we also wondered where in God’s name we were. The vehicle tracks were often barely visible and gave no indication of either direction or the correct course.
For Charlie and me, the positive side still outweighed the hardship. The silence gave me a feeling of harmony with myself and everything around me. We were far beyond human civilisation, and for long periods I did not want to leave.
“What are you so worried about?” I asked Mick, slightly irritated. “What can possibly happen that would make our situation worse than it already is?”
“I don’t know. I have a feeling everything is going to hell. I dream that we won’t find any more water. We’ve been bloody lucky so far, but I have no motivation left. I feel ill and afraid. Something bad is coming.”
“There’s no reason to worry, Mick,” Charlie said quietly.
Charlie had behaved from the moment we left Tamanrasset as though crossing the Devil’s Garden were an ordinary part of his day.
We stepped out of the tent. A sudden gust tore my tent from the ground and threw it five metres away.
“What was that?” I whispered.
The sandstorm
Minutes later the storm struck so violently that it was almost impossible to see or hear. We had to scream to communicate. At a shouted command, all three of us threw ourselves into the tent, but the wind forced the poles flat against the ground and pressed us down beneath the fabric.
Sharp sand found its way into every fold and corner. Breathing became difficult.
We curled into the foetal position with our backs towards the storm. It worked.
Five hours later the storm eased.
We crawled out badly shaken. Almost all our equipment lay beneath sand. The vehicle tracks and footprints that had marked our route from Tamanrasset had nearly vanished. The morning coolness had gone. The heat was upon us.
We broke camp and managed to push the bicycles one kilometre before the storm returned.
Once more we threw ourselves into the tent. This time the air beneath the flattened canvas was unbearably hot. The heat drained the strength from us and made us think about water.
Our supply was already meagre. None of us dared drink.
Mick shouted above the wind.
“Where the hell are we going to find water now? If this doesn’t stop, we’ll die. You can’t see farther than the end of your nose. There’s sand everywhere.”
During the previous six days, we had managed each day to attract the attention of the few other desert travellers.
“How can anyone find us?” Mick continued. “This won’t end well. We’re going to die. I’m going to die. We might as well give up.”
He meant it. All desire to live seemed to have left him.
I looked at Charlie. He was deeply shocked, close to breaking down himself. His best friend wanted to give up.
Helplessness came over me. Then panic.
“Air!”
I shouted the word, tore open the tent and threw myself outside.
The sand lashed the exposed parts of my body. It hurt. Ten metres away stood one of the concrete pillars that were supposed to mark the route every five kilometres. This one told us that we were 270 kilometres from Tamanrasset.
We had seen only five such pillars since leaving the town.
I crawled towards it, sat with my back to the storm and raised the binoculars. Every hour we searched the emptiness around us for anything that might reveal where we were or which direction to take.
I had barely looked through them when I saw something.
“Mick! Mick!” I screamed, stumbling back towards the tent. “There’s a car out there. There’s somebody inside it. If we help him out of the sand, he’ll take you with him. It’s over, Mick. You’re going to live.”
Mick emerged carrying an empty water container. It was a Peugeot buried almost to its axles. The driver had not seen us. He sat staring into a sand dune with a blank and terrified expression. Perhaps he was waiting for death.
I knocked as hard as I could on the passenger window.
Nothing.
I knocked again.
The sound brought him to life. He turned, saw us and began to scream. For several long minutes he screamed from pure fear. He tried to open the door on the other side and flee into the Sahara, but the wind held it shut.
At last he lowered the window.
“What do you want? Who are you?” he shouted in French.
I held up the water container. He nodded fearfully.
He gave us water and bread. He also agreed to take Mick. He would need the extra pair of hands, because the back of the Peugeot carried two heavy engines and he would certainly become stuck again.
Charlie and I watched them disappear into the sandstorm.
No worries, no sweat
Charlie felt that he had deserted the best friend with whom he had agreed to stay for the entire journey from Morocco to Togo.
“When you think about the conditions we endure every day, you have to wonder whether we’ll ever meet again. Do you think it will work out, Mike?” he asked many times when we rested.
“We’ll make it, Charlie. No worries, no sweat, old friend,” I told him.
I was certain we would make it through. With each passing day I felt stronger.
There were moments when I thought some higher power guided my steps. Charles de Foucauld’s words about solitude, God and being no more than a drop in the sea were constantly present in my mind.
The following day the immense rock formations of Gara Eckar appeared in the distance like a hallucination.
After days of uncertainty, the rocks proved that we were still on the right course. Gara Eckar was marked on my map, and thousands of vehicle tracks converged upon it from every direction.
At the cliffs, a force filled all my senses. My lifelong doubts and constant anxieties disappeared. For the first time in a long while, we heard birds and flies.
The cliffs also carried obscenities scratched into the rock, excrement, beer cans and rubbish. The sight of it filled me with anger. What did these arrogant creatures, guilty of this destruction, have to do with Gara Eckar?
We climbed towards the highest of the sandstone formations. It should have been difficult without ropes, but after what seemed only a few minutes, we stood on a ledge barely two body-lengths wide, five hundred metres above the surrounding desert.
In every direction lay a seemingly endless ocean of sand.
It felt as though we were standing in a vast cathedral at the absolute centre of the Earth.
Four days later, after more deep sand, sharp stones, heat and water-bright mirages, we reached In Guezzam on the Algerian side of the border.
