The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  The bus slows and comes to a stop in the dust.

  “Voilà, les marins,” the man beside me says as two men get on. Look, the seamen, the fishermen, their dark baked skin lined as the waves on the sea. Every year they come to live here on the desert coast, hauling in the fish from the wild sea.

  Hour after hour, on the final stretch to Dakhla, southern-most town of Morocco, the highway runs dark and smooth and straight, bands of sky, sand, sea, perfectly planar, sun and light, rhythmic music moves us in and out of sleep and the desert is always there upon waking.

  I have been here before.

  Four years ago it was a bus ride with a dreaded television, some American Kung-Fu movie, and people pulled the curtains shut against the sun and I felt enshrined, caught forever in the modern invasive world. When the film ended the curtains were drawn open again and the Moroccan music began, and another film began for me. I saw camels spilling onto the horizon for the first time, blue plastic floating along the ochre earth, glittering glass and locusts.

  Because I knew nothing then I was blessed. Don’t we always in life try to go back to find those same moments? You never find the same place twice.

  There were locusts, red-winged, metallic gleam, a shrill song, flying north in clouds, miles thick, hitting the glass panes. When we came to a stop I saw the bus, the shacks, the ground fluttering blood red, alive, and we crushed them underfoot. Later the swarms were gone. All along the way from Tarfaya into the old Spanish Sahara the bus stopped at the police checks, and each time a military man came on board and the driver and passengers turned to look at me. I was the only one who had to get off to show my passport. At the last check in Laâyoune, while I waited in the dust and all the passengers looked down at me through the bus windows, a new green Land Rover pulled in with two white surfboards strapped to the roof. A man came out in a wave of blue robes, head wrapped in white cloth, with dark sunglasses, a gold watch at his wrist, passport in hand. Not a muscle moved in his face as he approached the soldiers. He did not remove his glasses. He was solemn, poised as he spoke the greetings, “Salaam walaikoum,” a show of respect, and a sign that he had been here many times before. He knew what he was doing. He was a parody, a “Lawrence of Arabia” without the conquest, but with the money. He laid two Swiss passports in the hand of the policeman. He had a beautiful boy in the car. The boy smiled, asked me for a cigarette and when I gave him one, he held it to his lips and lit it against perfect white teeth, dark sunglasses, fuchsia head-cloth.

  Dakhla was full of night soldiers and music, smell of fish and salt, this last outpost filled with wind on the end of a spit of sand. The dark sea and the sands, three hundred and fifty kilometers to the Mauritanian border and 1500 back to Casablanca. There were no rooms left. But who was here? The soldiers? The tourists? I carried my bag from place to place down the sand streets and found an open café. Sand spilled across the doorway. The place was almost empty and echoed, lit by one bare fluorescent bulb. A man behind the counter was wrapping liquor bottles in bags and men came for them, concealing the bags deep in their hooded woolen jelebas and nylon overcoats, then left quickly. There were three European boys in the corner, their last dirham coins piled in little towers on the table, and bottles of beer.

  They were Germans. They went quiet and solemn when I came in. It was the North European in them and the North American in me and we hadn’t forgotten. Never trust a stranger. Funny how this feeling comes out when you are among your own kind. I worked hard against it and soon, slowly they were practicing their English and we were laughing. George was a tall Viking, with long trails of blond hair, half tied back, a beard, spectacles, rich laughter. Marcus, in the middle, was pleasant, soft-spoken, wearing Moroccan leather slippers on his bare feet that he kept losing under the table whenever he got up to buy more beer. Manfred had wild hair that looked like an afro. He was small and sour and already drunk. He lit another cigarette, played with his lighter and stared hard at me when I asked them if they were joining the convoy the next day and if I could get a lift. He was protecting this brotherhood and their initiation to the desert. They had each brought a Mercedes down from Germany. They were going to drive hard through the desert into West Africa and somewhere in Senegal or Mali, after they had spent their wildness, they would sell the cars off and go back to Europe with their stories. What did they think of me, the Canadian girl, hair wild and unbrushed, alone, awkward, a little lost? I was traveling for six months, maybe more. Where was I going, they asked. I was going to buy a horse in Senegal and ride to Mali. George smiled. Manfred said, “It will take you a long time. What is the purpose of that?” I said it was a dream of mine, for a long time.

  “A crazy dream,” Manfred said.

  “No crazier than yours.”

  “No, ours is different.”

  George had already decided there was room for me, and Manfred did not argue. At midnight he drove us in his white Mercedes, down the long tarmac outside town to the campground.

  The moon was still high and far when I got up from the clay floor of my little rented shed. Blue luminous light on the open lot, the tents and caravan cars, and cold. The bathroom was open to the sky. I stood at the sink and palmed ice water on my face and there were stars above me in the dawn.

