Travelogues/Biogs	Picture Books	My Favourites
Guidebooks and DVDs	Fiction	History/Culture/Science

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ALGERIA LONELY PLANET, 2007, 256pp, £14.99 LP can afford to produce guides to destinations no other publisher would touch and, along with the new LP Afghanistan comes Algeria, the first English-language guide to that country for decades, if not ever (LP's long out of print North Africa Shoestring from the 1980s covered Algeria but was always a bit lame). It's a slim book and the guide section is only about 100 pages but the Sahara fills about half of that and there's plenty more on the practicalities of desert travel in the front and back sections. I'm not expert but in the populated north the little-visited riches from the Roman era matching those of Tunisia and Libya get a good account and will probably be the most genuinely useful section of this book that will help open up that area (security issues in the northeast notwithstanding). As is fashionable, 4WDs get a jab on p.71 for creating too much dust which kills coral and so on, but you wonder how much Saharan tourists as passengers or drivers actually contribute compared to traveling or working locals? It's a bit like the current debate on flying and is probably based on Andrew Goudie's dust-raking 'Toyotarization' article that hit the broadsheets a couple of years ago. The LP has a point though, travelling at a slower pace is much more rewarding as long as you strike upon a good area. So it would have been nice to see more than a couple of paragraphs on the practicalities of choosing and undertaking a trek with camel support. That's what an LP-er will be after down south which is divided mainly between Tam and Djanet. They don't say much about travelling on the ground between the two which, following any number of routes, would the ultimate A to B tour of the south (as opposed to a loop). Oddly, the fairly obscure Tassili d'Immidir gets a mention (we're camelling there this autumn 07 - see the S-Files later for a report) but the more accessible and better known Tefedest does not. Maybe the author flew into usually-bypassed In Salah and had to dig up a counterpart to Tam's Hoggar and Djanet's Tassili N'Ajjer. The problem is the three towns/regions don't seem to hook up into a homogenous entity; the Algerian Sahara. The book proposes what you can see out of each town rather than linking the three, perhaps because that's the form witrh fly-in tours; the main way most will experience southern Algeria under the current restrictions. Independent-travellers will be frustrated or put off, by these restrictions*; fly-in Saharan tourists get what they're given (in Algeria, as good as it gets) so the book won't get much of a practical work out. Braver individuals can try and hire a driver/guide - it's a good idea in the less-safe Roman north I reckon. This is where the guide pays off and for the background information alone, it's worth buying to learn more about Algeria the Country as opposed to the Algerian Sahara. Latest on Algeria * My tip: get a visa using the 'one night booked in a hotel' ploy then fly into Algiers - no drama or checks - and then fly on to the south so avoiding the roadside checkpoints.

THE WESTERN DESERT OF EGYPT An Explorer's Handbook Cassandra Vivien, AUC Press - 2000, 426pp, around 120LE (£12) or £20 on Amazon A niche publication covering the Western Oases (Bahariya, Dakhla etc), the northern coast, Siwa, the Darb el Arbain region and of course the Gilf. It was originally published in the early 1990s as Islands of the Blest; A Guide to the Oases and Western Desert of Egypt which we're told became an 'overnight bestseller'. Sorry to have to say this but the first thing that strikes you while flicking through this book is a waffle-bound, juvenile, credulous writing style; a complete absence of editing hampered by a muddled hierarchy of headings which have little relation to the ramblings which sometimes follow. The book starts with the 'The Natural World' but includes a patchy, Sahara-wide history using ancient labels like 'Bilad al-Sudan' as if contemporary - an example of the author's limited understanding of her subject. The author witlessly adopts the Bagnoldian declamation that the Libyan Desert and the Sahara are separate natural features because, in her words, "the Fezzan is a fertile plateau corridor that separates the Libyan Desert from the Sahara". Me, I still think it is an unsophisticated political designation about as valid as the Urals dividing Asia and Europe (as discussed in my Great Warm Deserts of the World review). We do however get a good summary of geological epochs, events and evolution pertaining to the region. There is a good double-page map covering the book's region on the prelim pages and a couple of good ones elsewhere, but the half-pager on p.2 is a mixture of ancient, colonial and contemporary place names. It adds up to another of this book's many grating, literary, stylistic and graphic inconsistencies – you’d think better of the AUC Press. The Western Oases section (not strictly within the remit of this website) looks thorough, this is really where the book is best and was once knowledgeable, though you can be confident that the 100-odd pages which the latest Rough Guide (2005) devotes to the area will be more useful. As for the Gilf ("the top of the Gilf is like the top of the world"); rather tellingly the author admits earlier that her guide in that region, the late Samir Lama "guards his secrets from the prying eyes of writers like me". So be prepared to accept nothing more than historical accounts retold day-by-day, along with heartfelt observations that Lama could not censor: "Wadi Hamra is red. Red sand dunes are so beautiful. Red drifts of sand cascading down the side of a black mountain are so beautiful". This is as much as we learn about Wadi Hamra, we learn next to nothing about Jebel Uweinat (apparently the highest point in Egypt) or the riches of Karkur Talh, although we are informed that Aqaba Pass was first ascended by "Ford 2x2 cars". The trivial errors, substanceless piffle and batty analogies go on and on and remind me of that other flu-ridden turkey, Sahara, the Life of the Great Desert. A Sahara-based historical novel I've just started reading starts in the acknowledgements with the following endearing admission: 'As a reader I never knew the importance of a book's editor. As a writer I have learned the truth of it". While well-intentioned and enthusiastic, Cassandra Vivian seems to have spent too much time in libraries digging up archania but missed seeing the sand for the dunes, and was then let down by her publishers. Watch the binding too; open it too fast and it will explode in your face.

MOROCCO - THE DESERT PISTES Roaming Yak, Duration: 75mins, £16.99 with p&p The result of six months travel in southern Morocco, this dvd is actually more a watchable personal travelogue and overview of the country than a detailed route guide. That sort of material is better presented in a book and indeed is supported on the roamingyak website associated with the vid. Instead, you get a good impression for off-highway travel in rural southern Morocco in a way that a regular guidebook can't manage. There's only so much you can do filming yourself and a vehicle, and a lot of effort was made to getting a variety of shots, but you do miss out on some long and wide shots of the green Landrover trundling through the landscape. The custom-written soundtrack adds greatly to the film's ambience, and with the cover and snazzy presentation, it's a great package. Just try not to watch it all in a single sitting when one piste begins to look very much like another. With four-wheeling in Morocco becoming more and more popular, for a solo production Morocco; the Desert Pistes gives you a good idea of what to expect.

MAURITANIE AU GPS Cyril Ribas et Sylvie Beallet, Editions Takla Makane - 2001, 384pp, 35 euro This, fully illustrated paperback edition of Sylvie's GPS route guide to Mauritanian pistes covers 10,000km of pistes, right across the country up to and beyond the Mali border to places you have never heard of as well as the Beach piste, the rail route to Choum and some interesting excursions in the Adrar south of Atar. The layout of each route is similar to Sahara Overland which in my opinion is an optimal way of presenting GPS routes in a book - comprehensible even if you're not fully conversant with French. Route maps are laid over old Soviet 1 millions which is a smart idea and there are plenty of boxed asides in the text on Mauritanian culture and history plus some tasty colour photos. It's pricey but nothing like it exists in any language. A route guide for the truly adventurous - and all researched in fat-tyred 2CV... stick that in your 4x4 pipe and smoke it!