Across the border at Assamaka, travellers told us that the remaining 250 kilometres to Arlit would be easier. An oil drum or metal post marked the direction every five kilometres, but beyond the sulphur-smelling border post the desert became infinitely flat and the sand deeper.
The nights saved us
“Oh, dear God, it’s finally over,” Charlie sighed every evening.
The agonising day gave way to the night.
South of Assamaka, cycling became almost impossible. We pushed the heavy bicycles through deep sand in fifty-degree heat. Before the border, we had at least been able to ride for part of the day in our lowest gears. The desert had contained dunes and hills that gave some indication of direction.
Now it was endlessly flat. The only shapes were lake-like mirages.
At midday we stretched part of a tent between the bicycles and lay beneath it for five hours. The burning fabric hung one centimetre above our noses. We lay there in an anxious state of dark thoughts until it was time to return to the heat for one final effort.
At night the stubborn flies disappeared. Charlie came partly out of the apathy that held him during the day.
Charlie’s thoughts often left the desert altogether. When I asked where they had gone, he said he was thinking about beer and proper food.
We ate macaroni in one form or another three times a day.
His normal curiosity had disappeared. He sometimes stood motionless, indifferent to everything around him, and I had to ask him to make him move and continue pushing south-east towards Arlit.
Once the sun went down, a huge moon lit our camp. Millions of stars filled the black sky. The harsh and confused words of the day were forgotten, and we spoke lyrically about the Sahara. We told each other what a privilege it was to travel through it by bicycle.
After three weeks in the Devil’s Garden, a death-white shape appeared on the horizon.
It was the uranium factory at Arlit.
Arlit
I felt joy that we had crossed this unknown stretch of desert and survived. Food, rest and an abundant supply of water waited beyond the factory. But I also worried about what waited there.
At Assamaka we had already heard rhythmic Black music instead of the plaintive Arab songs of the north. The border guards had been loud Black Africans with booming laughter and a great thirst for beer, utterly unlike the quiet Muslim Arabs across the border.
At the campsite Charlie and I found Mick. He had been seriously ill for almost two weeks. But when we arrived, he was in full vigour and happy to see us. He immediately took us into Black Africa: first to the bar, then to the great market.
“Love is for Mike,” a woman whispered in pidgin English as she massaged my erection with the toes of her left foot. Her Black face carried a seductive, brilliant white smile.
“Black women are tight and taste sweet between the legs compared with those bone-dry white sluts,” she continued as she tried to pull down my shorts and unzip her jeans.
“This isn’t the right place,” I hissed. I was slightly drunk and unsure of myself. “Love—or whatever your name is—even if I want to, it goes against my principles to pay for a woman. That isn’t real love. At least that is something I still believe in.”
Uncertain what I actually wanted, I looked towards the noisy bar and the dancing, embracing couples in Arlit’s only hotel. Mick and Charlie were caught in the same situation. Two Nigerien prostitutes tried by every available means to sell their bodies to the shocked Britons.
Like me, they poured down great quantities of beer. It arrived ice-cold in a place whose powerful atmosphere was shaped by rhythmic Black African music.
The strangest collection of people I had ever encountered seemed to have gathered beneath the turning ceiling fans: transvestites, French criminals, Nicaraguan pimps, West African prostitutes, Peugeot travellers and local fighters.
Bloody knife fights were common. So were furious customers who discovered that they had misunderstood what was in the package when they had gone to bed with one of the beautiful transvestites.
The beer, ceiling fans and music made us three cycling adventurers prefer the hotel to the campsite on the outskirts of town.
The market
The market was another world.
The first people to catch my attention were the large and jovial women selling everything from freshly slaughtered livestock hanging from wooden poles to dried fish from the River Niger. They wore the most fantastic, brilliantly coloured dresses I had ever seen. The colours almost hurt my eyes.
The reserved older men were equally magnificent in long robes and small embroidered caps, even when they sold ordinary Western trinkets such as digital watches and canned food. Like the women, they belonged to the Hausa people, traders by tradition since the seventh century.
The market overflowed with food, trinkets and members of many African peoples. Many men carried scars on their faces that identified their tribe. Others wore Hausa clothing. Then there were the Fulani warriors, the models of the market. Today they were mainly nomadic cattle herders, but they walked through the stalls with the bearing of warriors. The men and women were tall, muscular and graceful, and the men’s elaborate hairstyles would have made a punk green with envy.
Despite all this, Mick first led us to a few huts made from corrugated iron where Arlit’s bicycle repairers worked.
There I saw one of the most advanced puncture repairs of my life.
An inner tube had two enormous holes. The repairer had no patch, rubber solution or tools, so he simply tied two hard knots, one on each side of the holes, and put the tube back inside the tyre.
The owner and repairer burst out laughing when I explained that it would never work.
The wheel wobbled wildly as the owner rode away through the deep sand of the main street, but it worked and he appeared satisfied.
It was a fantastic feeling to be back in so-called civilisation. Certainly we endured endless demands for money or cigarettes, and after every pedal stroke speculators offered a ridiculous price for the bicycle. Even so, we left Arlit with expectant and open minds, left the Sahara and Arabia behind, and pedalled into the Sahel on a paved road with a powerful tailwind behind us.
Long live civilisation!
wow what an amazing adventure.