RTW Leg 112
Dawn.
GATB-DAUA 753 nm.
Tombouctou-Adrar.  Ancient Trans-Sahara caravan route.
ETE: 4.5 Hours.
Terminal Departure and Terminal Arrival

NARRATIVE

Traditional transportation in fancy dress

This morning we head northward along the ancient caravan routes that ran from Timbuktu (Tombouctou) to Adrar and then the Mediterranean coast.  The Berbers were heavily engaged in the trans-Saharan trade. They set up a kind of multiple exchange whereby they carried Mediterranean trade products such as copper and manufactured goods south into the Sahara and exchanged them for salt, which was mined there. This salt was then carried further south to the forests of the Niger and the southwest African coast, where it was traded for gold, which they then carried home, to great profit. 

This is the Sahara, the desert of deserts.  The name itself derives from the Arabic noun sahra `, meaning desert, and its plural, sahara `. It is also related to the adjective ashar, meaning desertlike and carrying a strong connotation of the reddish color of the vegetationless plains.  Appropriate.  To get some sense of the place, a few facts are in order:

The Sahara is the world's largest desert, about the size of the United States including Alaska.  It fills the northern third of Africa, stretching 3,100 miles from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. In the north it is bounded by the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean.  In the south it encounters no geographic barrier. There it has expanded into the populated grasslands of the Sahel, uprooting millions of people, throwing them against one another, and spawning wars.  Expansion, which is apparently the result of long-term climatic changes, accelerated by overpopulation, overgrazing, and deforestation, is neither uniform nor ineluctable.  There are years even now when rainfall and vegetation push the desert back. From north to south the Sahara is at present about 1,200 miles deep.

Unlike deserts caused by features of topography, the Sahara is a weather desert, caused by the flow and physics of the atmosphere.  Imagine it as a solar-powered air pump.  The thermal equator, a line connecting the hottest points on the globe, runs through Africa ten to twenty degrees north of the geographic equator—in other words, just south of the Sahara.  As air is heated along this line, it rises. As it rises, it cools, and forms rainstorms. These storms define the southern limit of the desert.  Meanwhile, at the surface the rising air sucks in dense Saharan winds from the north.  These winds in turn are replenished by the air directly overhead.  Since the sinking air contains virtually no moisture, northern Africa is a desert.  The weather is a closed loop, completed far above the surface by southerly winds.

The Erg Chech along which we fly.

Evaporation rates in the Sahara are the highest in the world.  The relative humidity averages 30 percent, and it has been recorded as low as 2.5 percent. If you measure dryness by the net yearly amount of radiant heat at the surface versus the amount of heat that would be necessary to evaporate the annual rainfall—the so-called dryness ratio—the excess evaporative power of the Sahara ranges from a factor of ten to infinity.  The ratio is high partly because there is so little rain. Most of the Sahara receives less than three inches a year (New York's annual rainfall is forty-three inches.)  Even the wettest areas, along the outer edges, suffer from unreliability: it may rain today and next week, and then not again for years. There are large areas where nothing grows.  At the center of the Sahara are 800,000 square miles of hyperarid plateaus, some of which have been practically sterilized by drought. In such places bacteria die quickly, and cadavers, partly mummified, decompose slowly.  Think of sundried apricots. [For an example, see http://www.ngtraveler.com/ngm/flashback/9903.html ]

(Facts from William Langewiesche's 1991 article in the Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/langew/extreme3.htm .)

We travel along the legendary Trans Sahara, which is now marked on maps as a road and might lead the unwary to expect a modern highway.  In reality, however, it is a broken surface with large gaps missing for miles at a time, leaving nothing but tracks in the desert.  Experienced truck drivers, the modern-day caravan masters, cross the desert by sweeping left and right to avoid soft sand and using the nominal route as an indirect marker.  Typically, the veteran drivers navigate by the hue and shape of the sand and by the smell of the wind.  They proceed accordingly.  Each year, many become lost in the desert and some die of thirst.  (This trip suggests an emergency kit that includes plenty of water.  See "Thirst" below.)