  Someone opened a camper door and a little dachshund and an old Dalmatian dog came out and sniffed the sands. A woman was sweeping the porch of her caravan, made me feel they were all holding it back, the seas of sand, and were afraid to look up and over the walls to the cliffs, the wide bays, the smooth desert beaches where no one goes because it is a place of nothing. Seas of sand and sea of seas. You could stand out there forever and nothing would ever feel or know of your presence.

  I met the young boy of the green Land Rover and surfboards out on the cliffs. He came to me, charmed me for a cigarette, came too close, touched my arm. There was something in his eyes. He pretended innocence, but he knew of his own beauty. I watched him going down to swim, followed by the camp-guardian’s dog. The older man appeared then off to the left, dressed in white cloth and head-wrap. They were Swiss and he was the boy’s uncle. That was what I was told, but I wasn’t sure. He said nothing, walked out into the wind strumming a kora, a West African harp, for the boy who swam far below him into the sea off the desert, and the white dog ran lonely along the strand.

  All of this comes to me as our bus passes that same campground and I ride into Dakhla a second time. I find a room in the hotel where I could not find one before. And it is Ramadan, all of the shops are barred and dark, with nothing to eat until night. Everyone—only the men, there never seem to be any women—is surly and sleepy. Tourists, in the periphery of my eye, disappear into the maze of streets, distant and unknown. No one wants to be found.

  The tourists arrive in groups or alone, having found their own ways through the length of Morocco. They come because the Algerian route has been closed for years and this is the only desert passage to West Africa. Twice a week “the convoy” leaves from Dakhla led by a Moroccan military jeep and travels 350 kilometers of dust and desolation to the Mauritanian border across the once disputed zone of the Spanish Sahara. A war went on there for years between Morocco, Spain, Mauritania, and the Sahrawi POLISARIO Front, desert rebels backed by Algeria, Libya, and Cuba, fighting for independence. But the mines are still there. How ingenious to hide them in the sands that move in waves, are never still. The same surface cannot be found twice, but the mines do not move.

  That morning, years ago, I met the convoy for the first time, on the outskirts of town, not far from the campground, on the side of the highway. Thirty vehicles, Renaults, Mercedes, Land Rovers, Jeeps, a red bus, two motorbikes, all from another era, patched and repaired, and metal-worn, roof-racks roped with jerry cans, extra tires, sand-ladders. A crowd of people, mostly European, but one Japanese boy and an African man, and all the colors and styles of their clothes, a theater of army pants, desert boots, plastic sandals, stained and ripped silk shirts, camisoles, greasy t-shirts
, head-wraps of black, fuchsia, orange, lime green. So many languages and accents rose from between and around the cars, and different music from sound-systems overlaid one another. Everyone was smiling, affected by the light.

  I was waiting for my telex to come in from the police station in town where I had been the night before and where the Germans and I had gone to register in the morning. I was waiting to be authorized. What purpose could a telex have here on the edge of the sea of sand? I leaned against the hood of George’s car and George shook his head. Officials were taking down license plates and registration numbers, noting who was in each car and searching the trunks. And in this I saw a secret language, glimpses of maps, packs of cigarettes, food being passed through the windows to the soldiers. Not a word. One soldier pocketed a bag of milk.

  Over and over they did the head-count. I thought maybe they lost count each time in the blowing numbing wind. At one in the afternoon someone gave a signal—they could have fired a gun—and cars began driving onto the tarmac, one by one in a long line. Somewhere at the head of the line was the military jeep, but I couldn’t see it. A soldier ran over and told me to take my bag and go to the police building behind him. Others had been pulled out, a Senegalese man from France, a French man and his bus and a Dutch couple. Was there any reason? Or was it just that we were out of time and place? I got into the Dutch couple’s Land Rover, and as we turned around to go back to the campground with the red bus and a Renault behind us, the police waved us down and told us we could now all join the convoy. The Dutch woman, Lou, got out and did a dance on the highway, did it for all of us. This one great moment under the desert sky. I ran down the line of cars to find George and the white Mercedes. The police officer gave the hand signal. He smiled, “bon voyage!” and we drove off with all our colors and laden vehicles, down the tarmac and then turned off and entered the desert of rock and sand and dark sea, and cloud blue sky, all on a whim.

  Everything is different now. There are too many cars, fifty or more. The lot is packed with crowds of young Europeans who do not mix with the Mauritanian, and Moroccan, travelers on the other side of the highway. It is Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for the Muslims, and while the others abstain from even a drop of water, the Europeans gorge themselves on food and beer from cold chests, chain-smoke and seem armored, unforgiving. I weave among them, looking for a ride. Everyone turns me down, they have no room and I feel I’m out of luck this time. I should not have come back. But one older French man in a white Mercedes gives in, it seems out of pity, and yet he is the only one in his car and there is more than enough room.

  “How much baggage you have?”

  “Just this one.”

  “Pourquoi pas.” Why not?

