From the hot and sandy expanses of Algeria in August come forth my first travel recollections on the blog, as composed from a tranquil hotel in the palmeraie outside Ghardaïa. Let us plunge straight in:
“I thought I would offer up a few observations from Algeria, where I’m currently spending a few weeks. I hope it’s of some interest, but it’s also OK if only my parents read to the end.
Many people’s first reaction to my choice of destination was concern for my security, so I’ll address that first: I’ve not yet felt unsafe here (and how it feels on the ground is a good indicator of safety) beyond a long bus-journey without a seat-belt. I’m generally avoiding border areas and the far south of the country, which is supposedly incredibly beautiful but is also home to Boko Haram, AQ in the Maghreb, et al, and the rest of the time I’m going on local recommendations. Ghardaïa, where I am writing this from, was restive last week but safe now (although I’m still staying out of town). So in summary on that point: no need to worry.
As to my route here, I’m still not flying (for environmental reasons) but was chuffed to make it to Algeria in 48 short hours: Eurostar to Lyon (making the most of their newly extended service), Renfe to Barcelona, where I spent the night, afternoon train to Alicante, and from there to Oran, Algeria’s second city, by overnight ferry. I felt like I entered the Maghreb as soon as I walked into the ferry terminal, where Arabic was spoken (but French by the staff) and a cafe was furiously serving up iftar meals to Algerians breaking the ramadan fast.
My arrangements for arrival in Oran were hazy at best, and a lady I briefly helped taking her suitcase onto the ferry introduced herself to me and straightaway offered to give me her phone number in case I needed help in the city, so my experience of Algerian hospitality had begun before I had even left Spain. Linda eventually hosted me for a night with utter kindness. She lives in Paris and so had not seen her family for months, but yet they straightaway welcomed me in and waited on me with various fresh, home-baked madeleines and syrupy semolina sweets. Later on her brother Mukhtar took me with to the pool club where he stays with a crowd of friends until late during the summer, where I downed sugary mint tea (surprisingly bitter in Algeria) and avoided humiliation with pool-skills that less rusty than I had feared. What with heat (and during ramadan the fasting) it now made utter sense to me that everything closes up in the afternoon between lunch and around 4.30pm, and people make the most of the night. I have started luxuriating in an Algerian siesta, due to a lack of alternative options as much as the need for rest.
From Oran, and via the old Islamic cultural and academic centre of Tlemcen, I took the overnight bus to the town of Taghit. This was now true Sahara, where each town is an improbable oasis amongst endless sand dunes, and Taghit itself is dwarfed by an enormous row of them. The cities are all dusty, with sand appearing and piling up wherever it’s not actively brushed away, burying walls, staircases, passages. I find something about sand uniquely frightening – its absolute lifelessness, its weightiness despite the tininess of its grains – but I realised this is partly cultural after I asked a local Sahrawi (they speak a Berber language) how they view sand. Indeed for them sand is central to life: they traditionally covered floors with it, and noone seems to mind a bit (often: a lot) of sand in their food.
I next visited the larger town of Timimoun, the so-called oasis rouge. Here as in Taghit there is a well-preserved csar, or old fort, where the buildings are built of red earth and palm-trees, with thick walls and narrow passages keeping the sun’s heat away. The government has even set up a new national centre for research into dried-earth building techniques, where I met some genial young architects who have moved down from the metropolitan north. The area around Timimoun is home to many more impressive csars and fortresses, as well as many examples of fougara systems, an ancient mode of irrigation apparently found only here, in ancient Mesopotamia and in China – incredibly intricate dried-earth canals taking water from wells and around palm-tree plantations. Only in one case did the French insert an art-deco swimming pool into the setup.