This is a long run over miles and miles of desert, so we should enjoy the huge sky and broad vistas.  Radio navigation will present a challenge over the unpopulated desert distances, so plan accordingly.  Finally, as we turn at Reggane you can see the oases of Touat, a dozen in total, strung along as pearls along a necklace.  The northwest-southeast line follows the Wadi Messaoud (and the Wadi Saoura farther north).  Today the area has a mixed population of Arabs, Berbers, and Haratin (Negroid Berbers descended from former slaves).

Gateway into Adrar

The oases of Touat from the air

Over the centuries, desert nomads and settlers used various methods for obtaining and distributing water.  The most spectacular of these are the networks of underground water-channels, called foggaras, which were once used to moisten dry soil with water from distant sources. Air-currents drawn in through vertical shafts created enough flow to deliver a trickle of precious water to scattered outlets. The remains of the network, around Adrar, show that its channels totaled an astonishing 2,000km in length  Irrigated by these  foggaras (and now by pump-raised underground water), the oases produce high-quality dates, as well as grains and vegetables.  (See "Water" below.)

Additionally, the trans-Saharan motor route passes through the area. Two trans-Saharan roads have been built: one paved route from El-Goléa to Tamanrasset and then south to Niger, the other from El-Goléa to Adrar and then on to Mali.  Nowadays, the first route is more prominent, with Tamanrasset taking root as the central Sahara pivot for trans-African trade—a modern Timbuktu.  Our route is more of a backwater connection.

Flight planning and narrative by
Mike MacKuen
RTW Pilot #039

ADDITIONAL SCENERY AND ADD-ONS.
None.

20 Apr 92 - Timbuktu, Mali  (Tom Claytor)

Sand is everywhere. Not the normal type, it’s not the kind you can get wet and use to build a castle; it’s more like dust. My watch is already destroyed. It gets in your ears and your nose and your hair, and it stays there.

On the other side of the wall, I can hear Songhai Devil Worshipers chanting and banging on floating gourds. We are surrounded by Mosques. There are no tourists. The Tuareg recently attacked the town. The children thought it was another Rambo film and sat on a wall to watch; one was killed.

I am staying with a Baptist pilot. Mechanics are few and far between. I’ve found one here, but he’s from the "old school" that likes to be thorough. I’m not so sure I like that, but without an annual inspections there is no insurance, so we begin. There’s no hangar. Sand flows everywhere. He makes me open every single panel, and I watch sand fill my airplane. For 3 days, we’ve been doing this. We start at 5 AM and work until noon, by then we’ve drunk a gallon of water, and it’s too hot to think.

Everyone else checked the timing by looking at the mark on a timing wheel. Not this guy, he opened up the engine to see the cylinder, put a protractor on the nose cone and found my timing has been off my 10 degrees since before I left home. I don’t know how I should feel about this. Pre-detonation is serious, but there has been so much water and wide empty places; I guess I just don’t think about it. We fixed it; I learned something, and I will never question thorough "old school" mechanics again.

For more on Tom Claytor, see http://www.claytor.com/Bushpilot/intro.html and http://www.claytor.com/Bushpilot/ .  In 1990, at age 28, he set out  carrying a flag from the New York Explorers Club (the flag has been to the top of Everest) to circumnavigate the world in his specially-equipped Cessna 180.  He has been a decade in transit, taking on tasks here-and-there to pay for his passage.  Among other things, he has made an hour-long video for National Geographic.  At this writing, he he is flying in Thailand.  This is our sort of enterprise!  (The next time you think of the time spent coaxing a single-engined craft around the globe, think of Tom.) 

From Tom Claytor's home page:

Tom Claytor with hyena friend

The most often asked questions: (1) Do you ever go home? - No. (2) How do you do your laundry? - In a bucket. (3) Is it lonely? - Yes, sometimes very. (4) How do you pay for this? - Work the plane on conservation projects and find sponsors. (5) Why? - Perhaps this is the most interesting of all the questions. I think in life if we have dreams, and we can either try to realize those dreams or we can let them pass. I like the quote, "happy are those who dream dreams then are willing to pay the price to make them come true." However, I am not always happy. Sometimes, this hurts - and hurts a lot. Sometimes, I wonder what the emotional cost will be. It is hard, and I have become hard; but I have also become softer. The most important thing about doing something like this is to laugh at yourself. If you can't do that, go home. You must never take yourself too seriously. ...

