A trip across Africa

We stopped for lunch by a stream. Alex and I forded across some white stones to get to the other side. We picked up some loose branches and broke them in half. We jumped back across the stream and picked up some stones from the river. We arranged the stones in a circle, stacked the large sticks in a circle pointing inwards and put some grass on top. I lit a match.
Alex leapt up to the car and grabbed a jerry can. He poured some of its contents over the wood. Petrol.
I gave him a lighted match. he threw it into the fire it lit up with a whoosh. "Brain beats brawn. That's the fruits of a 30,000-pound education," he said. I liked him for saying that.

* * *

I sank onto Mandy's towel.
"We've come all this way to go to fucking Benidorm?"
" Alex bought a frisbee in one of the shops behind the beach He looks happy, doesn't he."
Alex's long. blond hair flowed loose over his shoulders. The muscles on his hairless torso rippled as he jumped to try and catch the frisbee. A silver cross necklace glinted in the sun. He hadn't noticed me.
She hadn't shooed me away, so I remained on her towel, sitting with my knees drawn up and squinting at the white horses on the sea.
Alex caught the frisbee. It was Willem's turn to be in the middle. Willem came up to me, kicking deep into the sand as he walked. He collapsed onto hid sand-covered towel. His black sleeveless T-shirt was drenched in sweat.
"Oh, man. Alex is too hungry for me."
"Nice map-reading. You chose the most secluded spot on the entire coast."
Willem was lying with his eyes shut.
"Give me a break, man. All the roads had signs to Benidorm. A beach's a beach." The others plodded up to us.
Alex wore cut-off jeans with fashionable tassels. Alex smiled and said "Allright. mate.". "Funny the games always end when it's Willem's turn," said Alex, spread-eagled on his towel. His hair was swept back, his eyes shut, cross heaving on his torso.
No one answered. Nikki splashed on some more Ambre Solaire onto her legs and turned onto her stomach.

Alex came back from the telephone box. He had bad news. He had retakes. He had to go back to London, but promised to return if he could in Kano. His girlfriend, went with him.
"What is the biggest difficulty?" I asked.
"Difficulties. Drunk soldiers, sandstorms, misnavigation. Breaking down. All in the desert." said Willem
"Misnavigation...getting lost, you mean. Is that a real possibility?"
"Yes, it is possible. Many people die every year in the Sahara. More than die sailing the Pacific or climbing in the Himalayas."
"We have got all the maps, I hope. And compasses?"
"You have to buy large-scale desert maps in Tamanrasset, the last town before the deep desert in Algeria. They show every sand dune. Yes, I have a compass.

"Let's go into a cafe," said Mandy. I nodded dumbly. I needed an espresso.
We went into the cafe Nacional. A talk radio programme echoed in the tal ceiling. A table fan on the bar counter blew a breeze. The barman was reading the paper, despite the semi-darkness. There was a smell of stale olive oil. There were only two other customers. An old man sipped a black coffee carefully in a corner. He wore a beret. The other customer was munching a big salami sandwich and gulping down a big coffee with milk. The clatter of the cup on the saucer echoed in the cafe.
There were crumbs on the formica table. They didn't make bars like this in Spain
anymore. All was missing was the Franco portrait, and I could see a white space on the wall up where the flies were buzzing where a portrait might once have hung. I ordered two coffees from the counter and went outside.
Mandy was sitting with her head in her hands. She had chosen I ordered two black coffees and sat down. Mandy looked up and gave me her biggest, whitest grin.
“I thought you were going to get back together,” I said. .

;
Mandy squinted and looked out on the highway. She tracked the trajectory of a
motorbike until it had weeeeeAAHHHHHHHHHOOoooeeewed past us. It was very quiet. Some coins pi inked on the counter inside. The man with beret walked out, casting aquick glance at us. I looked at my watch, 11 am. "Eso es Radio Nacional d'Espana FM. Noveinte-seis, punto uno. Peep-peep-peep. Ahora, en la guerra en Iraq..." Someone turned the radio down. The Mexican revolutionary
look-alike bar-owner came and took our coffees away. "Algo mas?"
"Dos cervezas," I said.
Before I had closed my mouth, Mandy leaned over the table and kissed me. We kissed and we kissed until I pulled tway when the waiter coughed and put two
beers' on the table. She tasted of coffee and something sweet. .
Still dizzy with Mandy's sweet taste in my mouth, I went into to pay for the beers and the coffees. The bar owner looked up from his paper and stared at me with baggy eyes. “Cinco euros."


* * *


There is a certain age when many men buy a boat and go
to sea. The desert is a kind of sea. The desert poured past, the light as blinding as
darkness, the sand as white as snowfield. Stones and gravel, gravel and sand, sand and stones.
Heat distorts perception, perhaps it was one hour or many.
It was early evening now, and dunes – huge dunes could be seen for miles away,
I was glad to see trees: when the ground is flat, thE sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being big yet thereis so much further to go. It was an oasis – there were some berber mud houses. We parked and ate some dates off the trees.
We began to climb, at the top of the dune, we saw a quilt of dunes, set in relief by the sun, stretching to the horizon. Then the stars came out, billions of them. The stars were like green chandeliers….I switchED on the shortwave radio. Above me is a wonderful
sense of cool, listening to the rise and fall of interference, the rolling of the huge roaring breakers
of space…..I sent a text message to Brussels. There is no reply.

