Fear and Loathing in the Sahara Desert

I have been in the desert for four days now and every night I settle down in the evening to read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in America, a collection of his letters from 1968 to 1976, by torchlight. This has made me mindful of the need to create a large enough body of correspondence, in order to support me in my pension years. I am not sure how this will work, as unlike HST I am not a writer, but anyway. Although, obviously HST will not be enjoying the royalties from Fear and Loathing in America as he shot himself to death last year.
Anyway, to that end I am writing this e-mail to you. I arrived in the desert on Monday night and stayed in the Funduq Afriqia and was Range Rovered by my guide/driver/cook/desert expert to the Jebel Acacus the next morning. Here, ancient volcanic rock structures protrude atop orange mountains of sand, like chocolate syrup spooling over the tops of massive scoops of mango ice-cream. No-one in sight for miles and miles around and, when the wind drops, only the sound of the plumbing of your own body. I am not against pickled sharks and silkscreens and elephant dung on canvas but when it comes down to the real thing, the natural world still has the edge on things of beauty that make me want to cry.
On the rock walls ten thousand year old carvings tell the tale of man the hunter to man the shepard and to man the vandal and man the defacer. There are some more recent Tuareg carvings, though of course they lack that subtlety of composition.
My Arab guide, Mohammed Omar, seemed to harbour ambiguous feelings about the Tuareg. Having forgotten to pack sugar, by day two he could no longer bear the horror of withdrawal and set about prowling the parts of the desert where he thought we might meet fellow travellers. We must have driven fifty miles but to no avail, when suddenly we saw a white vehicle maybe half a mile ahead. A frenzied chase ensued until the car, a white Isuzu pick-up, came into clearer view. Mohammed took his foot off the pedal, sighed and cursed, "They are Tuareg. They never give anything. They say they live here so, they don't give anything." There was some bitterness there.
He was a great guide though, even if his selection of road music wasn't quite to my tastes. Maybe Arab wedding music is an acquired taste but when those cats get into a drum groove, you had better hope it is a good one, as the chances are they will still be knocking out the same beat half an hour later. There must be a fearsome amount of repetitive stress injury amongst Arab rhythym sections. Still, the sort of guttral, Turkey-like sound that Arab women make when they are happy, particularly at wedding ceremonies, laid over the top made it a bit more interesting.
There was a nod towards Western music in the form of orchestral versions of Metallica songs and a convenient meeting of cultures half-way in the form of Cat Stevens's greatest hits. Music was also a topic of conversation, though I have to say Mohammed sometimes stretched my musical knowledge to its outer stratospheres. I had dealt with "What is a buffallo soldier?" and "What does 'I sit and drink Penny Royal Tea' mean?" to Mohammed's satisfaction when he hit me with "What is the name of that group, there are three girls and the letter X in their name?" I racked my brains in vain. I could have racked until wrack and ruin. The answer, after repeated questioning: The Cranberries. Jesus Christ! There is no X in the name, and only one fucking woman in the band!! Ah well.
After we left the Acacus, we made our way to the sand dunes. Now it has often been said that the colour of the modern cinema screen is so much realer than the real world. The dunes dispelled that myth for me. The two-tone richness of blue and orange, slowly turning to luminescent, radioactive grey as the moon rose was not just cinematic. It was even better than even better than the real thing. But the real thing at the same time.
I wandered lonely for a while and thought about all those dunes of sand. Almost on cue, a raven flew by going cawing like a rusty old motor and I thought about how these grains of sand were here before me and all my forefathers and they will bury the children of my children's children and maybe one day they will bury the entire human circus. Then again, I thought, I have more cells in my body than there are grains of sand in this whole desert (although I am not sure that is accurate) and the sand has no cells. Not even one. I can dance and sing and play the piano. I can live and love and hate and pray to be a better person. To make a minor correction: I can't sing and dance and my piano playing is not so good either.
The night was painfully cold. I awoke in the night and unzipped the tent and, able to see two hundred metres ahead of me, I surmised that the sun had returned and got unsleepingbagged and dressed to watch it. It transpired that it was merely the strength of the full moon that was giving me the ilusion of visibility almost as strong as the day. I went back to the tent, certain that with the discomfort of that cold, sleep was impossible. When I awoke, the day had broken. The guide told me that a fennec (a funny-looking desert rodent with big ears) had taken the left over chicken that he had left out for the ravens.
Next, we drove down to see the Ubari lakes, oasises in the heart of the Sahara. The oasis of Umm al-Maa ( Omm l-ilma) stood out for me. A shade of aquamarine, surrounded by reeds and bamboo shoots, surrounded by the dunes, it was like the hazy actualiasation of some parallel dream of a childhood imagination spent in the sun-kissed warmth of love and protection. A pity then, when a team of seven Italian scramblers dressed in orange shattered the stillness by charging up and down the dunes on their bikes. After a couple of minutes one of their entourage sensed that they were out of order and rushed out shouting "Basta per oggi. Ora basta!"
The last of the four lakes was Mandara. Here, a village community used to live, in front of a lake whose colours they say used to change from emerald to blue and even to red in places. However, in 1991, the village folk were forcibly removed by Gadaffi, presumably on the reasonable grounds of a lack of proper sanitation. The remains of their buildings still stand, though with walls and roofs caved in in order to stop any ideas of repatriation from the new concrete hamlet of Mandara Jedid, I think the guide said it was called. Not that they would want to move back now. Over the last couple of years, the lake has run dry and evem the reeds are beginning to die. Only a handful of Tuareg remain, selling ornaments and silver to the slow drip of tourists. As we drove off up into the sand, I looked back down on what must have once been such a harmonious scene of man and nature, now reduced to an impossible sadness.
Now I am back in Sebha, the largest Libyan town in the Sahara. My plane back to Tripoli leaves in four hours, so I will wander around until then. The people are not as surly and suspicious as I had been told they would be. There are clusters of black Africans at the roundabout in the centre of town, trying to sell their labour, though demand could never match up with the daily increasing supply that is flooding the route from sub-Saharan Africa to the coast. Still, if they have made it this far, they are only twelve hours by car from Tripoli and then, the other sea awaits. This time of water though, rather than sand. Maybe, if they are lucky, they will make it to Fortress Europe. Or be rewarded with a savage beating at the Hal-Safi detention centre in Malta.
I stayed at the Funduq Afriqia again last night, my last night here. I was watching a James Bond film on MBC2 in my room when the TV suddenly started changing channels on its own, settling on an Egyptian singer warbling a song called 'Salem Alekum', presumably the Arab riposte to Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello'. Not a ghost though. It transpired that there is only one cable connection in the hotel, which is linked to the TV in reception and illegally connected to all the other TV sets. Thus, the receptionist becomes the effective big brother. Not the Orwellian one who views us, but the one who decides, because size and might are right in the jungle of the living room, what we view on TV. In disgust I went out and bought a readily cooked chicken and ate it in my room. There was a restaurant in the hotel and eating a cooked chicken in your room may be against the rules, but I did it anyway. I guess you can take a hobo out of the streets, but you can't take the streets out of the hobo.
So for the few remaining hours I will roam the streets of Sebha and maybe read some more HST under a palm tree. Remember to keep this e-mail for posterity. Actually, maybe I will put in my blog. Yeah, I had forgotten about that. That's what I'll do.