About twenty of my pilot friends are dead now. It is one thing in life to learn from your own experiences, but it is quite another thing to listen to someone else's experiences in such a way as to make them painful and to make them your own. I met one rugged old pilot in Ethiopia. He used to fly for Air America in South America, and he used to work with some rough characters. Every time he would go to a new place, he would ask, "how does a guy get killed around here?" and people would tell him. He would then avoid all the things that had killed the other people. I have used this trick to fly safely through places and conditions that I have never experienced before—like Greenland in the winter and the Sahara in the summer. Strangely, this trick is as applicable for life as it is for flying. Listen carefully with empathy or pain—and then learn. ...

Another thing I believe in is that you don't have to have a good memory if you always tell the truth. I am in way over my head on this trip; there is no way I can remember everything, and so it is easy—always tell the truth. It was proven to me again just recently when I was put in jail for "violation immigration act" in one of these African countries. I might not have gone in jail in the first place if I had invented a little story, but it is just too much work and can be very dangerous if you get caught. I told the truth; I went to jail. The next day I was interrogated plenty of times, but always the same story. Every time I have been arrested, it has been like this. Painful for the moment, but worthwhile in the end.

Someone once said to me, "This is a good trip, and one of two things will happen: You will either make it, or you will be just another guy who tried and failed." I love the truth in that statement; It is humbling, and all I have to do is to get home.

 

Thirst.

Truck broken down on Trans-Sahara

Somewhere out here, perhaps not far away, the Belgians had been lost.

They were husband, wife, and five-year-old boy, driving a Peugeot sedan for resale in Burkina Faso. At first their trip went fast, from Algiers through the northern oases to points south. Eventually the pavement ended. They were prepared to spend nights in the desert, but the driving was slower than expected.

When they got lost, they still had plenty of gas, and they set out to retrace their route. This was not easy, because the ground was hard-packed and rocky. They grew even more confused. But getting lost was part of the adventure, a special game for carefree Europeans. We know this because the woman later wrote it down. People dying of thirst in the desert often leave a written record. They have time to think. Writing denies the isolation.

The car broke down. They rationed their water and lay in the shade of a tarpaulin. The rationing did not extend their lives. They might as well have drunk their fill, since the human body loses water at a constant rate even when dehydrated. The only way to stretch your life in the desert is to reduce your water needs: stay put, stay shaded, and keep your clothes on.

The Belgians hoped a truck would pass. For a week they waited, scanning the horizon for a dust-tail or the glint of a windshield. The woman wrote more frantically. Their water ran low, then dry. They grew horribly thirsty. After filtering it through a cloth, they drank the radiator coolant.

Water is the largest component of our bodies, but we have little to spare. In the hottest desert we can lose it (mostly by sweating) at the rate of two gallons a day while resting in the shade, or four gallons a day walking. Because sweating keeps us cool, we function well in extreme heat as long as we have plenty of water. We need a lot of water—say, half again as much as a camel over the course of a year. The rule is to drink until your thirst is gone and then drink a little more. If water is available, you naturally maintain your fluid content within a range of a quarter of a percent. If water is not available, juice, Coke, or beer is just as good. Apparently, radiator coolant also works. But what happens when it all runs out? Inevitably this becomes the question for anyone stranded in the Sahara. I can only list the symptoms.