***

We drove all day, until there were just two things on my vision, a faint black band, which danced all the time before my eyes, and two giant spaces of blinding whiteness on either side. Three vehicles passed us, heading north. This was the motorway of the Saharan desert, the only tarmacked road in any of the Saharan countries that headed this far south. At nine, after the whiteness had dissolved into another technicolor sunset and our world had shrunk to a cone of worn asphalt in front of the headlights, the first streetlights started lining the road. There was an unbelievable sense of relief at returning to civilisation. We drove into the town, endless rows of cubes that shone ghostly white in the street lights. These were divided off by a grid of very wide streets, a nothingness of heat and space. We checked into a cheap hotel with turquoise walls and no airconditioning, and fell into a deep comatose sleep.

Tamanrasset was the last outpost. It was in the middle of nothing, thousands of kilometres either way of emptiness.
You could draw a straight line from the Atlantic ocean to the Nile and you wouldn't come across a single habitation, except this town of 15,000, marked as a black circle on the Michelin map. This was the biggest settlement between EI Golea, thousand kilometres to the north and almost in the Algerian Mediterranean, and Arlit, a Uranium-mining town in northern Niger which was our next inhabited destination. We felt as remote as a moon base

We stayed three days, filling up with food and water, petrol, and drinking beers at five pounds a bottle at the hotel Meerhaba.
Our brief rendez-vous with air-conditioning seemed like a dream. Civilisation was an abnormality, a freak, and the flatness, the eternally blue sky, and the sun seemed perfectly normal. As soon as the tarmac ended, the piste, the series of tyre racks that sprawled in every direction, like a railway station switchyard. At the Algerian border post, we said goodbye to our guide, Mohamed.

** *

The other soldiers looked on, thin, black charcoal sketches squatting silently under the wilting palm trees. They looked like famine victims in uniform. Their olive coloured tunics hung loosely over concave torsoes. Their small heads were dwarfed by the helmets which looked like enormous green cloches hovering over small globes of charred Christmas pudding. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of the south Vietnamese army, tiny orientals in GI uniforms designed for beefy
Midwesterners.
Their skin seemed to absorb the light; you couldn't make out individual features.
Except for their eyes, white slits which stared at us impassively. One of the soldiers whisked away sandflies with the palm of his hand, keeping his gaze fixed on us.
Another took a sip of his beer, looking at us down his nose as he swigged the
bottle.
The Algerians, with their generous, semitic features, rounded noses, faint body
odour and stomachs that strained against and flopped over their belts seemed like
amiable buffoons compared to this impassive concentration,
"Eh. Monsieur et madame. Qu'est-ce que vous voulez?" said the leader, standing in front of the car now and dragging on his cigarette slowly. He wore Ray Ban pilots'
shades which reflected a wide streak of blue from the car
"Nous pouvons passer la frontiere cet apres-midi?," I said.
He took another drag of his cigarette. Waiting. They had plenty of time to kill out
here. We were the only car.
"La frontiere?" .
Not understanding. As if he's been drugged or asleep and just woken up.
"Oui, la frontiere. C'est la frontiere, non?"
"Oui, C'est la frontiere."
"Voulez-vous les passports?"
He took another drag of his cigarette and threw it into the dust. The shadows were
still staring at us. They still hadn't moved, except to take the occasional swig from
their bottles, one hand on their M-Sixteens jammed in the sand.
"Oui. Tous les documents de la voiture," the boss said finally.
Mandy brought out of the glove compartment our money belt containg passports,
all documents relating to the car and vaccination certificates. She hesitated. He
waited. Then she handed it over to him.
He walked off to one of the sheds.

One of the soldiers took another swig of his beer. Mandy shielded her eyes from the sun that was saying goodbye on the horizon,

The Boss returned after twenty minutes.
"Why were you deported?" he said in French. "Deported?" I said. I didn't know what
he was on about. I had never been deported from anywhere.
He showed me. A stamp on page six said: "Departed New Zealand 12 August 1988. Auckland Airport."
"I departed not deported. Can you hear the difference. It means 'parti', not
'deporte'. "
I grabbed the passport from his limp hands.
"Look. Here it says, departed from Australia, departed from India, departed from Malaysia. You don't think I have been deported from all these countries, do you? I'm not an international criminal, you know."
He wasn't smiling. Instead he took out two more documents from under his arm. These were the international vaccination certificates, small yellow booklets with stamps of the typhoid, cholera, and other anti-tropical disease jabs we had both had.
"Vous n'avez pas ete vaccine contre la fievre jaune."
"Oh yes I have. Look here."
I showed him. It was on the last page, a stamp which said in English "Yellow Fever"
and the date.
He didn't bat an eyelid as he took out the car documents. Our laissez-passer through North Africa fell out of the plastic folder and settled in the sand. That was useless now.
"Ou est votre carnet de passage."
"Carnet de passage?"
"Can we buy one now?"
He looked away. I could see the whites in the corner of his eyes now. The light caught his skin, a
and I could see it was shiny, like polished ebony.
"A demain." In an African accent uh-de-mun.
Tomorrow.
"What time?"
He tensed his cheek muscles. He had scars on his cheek, tribal markings inscribed at puberty that make every Hausa look as if he has been in a Harlem street fight. "A demain." he said again and swung on his heels