The desert town of Beni Abbés is home to a small Catholic hermitage, part of to the Brothers of Père Foucault, where I visited and met the monks. I’m not sure what I expected (perhaps some kind of mediterranean Friar Tuck?) but the two frères were simply two late-middle aged chaps in shorts and shirts who wouldn’t look out of place at the National Gallery café. They were very friendly, fairly quiet, and totally adapted to their incredible choice of lifestyle, in a small town in the central Algerian Sahara – the first time I tried to visit they were out visiting locals for Eid, but the next morning they gave me some of the sweets they’d received and showed me around the hermitage. Their austere chapel is maintained as it was built by Foucault: high pillars supporting the ceiling, sandy floor, and a single simple mural of Christ in pastel colours flanked by a pair of blackened candle niches. I doubt the twelve tiny stools are often filled for prayer and cannot imagine the choice to leave France for such a remote existence.
For everyone else in Algeria, it seems that Muslim observance is a central part of life, more than anywhere I have visited: after two weeks here, I have not knowingly met anyone that does not fast at Ramadan, pray, and identify as Muslim. That is in contrast to, say, Iran, where most people I met were secular (albeit metropolitan). It truly feels like I am in the Muslim World.
I have now left the desert and am in the Ghardaïa region in the M’zab Valley. It’s an isolated region with a strict social code, so that I am not even allowed to enter the villages without a guide. There is a remarkable local style of dress, with the women wearing a large white robe covering their entire body, leaving only their right eye exposed through a triangular gap in the fabric. I try not to stare but find it quite enchanting: sometimes the figure stoops and the eye has a fold of wrinkled skin; sometimes the ankles are young and there is a large, fleetingly curious eye with large lashes. Today I visited the village of El Atteuf (the other villages were closed up as it is Friday), built like the other villages on a rocky hill, so that only the outermost streets fit anything other than donkeys and hand-drawn carts. The village contains the 900-year old Sidi Ibrahim Mosque – it is beautiful in white, almost like a 1960s modernist beach-house: an abstract, organic shape, small varying windows, the whole sunken into the ground. Le Corbusier visited the mosque and it inspired his chapel at Rongchamp, which I now hope to seek out at some point in the future.
Indeed Frenchness is also inescapable in Algeria, which was a full part of France until 1962, forming three départements. French is on all the street signs, and a good enough second language that I parked my Arabic-learning efforts early on. However, the older generation is noticeably more francophone, and beyond the north people are less fluent (a combination, I suspect, of having Berber as a first language, pushing French down to third-language status after Arabic and of poorer education down here in general). There are also grand buildings and town squares obviously dating from the colonial period, as well as baguettes – although my favourite French-y image so far has was the scene played out nightly on the sandy street outside my hostel in Timimoun by a formidable group of pétanque players, working their expertise in full Berber garb.
I’m starting to approach the end of my trip, and I expect that Algiers, from where I take the ferry back to Spain, will again have more obviously European influences, while the Roman sites I intend to visit are a far cry from the desert cities I’ve seen so far.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve reflected a little on the nature of travel, helped in my ruminations by Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Travels with Herodotus’. Kapuściński introduces his readers to strange, foreign peoples and customs; while Herodotus before him introduced his audience to whole lands that were previously unknown. What then is the point of travel in the twenty-first century, when the whole world seems to be known, selling Coke and Real Madrid shirts; when you see the same Mecca poster of two crying girls from Algeria to Iraq, and it’s all at your fingertips as well? I think part of the answer may be that today we don’t just wonder at the foreign, but can bridge the distance between what is familiar and what we might previously have feared. As Kapuściński puts it, sometimes it is the description of outer differences which help us realise our unity. But I suspect I will carry on turning over this particular question for a bit longer.
That is my tuppence for now. I need to gird myself for the night-bus to Constantine. I hope you find it interesting. Please pass on if you like but preferably let me know if you plan to publish it…”
This final request was not heeded, so that readers of a certain newsletter may have one less reason to visit this blog (although they remain warmly welcomed).
My final days in Algeria were just as enjoyable, the superb Roman remains and francophone cities of the north a fascinating contrast to the country’s south. I returned home once more by ferry and train, and have nearly got over the stress of missing all of my rail connections (for the first time – after a four-hour ferry delay), the trauma replaced by memories of conversations on a Spanish train with hip Turkish academics lecturing in Sweden but moving to Holland, and of a fresh pastry on Paris’s Île Saint-Louis on a deserted Sunday morning. Algeria was truly wonderful, but the French make better pains au chocolat.
