The lucky ones who do get ashore bring waterproof bags with a change of clothes.
Some speak only Arabic and clutch pieces of paper with contact names and numbers. One came to Belinda’s door and asked her if she might help her contact a Spanish Internet address. The name she had been given, but didn’t understand, was a very sick joke. It was two Spanish words, ‘puerto muertos’, literally ‘the port of the dead’.
As we walk back to her house, through dunes littered with castoff clothes that may well have protected people on mighty journeys across the Sahara, Belinda explains why she thinks the best way to deal with the immigrants is to allow them a short-term visa.
‘Then at least they could come and try it out. I think a lot of them actually come over here and don’t like what they see. It’s more expensive to live here, they can’t get a job, so they’re actually happy to go back to their families.’
She pauses and looks out the way we’ve come.
‘But you know, when all your family and friends have clubbed together to get this ticket for you to Paradise … How do you go back?’
It’s dark by the time we reach Gibraltar. There’s a queue to get in. Our driver grumbles about the usual Spanish prevarication. But there’s a lot more for him to grumble about since we left here all those months ago. The British and Spanish governments have been doing the unthinkable - talking joint sovereignty. Though they’ve been assured that nothing will be decided without a referendum, the folks who live on the Rock are very angry. Joint sovereignty may mean the end of this bickering at the border, but the very suggestion of a Spanish flag flying on Gibraltar, even alongside the Union Jack, is seen by some here as the first rumbling of betrayal, the beginning of the end.
For me, for all of us, this is the end. After nine countries and some 10,000 miles of travel we’ve made it back to the reassuring armchairs of the Rock Hotel. By tomorrow we’ll all be back home, worrying about the price of car insurance and why the plumber hasn’t called.
I’ve had a few beers of celebration and I’m a little light-headed as I stumble out onto my balcony at midnight. I look out over the starlit Strait towards Africa and try to think big thoughts about what I’ve learnt from all this, other than that nowhere is Paradise.
AFTERWORD
I’m glad to be home, but in the all-moving, all-talking mayhem of modern life, my restless thoughts go back to that great place of silence and apparently infinite space. I need to be reminded of its special qualities, but, like keeping up with an old friend, that can be hard work.
Even checking the weather (sad person that I am) isn’t easy. The likes of Nouakchott and Bamako rarely show up on a list of world cities.
A few scraps of news have come out of the desert since we finished our journey. A United Nations report blames high-tech foreign fleets for destroying Mauritania’s fishing industry. The Polisario has released 115 Moroccan soldiers, held in their desert jails for twenty-five years (they never told me about them), but Saharawi independence looks as far away as ever as the UN discusses an American-backed compromise proposal for Western Sahara. Nancy Abeiderrahmane has had her attempt to sell camel cheese in Europe turned down, because the camels are not mechanically milked, and the drought in Algeria ended savagely and dramatically soon after we left, with hundreds drowned by floodwater in the capital. Dave Hammond, the British motorcycling hope in the Dakar Rally, was in twentieth place with only two stages left when he fell into a hidden chasm on the blind side of a sand dune. He spent many weeks in a Paris hospital but is now back home and recovering. As I write, the British and Spanish prime ministers are meeting to discuss plans for the Rock, whilst the government of Gibraltar is putting ads in British newspapers to ask for support.
Otherwise, the mystery of the Sahara remains largely intact. Except in my dreams, where it still springs vividly to life.
Michael Palin, May 2002
BACKGROUND READING
I gratefully acknowledge a number of other people’s efforts, including the Rough Guide to West Africa, Lonely Planet’s Africa on a Shoestring, the Footprint guides to Morocco, Libya and Tunisia, Barnaby Rogerson’s Cadogan Guide to Morocco and A Traveller’s History of North Africa, Ross Velton’s Bradt Guide to Mali, Kim Naylor’s Discovery Guide to West Africa and James Wellard’s The Great Sahara. Hollyman and Van Beek’s beautiful book on the Dogon is one of the best on a difficult subject. Sanche de Gramont’s The Strong Brown God and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Water Music were essential River Niger reading. I found the Eland edition of Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa indispensable and Quentin Crewe’s In Search of the Sahara, Jeremy Keenan’s Sahara Man, Richard Trench’s Forbidden Sands and Martin Buckley’s Grains of Sand informative and inspiring. Hachette’s Guide de Sahara, Chris Scott’s Sahara Overland and Simon Glen’s Sahara Handbook are all good chunky guides that get right to the heart of desert travel.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The filming of Sahara lasted a little over four months and covered nearly 10,000 miles. The preparation for the journey and the process of welding it into a series took the best part of a year. No-one had an easy job.
At our home base in London, Anne James steered the boat through choppy waters, from launch to final anchorage, with diligence, energy and enthusiasm. Natalia Fernandez dealt with every detail of our travel plans, which, considering the bureaucratic complications in this part of the world, deserves more than your average respect. Janina Stamps, who set us on the road, and Gina Hobson, who brought us back and saw the programmes to their conclusion, applied skill and experience to some nightmare situations, and Lyn Dougherty rode expertly through the minefields of cash flow.
Paul Bird and Alison Davies at the office helped preserve my sanity, without apparently losing their own, and Alison tucked and tidied the manuscript.
Elizabeth Parker wrote music for the series and Bernard Heyes designed our maps and titles. George Foulgham and all the team at VideoLondon made it sound wonderful and the amazing Alex Richardson took on the task of editing all four hours. Though he and his family may be regretting it, I, quite selfishly, am delighted. Nicola Moody at the BBC gave us generous encouragement and great support.
It’s impossible to thank everyone who helped us out on the road.
Many of those to whom I owe my thanks are mentioned in the text. Of those who are not, but without whom we could never have made such a journey, I must not forget Marie Gloria Macedo, Richard Stanforth, Alan Keohane, Bob Watt, Djadje Ba, Violet Diallo, Barry Halton, Mike Lord and Stirling Security Services, Mr Ahmed Faci, Kahlifa Airways, Simon Khoury at Arab Tours, Judith and Fanta and Tidene Expeditions in Niger.
Our core filming team, whose average age, we were shocked to find, is well into the mid-fifties, were nevertheless a credit to Saga Filming. Nigel Meakin on camera and John Pritchard on sound (and putting anything back together again within five minutes) took to the desert with cool authority. Peter Meakin, apart from bringing the average age of the crew down by a good ten years, loaded, unloaded and shot film in quite horrendous conditions, without ever once complaining. Except when his father wasn’t looking.