Thirst is first felt when the body has lost about 0.5 percent of its weight to dehydration. For a 180-pound man that amounts to about a pint. With a two percent loss (say, two quarts) the stomach is no longer big enough to hold as much as the body needs, and people stop drinking before they have replenished their loss, even if they are given ample water. This is called voluntary dehydration, though it is not a conscious choice. Up to a five percent loss (about one gallon) the symptoms include fatigue, loss of appetite, flushed skin, irritability, increased pulse rate, and mild fever. Beyond that lie dizziness, headache, labored breathing, absence of salivation, circulatory problems, blue skin, and slurred speech. At 10 percent a person can no longer walk. The point of no return is around 12 percent (about three gallons), when the tongue swells, the mouth loses all sensation, and swallowing becomes impossible. A person this dehydrated cannot recover without medical assistance. In the Sahara it may take only half a day to get to this stage. Now the skin shrinks against the bones and cracks, the eyes sink, and vision and hearing become dim. Urine is dark and urination is painful. Delirium sets in. In a hot desert climate, as the body dehydrates, a disproportionate amount of water is drawn from the circulating blood. The blood thickens and finally can no longer fulfill its functions, one of which is to transport heat generated within the body to the surface. It is this heat that ultimately kills. The end comes with an explosive rise in body temperature, convulsions, and blissful death.

After the radiator coolant was gone, the Belgians started sipping gasoline. You would too. Call it petroposia: Saharans have recommended it to me as a way of staying off battery acid. The woman wrote that it seemed to help. They drank their urine. She reported that it was difficult at first, but that afterward it wasn't so bad.

The boy was the weakest, and was suffering terribly. In desperation they burned their car, hoping someone would see the smoke. No one did. They killed their son to stop his pain. Later the husband cut himself and the wife drank his blood. At his request she somehow broke his neck with a rock. Alone she no longer wanted to live. Still, the Sahara was fabulous, she wrote, and she was glad to have come. She would do it again. She regretted only one thing—that she had not seen Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III. Those were her last lines. The family's remains were found later, and returned to Tamanrasset.

From William Langewiesche's 1991 article in the Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/langew/extreme3.htm .  Or better, see his Sahara Unveiled: A Journey across the Desert.  (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).  I absolutely recommend this piercing observation of the Sahara and its people.  Langewiesche is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of Stick and Rudder, the revered classic on aviation.  The younger Langewiesche made his living for most of his life as a private pilot, having turned professional writer only in the last decade.  (If you have not yet read William Langwiesche's Inside the Sky, you have a real treat ahead of you!)

Water in Adrar

Adrar in the sun

Adrar is a provincial capital in central Algeria, a town of 15,000, laid out in wide streets between ocher buildings. It sits at the center of a region of oases known as the Touat, astride an ancient caravan route from Gao and Timbuktu. I went there to look at irrigation. My host was a young merchant, Moulay Lakhdar Miloud. Moulay is a title of respect. There are a lot of Moulays, and many seem to know one another. I once heard the Sahara described as the United States of Moulay.

Moulay Miloud is a bachelor with a narrow, intelligent face and a moustache. His friends call him Uncle Moulay. He was dressed in a pressed white robe. We sat on the floor of his living room and waited out the hot midday hours, drinking brown water from a plastic jug. The water was brown because Miloud had mixed in cade oil. The cade is an evergreen bush that grows in the Atlas Mountains. Saharan nomads use its oil to seal the inside of goatskin water bags. Miloud did not have a goatskin, but he came from a long line of desert travelers. He bought the oil in small bottles and added it to his water for flavor and good health. The mixture smelled of pine sap and tasted of clay. Miloud smiled, pleased that I liked it. But I would have drunk anything. I had been for a walk.

...Outdoors the temperature was 124 degrees Fahrenheit. During my walk the air had been still, the sky milky with dust. There was no shade. The streets were deserted. The heat hit hard, a physical assault, burning skin, eyes, and lungs. I felt threatened and disoriented. I had drunk my fill beforehand, but an hour without water was all I could stand.

The Sahara is hot because it is sunny. In Adrar out of some 4,400 hours of annual daylight there are 3,978 hours of direct sun, on average. (Paris, home of the great Saharan colonizers, gets 1,728 hours of sun.) Elsewhere in the desert the count is equally high. And this is steep-angle sunlight, powerful stuff. In the winter, air temperatures can drop to freezing at night and rise to 90 degrees by noon; soil temperatures can fluctuate so brutally that rocks split, a process called insolation weathering. In the summer the Sahara is the hottest place on earth. The record, 136 degrees. Fahrenheit, is held by al Azizia, Libya. Airborne dust makes things worse. It traps heat radiated by the hot soil, and is why in Adrar the desert does not cool much on summer nights.

