Long day’s journey into sand matting.
Woke to a harmattan haze with the rising sun a huge orange disc in the sky, its brightness dulled by the grainy air. Last breakfast for this shift, with slim pickings of bread.
Moving on, it quickly looked like we were up for a long hard day of travel, with nothing to soften the harshness of our journey through baron, sandy and tufted landscapes swirling with dust - a mirror image of our drive into Timbuktu. Sat in the back of the truck grinding sandy teeth, my sunglasses collecting drifts of sand.
Having just last night written about not having photographed the handsome long-horned cattle so common in this part of Africa, we came upon an extraordinary panorama of people and cattle in the blurred haze. A group of herdsmen and tattooed and scarred women (Tuaregs or Falane) were shepherding them into a compound for injections and ear tagging, the calves roped together in a line, and hundreds of older animals behind them, the bulls with magnificent sweeping horns. Our enthusiastic arrival almost stampeded the animals, the men having to keep them together and settle them down while we photographed the animals and the people. who stood quietly and proudly for us in their woven hats and fabric wraps. It was fun taking some portraits of men because I have taken so many of women.
From there we drove through Niger border formalities and into the city of Nguigmi where I wandered through the “bulk store” end of the main market. A single line of mat huts backed onto a huge area of dust and Willy Willys swirling through the legs of more than 60 hobbled camels, some sitting quietly, others determined not to stay where they had been put and hopping around or crawling on their knees. The back walls of the huts were lined with piles of camel saddles: simple A-frames with minimal padding, some like sticks tied together, others decoratively carved, and many with carved frontal pieces up to 40cm high, encircled with rings of engraved silver to form a beautiful horn.
Many of the women were almost classically beautiful, with fine, high cheekbones, their heads loosely shrouded or bound; most wore huge silver earrings, heavy silver rings and arm bands of worked silver, while some had yellow metal crescents in their ears. At the end of the market was a collection of shanty huts with children sitting out the front, against a backdrop of filled sacks and piles of rubbish.
This market enthralled me and I loved every minute of my wanderings, but I got back to the truck to find that nearly everyone else had had a bad time, with aggressive children pushing them and snatching things from them.
On the road again, we had a trying afternoon of driving on grit, long stretches of hardpacked white ground, which on closer inspection proved to be vast beds of white limestone and millions of tiny white shells, and deep sand drifts that gave us an afternoon of sand mattings drills, the groaning engine signalling a rapid disgorge of people from the truck and a running matting performance. We were a precision team after the 11th time!
The Douglases came across a huge longhorned cow skull which we mounted on the front of Stanley.
Later in the day we found ourselves on rutted road, taking a narrow path between bushes, the two trucks alternating in the lead all afternoon. At one stage the sand looked so white from the truck, with tiny sprigs of green, that it could have been the Antarctic.
The Tchad border was a new experience in bizarre. Perhaps high on drugs or mad or maybe just pissed off with life, a ranting chief with no legs lectured Kelvin at length about his hatred for Libya and Gaddafi, whom he had fought, and told Kel off for living so close to France yet not being fluent in French. Then he asked for some indication of Kel’s friendship, and a mad scramble on board Stanley produced some port in a whiskey bottle.
During that carry on, the rest of us were forced to attention while the flag was lowered, the soldiers and us standing erect with respect as a soldier beat time with a lump of wood against a wheel rim hanging in a tree. The folded flag was then marched off by the men, one right-ing and left-ing in bare feet and thongs.
We then got the unwelcome news that the lowering of the flag signalled the frontier was closed and we would have to camp just out of town, leaving our passports in the trusted hands of the insane chief. Before we were allowed to leave, however, we had to gift some diesel to several of the khaki-clad men. I was so angry that we had to give in to these toy soldiers-and wondered what tomorrow would bring.
We set up camp among burrs and swirling sand.
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