Had I more space I would have described the roadblocks every
kilometre or so in Niger and Nigeria, which were sometimes just rope suspended
between posts, other times the whole barbed wire, burning-tyre set-up. Always they
were manned, either by men in uniforms of varying completeness, sometimes tunic
over a bare chest and shorts, or by men in full guerilla-surpression battle gear
armed with M-16s which they used to wave in our faces when they demanded our passports.
If I had more space I would have described driving on the one tarmacked road in the whole of Niger, signs showing that it was built by the European Community and a cornucopia of
road signs which were useless because there wasn't a single other motorised vehicle using the road. The Africans always seemed to be crossing the road, like ants carrying sacks and
pots and sticks between clusters of grass huts which grew out of the dust-brown,
In Cameroun, the mud tracks through the jungle
were so churned up by the monsoons that it took days to travel between
neighbouring villages, a distance of a few kilometres. At the end of each day, we'd
look like mudwrestlers after sometimes hours of digging the car out of bogged
down positions. Going up the hills, you could usually fishtail upwards, jerking the
wheel raipidly in both directions to get enough momentum to stay up and go
onwards. But when we were going on the flats, and encountered some of those
water-logged holes which were large enough to swallow a large lorry, there was no
way to go forwards but to go through, which meant a lot of digging and manouvring
with the sand ladders - here used, of course, for the same purpose. When there was a really difficult stretch, we just queued up with all the other trucks and four
wheel drives who had to be somewhere yesterday and waited for a government
owned bulldozer to arrive and tow each of us to safety. They were long waits, and
though most of the negroes took it stoically, slepping in the cabs or playing cards
on upturned sopaboxes, a few were ready to pay almost any price to get through.
Gangs of a dozen men would assemble and try to push the eager driver's car
through the mud, which sometimes worked, Sometimes didn't. At any rate it was
very dangerous because the car, which always spun dresses of mud, sometimes slipped backwards or sideways onto the pushers. Once, one of them had to be
carried away. We were told he was dead.

At one particulary intractable hill, we had waited for three days in the rain for the
bulldozer when we tried to do it ourselves. We had pushed the car half-way up,
without the help of the waiting black drivers, who sat around laughing at our efforts,
when Toyoto pickup bounded at top speed over the crest from the other side and
smashed into the side of the Landrever, throwing me harmlessly into the mud.
It took minutes for the assembled blacks to calm the man, whose facial veins were
almost bursting and eyes almost popping as he hurled abuse at us - although of
course the crash was his fault.
It took us three weeks before the car arrived in Douala, mud-spattered and slightly
battered. Up to then, we had had many chances to talk to local villagers, who took
great delight at watching the mud-crossing spectacle. One of the most intelligent
was a primary schoolteacher who looked incruously plump and out of place in his
safari suit and wire-frame glasses. He spoke fluent English; this was the English
speaking part of a country divided not only by hundreds of tribal languages but two
colonial languages too, the result of the country originally being split into French
and English rule.
"Why don't you have any tarmac roads?"
"The French-speakers dominate the government, therefore they spend all the state
money on imroving the roads in the French-speakers' sector."
"Is it a big problem for you, these mudroads?"
"It ensure that we will always remain the most backward part of the country. It's
quicker to get to Lagos than to the nearest Cameroonian village with a tarmac road
leading to the rest of the country - that village is French-speaking of course."
"Why don't you English speakers revolt, or refuse to pay your taxes."

Once or twice we would sneak into the Hilton toilets to try and wash ourselves,
stealing the complimentary soaps and making monkey faces in the life-size mirrors,
looking a bit like monkeys ourselves in our unshaven state and mudstained
clothes, until white men in suits came into pee, their faces almost a luminous white
in the fluorescent strip-lighting. They would look at us disapprovingly and we knew
then we'd spent too long in Africa.

The palm trees have gone now, to be replaced by another kind of jungle.
It ended, then it really ended. the rain pounded the terminal roof like machine-gun
fire and the baggage handlers had taken shelter under the planes, rainsodden birds, dancing to their own private gigs.
"Cheers to that most contagious of tropical diseases."
"Do you feel better?"
"Much better," she said.
"Sometimes distance is a better healer than time."
"Time, distance - two sides of the same coin.