Late in the afternoon Miloud and I drove an old Renault to one of the outlying oases. The road was paved. It led past neglected palm groves and then across rolling sand and dirt. In the far distance I could make out the dunes of the Erg Chech, the enormous and uninhabited sand sea that extends 600 miles, across Mali and into Mauritania. Miloud said, of the land on either side of the road, "In the winter all this is green." Translation: if it rains, a few translucent grasses may sprout. The average annual rainfall in Adrar is less than an inch.

The two dozen oases of the Touat sit at the receiving end of the largest dry watercourse in the Sahara, an ancient riverbed called the Messaoud. It is a long, shallow depression where water still lies close underground. Oases are not the waterholes of public imagination but irrigated groves of date palms. They are artificial creations. The ones in the Touat are famous for the engineering of their traditional wells. Known as foggaras, these are gently sloping tunnels, burrowed for miles into higher terrain. Since their paths are marked by frequent mounds around excavation shafts, they look like the diggings of giant moles. The foggaras were built centuries ago, not to find water but to bring it to the oases in a constant flow. They are self-filling subterranean aqueducts. They are not, however, self-maintaining. ...

A band of dusty children followed us into the desert to the foggaras. Water was still flowing, but the foggaras were slipping into disrepair. One reason is that maintaining them—digging them out, shoring them up—is dangerous and difficult work, and since the abolition of slavery there has been no ready supply of labor. A more immediate reason was in the concrete shelter nearby. It housed an electric pump, drawing water from a bored well. The modern world had arrived, and no one was complaining. 

The system of distribution was still the traditional one. We followed the ditches that carried the water back to the village. Upstream it was drawn for drinking; downstream it was used for washing and sewage. The water that finally flowed toward the palm grove was, let's say, rich in nutrients. It was also precious. Water rights are inherited, bought, and sold, and are more valuable than the land itself. Within the grove the water is divided and metered through finger-width gateways into an intricate branching of channels. In the end it spreads into individual plots, separated by dikes and protected against wind and sand by adobe walls. There the date palms grow.

Date palms are well adapted to the Sahara. They thrive on sun and heat, and will produce fruit in water that is ten times as salty as human beings should drink. Though they require large amounts of irrigation for the first few years, they then tap into groundwater and become self-supporting. They also shade the irrigated vegetable crops—most commonly corn and tomatoes.

This grove was small by Algerian standards—about a half square mile of junglelike vegetation. We strolled through it on dirt paths between the plots. The shade was dense, but it provided no relief from the heat. Dead fronds drooped from the trees and littered the ground. Miloud pointed to them and said that when he was young, the farmers would have been ashamed. Yellow butterflies flitted about. Ants carried oversized trophies. A turbaned man hacked at the earth. A ditch gurgled with polluted water. I stopped to list the other sounds: the distant music of Arab horns, a dove cooing, a donkey braying, a cricket, birds trilling, children laughing, the thunk of a woodchopper, a sharper hammering, a rooster crowing, flies buzzing, a chanted prayer. ...

Heat-soaked walls

THERE is a limit to the insulating qualities of adobe construction, a temperature extreme beyond which walls go critical and begin to magnify the heat. I have studied this: the walls do not cool down at night; at dawn the inside surfaces are hot to the touch; by day they are hotter still. The houses become solar ovens. Concrete is worse: it gets hotter in sunlight and no less hot after dark. In the big Soviet-style buildings you can burn bare feet on the second floor. Air-conditioners and evaporative coolers are rare, and replacement parts are rarer.

During the peak months of summer people move outdoors. In the morning and late afternoon they sit in the shade cast by the walls. At midday they hide as best they can, under an awning or a tree. Strangers flock to the hotels, where the lobbies have fans and high ceilings. The secret police flock there too, for the same reasons, and also to investigate the strangers. Everyone waits. At night, while hotel guests lie trapped in their rooms, the Saharans eat and sleep in the gardens. ...

