A quick one to Tessalit
Just back from a quick run
to Tessalit (northern Mali) via Algiers with pax
Zander and Martin along for the ride. At Algiers
port they were a bit bemused by a tourist car (we
were the only foreigners on the boat) but despite
4-5 hours queuing we got to In Salah the next afternoon
and took a great run along the Old Hoggar piste
east of the highway past a lovely guelta with
a too-long-name. We camped here and next morning
a little scorpion ran out from under the mattress
to be picked at by a pair of black chat moula
moula birds.
Tadjemout
fort, on to Arak Gorge which now has a bridge
and then the highway down to Tamanras. Missed
a whole lot of rain by a couple of days and only
for one cool night among some Tanezrouft dunes
did the night
time temp
drop below 24°C.
Arak
Gorge car wash.
Tadjemout
fort - very nice spot
Tanezrouft
by day; hot
Tanezrouft
by night - still hot
Cooling
off in a guelta.
Even though I expected a humdrum run along mostly
known routes, as always the desert delivered and
we saw many unusual things and had some interesting
encounters.
We
took the high route to Bordj out of Abalessa, through
the still muddy oued and out onto the Tanezrouft,
passing a pre-Islamic tomb on an very isolated
hill. Dusty Bordj did not seem to have changed
much over the years but a few kms south of town,
Hilal (not on any map and home of the Ambassade)
was a chummy contabanders compound in No Man's
Land but tolerated by all around. It looked like
a Van Damme movie set where, if you let your imagination
run around a bit, a dusty cover gets pulled off
a Merc truck to reveal a shiny Russian missile
for sale to the highest bidder. The guys here were
all friends of Mohamed, Berabish traders from Timbuktu
doing direct runs there and back and even to Zouerat.
There welcome was very warm and we discussed my
forthcoming crossing of northern
Mali from Mauritania.
They will prove to be a useful contacts if we get
in trouble in Mali next month [we did and they
were...] as well as being a source of much needed
fuel if Bordj is dry after our 2000-km crossing.
Tessalit also looked the same after
15 years or more. Apparently it was ransacked and
abandoned during the 1990s Tuareg rebellion and
has never really recovered. I let the guides sort
out the laisser passez with the help of a a big
box of dates for the police chef. But up on the
hill fort the gendarme could not wait to get his
bite of our cake and played all the usual power
games once he clocked what was going on (a flash
car being sold overnight). "Ou
est mon 
cadeaux!" he
roared as he feigned an inspection ofthe back of
the car. The nearest thing to hand was a jar of
Bertolli sauce (the best mainstream pasta sauce
you can get, btw, - try it) which he snatched disinterestedly.
Back up on the terrace we sweated
it out and it was a relief to leave most of the
grubby negotiations to Omar who was taking the
80 away to recondition its identity. In the end,
despite a visit to the mayor, Tessalit proved too
greedy for Omar to complete the transfer so I signed
a bit of paper back up at the Ambassade next
day and left it with Omar to take down to his home
town of Gao to get registered. We carried on
to Tam in his 600,000-km-old 60 which I soon christened
Le Chien. And that was before I even drove it...
On
the way back through Bordj the police sort of knew
what had gone on but could do nothing about it
- the car had left Alg legitimately. As we waited
some shifty-looking foreign guys turned up off
a Timbuktu truck and put me in mind of a GSPC training
camp (as if they'd come back through Bordj once
trained up!). A week earlier near some GSPC had
reportedly been killed by Malian Tuareg. Kidal
continues to be tense after the events of the summer.
These guys were probably nothing more than students
coming back from some Koranic school - but this
is how we think these days on seeing bearded Asians
at an outback border post ...
Out of Bordj we spent the night
among the
dunes near Ifaleg wells(not on the Mich map) where
we saw a large camel train leaving after being
watered. I never imagined camels out in the utterly
barren Tanezrouft but the recent rains (there were
pools even on the flat Tanezrouft) had driven the
nomads down in anticipation of a feed. It was to
be our only cool night and a real tonic after the
unrelenting heat and associated locusts, mozzies,
small scorpions and other irksome bugs. Hot days
are fine I decided, but hot nights are a drag.
We spent the next night in the granite hills near
Abalessa where I finally got round to experimenting
with making bread in preparation for SEQ. And for
a first go it turned out pretty damn well - a very
passable combination of burned dough cooked in
a tin on the embers. In Abalessa Moh' led us to
the tomb on Queen Tin Hinan. Interesting little
museum with the rocky tomb round the back, but
only pics of the treasures remain; everything was
pinched by Prorok and his cohorts in the 1920s
(link to review of his book, Mysterious
Sahara).
All that remained was a bone shaking
ride 
into
Tam in the no-brakes, left-only power steering
Chien followed by two days idling in the old Camping
Dessine - the original campsite I used to use in
the 1980s. It's still home of the old Trans Saharienne
bus (right), rusty away slowly by the reception.
We killed time by following the
shade, watching our clothes dry before our eyes,
waiting for Ramadan cafes to open up and cruising
around town in the Chien logging a GPS map for
future use. Then, when the time came we flew up
to Algiers, Europe and home.
October 2006
Travellers reports from the Sahara