THE hydrologist's name was Sollah. In the morning he took me to see the irrigated farm, which he called a model. It sprawled across 800 unshaded acres in virgin desert—an American-style operation, privately owned, with a bright tractor and a crew of Haratin black workers. Circular irrigation systems stood over wheat stubble. There were greenhouses, and plots of tomatoes, peppers, pimientos, cucumbers, melons, and cantaloupes. There was plenty of mud. This was modern agriculture—energetic, productive, and perhaps wasteful. I told Sollah that it looked like farms in California. He was pleased, and asked why. I answered, Cheap water. This pleased him even more, because it was his water. He had directed the government crew that drilled the first well.

We went to drink the results. Two pumps drove a heavy flow of water into a holding tank. The water was sweet and cool. They had struck it with an Oklahoman rig at a depth of 450 feet. The water ran dirty with sand and mud for two days, and afterward turned clear. The project took a month to complete, which is about average. There are several crews like Sollah's in the province. Together they have been drilling forty-five wells a year. Every well has produced.

Most of the Sahara is too dry for drilling. If you do hit water, either there is too little or it is too salty or too expensive to pump out. It might sustain a few settlers, or people passing through. It is not worth thc cost of getting to it. But here, in the northern third of the desert, large reserves of fresh water lie under the parched surface. The shallowest have for centuries irrigated the towns and oases. They can be got at by foggaras and hand-dug wells. They are susceptible to drought and overuse; the water table falls, crops fail, and settlements must be abandoned. But if it rains, even far away, eventually the shallow reserves are replenished.

Of greater importance for the future are the deep aquifers, whose discovery was a by-product of the search for oil. The mere knowledge of their existence has had a profound effect on life in the Sahara. Known as confined aquifers, they are pools of fresh water trapped in permeable rock strata at depths of 300 to 6,000 feet. They hold as much water, according to one estimate, as the Amazon River discharges in two years. That is a lot of water. What's better, much of it is under pressure. Once tapped, it rises to the surface and forms artesian wells. Geysers have shot hundreds of feet into the air. Wells have been capped to keep villages from flooding.

Water works powerfully on the souls of Saharans. Muammar Qaddafi has launched an agricultural revolution in Libya, and is building gigantic irrigation projects. He believes he will transform his sands. If for nothing else, he is respected for this. Other Saharans have equally grandiose dreams. Miles of tomatoes, potatoes, rice paddies, fish farms, horizons of grain—the United States of Moulay. If there is water in the desert, anything is possible. Sollah, a quiet and rational man, was suffused with the glory of his mission. Even the taxi driver who took us out to the farm had an opinion. He believed that irrigation would eventually bring rain. Call it reverse desertification, the trickle-up theory.

But there is a problem. The deep aquifers are being recharged very slowly, if at all. This means that the aquifers contain mostly fossil water, deposited long ago, when the Sahara was not a desert. The water that Sollah and I were drinking was perhaps 5,000 years old. In western Egypt well water may be five or ten times as old. My comparison to California was only partly correct. Much of the irrigation water in the American desert comas from rivers and reservoirs—short-term, renewable surface supplies. Some waste is perhaps affordable. The deep water of the Sahara is different: you pump it here for keeps. Like oil, it is not renewable.

A second problem is that despite the large reserves, only a small fraction of the stored water can be extracted economically. There are many reasons for this, including lowering tables, loss of artesian pressure, expense of drilling, expense of pumping, and increasing salinity. Scientists argue that new wells should be drilled sparingly, and water used wisely. They use terms like "practical sustained yield"—meaning you take out no more than is going in. They say an aquifer is like a bank account—if you must draw it down, the reason should be to build a return in the long run. They warn about unchecked exploitation, and talk about the end's coming as soon as 2025.

Their advice passes like wind. Saharans are no wiser than the rest of us. They dream of green. It is the color of Islam. In Algeria the fundamentalists have promised to make a garden of the desert. Words come easily.

Palm grove and Sahara sunset.

From William Langewiesche's 1991 article in the Atlantic Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/langew/extreme.htm .  Or see his Sahara Unveiled: A Journey across the Desert.  (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).