  Again, a white Mercedes will carry me through the desert, but in a different way. The soldiers’ faces are shaded by suspicion. It has become a circus. I feel nothing from these people of the convoy.

  And as we begin the journey Allain says, “Ce n’est pas comme avant, ehn? Je suis déçu, les gens sont devenus trop individus.” It’s not like it was. I’m disappointed, people have become too individualistic.

  And the road is paved.

  But he himself is that way, an individual, racing to get ahead. The tarmac is only wide enough for one-way traffic and held between banks of red dirt and rock. “Je vais doubler maintenant, ehn?” Allain says, bent over the steering wheel. He means we are going to pass the others now. We are wavering one wheel on the tarmac and one on the bank, Allain trying to hold the car steady as we pass a Land Rover, a jeep, a truck, out of control. His “special cigarettes” are hidden in a bag behind the ashtray, to get him through. He smokes every one in the first stretch. The road is paved now all the way to Mauritania. We go too fast. He does not notice anything at all, does not speak except to curse the other cars. The desert floats past, so ethereal that if you do not watch, it becomes a dream. I am helpless, held in his world, alienated from the convoy, and I cannot feel the desert. We are all just trying to get there.

  What I remember of the desert: the open white beaches, miles wide, dark indigo sea, periwinkle sky, wind, George and I and our windows open, our minds, having never seen anything like this. Always a dust blowing in veils across the tracks, across the land, traveling in transparencies over ripple patterns and webs of thorn bush and mauve shadows. George’s music went with the land, West Africa’s Salif Keita and Youssou N’Dour, down the old Spanish road that was nothing but broken rock and sand.

  “Like a mosaic,” George said.

  He followed the example of others ahead of us. He did not know the desert. It was like driving in snow and ice; you had to go at high speeds to float across the sands and then slow in enough time not to crack the bottom of the car on the jagged rock. The eyes grew tired of always searching ahead. Sometimes there was a track and sometimes it disappeared. For some reason the cars ahead would detour from what seemed a good track and later we would see how it ended in deep sand and craters. We thought of the mines lying under the sands somewhere in a radius of three hundred and fifty kilometers. I never saw the military jeep among us. Maybe they weren’t with us at all.

  Once a sand dune lay across the track, an immense silent being, and we had to go around, but then we could not find the track again. It was just George and I, and Marcus and Manfred in their cars with Marcus’s passenger, the Japanese boy, Mitsu. The rest of the convoy was far behind us and we had lost the others ahead of us. Wind, sand dust in our eyes as we climbed a hill of shale and scattered shells. We looked through the Japanese boy’s telephoto lens at the land that seemed made of light, a herd of camels far away, like insects, all sense of proportion gone. No track, no sign, nothing, everything. We picked up shells. We thought of the mines and looked at our feet. Strange how it did not frighten us. And strange how you become when you do not know where you are. Then far in the distance a speck, something moving towards us, those long slow moments, one gust of wind that carried no sound. We saw a motorbike and a red helmet glinting. Mark, the Australian boy. He had already been to the first control point and waited there with the other motorbike and the French man and his bus. He had come to find us, and lead us back to the track that somehow appeared again not far, a trick of the light.

  George and I drove on into night, in our own little world, only the red taillights of the cars ahead and the long roaming rays behind us. We were afraid to lose those lights. Often they disappeared over a rise and George sped up, frantic until we caught them again. We must not get lost, but we did not say it. Our eyes strained in a darkness that had no shape. We kept imagining shadows, could not shake off the presence of trees, that we were moving through an endless bristling dark forest.

  The caravan came to a full stop late at night in an open space beside the track. People began setting up tents and stoves, opening up their trunks. A cold wind, a great phosphorus sky of stars, the small tinkling sounds of laughter and voices, lamps lit one by one. We waited for the potatoes to boil at the hatchback of Manfred’s car where we had set up the Coalman stove. I had two cans of sardines that I tried to open with my army-knife. George went through his tool kit and pulled out his huge cutting pliers, bent the sardine cans in half while we laughed, oil spilling from our fingers onto the sand. We ate standing under the sky, out of pots and plastic cups, with penknives and our fingers.

  Later there was instant coffee and a passing around of cigarettes. Marcus brought out his guitar, gently strumming, sitting up against his car wheel. Two Germans from another car came over, one in a giant army coat that he turned into a sleeping bag and reclined on the leeside of Manfred’s car. They were businessmen, used-car salesmen occasionally, and they had been through here too many times to count. Each time they brought cars too old for Europe to sell in West Africa. “It used to be a holiday,” they said. “Not anymore.”

  Still you come, I thought.

  The Japanese boy, Mitsu had pulled on every piece of clothing he had and settled down next to Marcus, shivering. I rolled o
ut my sleeping bag and lay beside him. We had a row of water containers against the bottom of the car to cut the ice wind. A group of Frenchmen in a van across from us were drunk, loud and laughing. A French woman sat alone in her car reading by flashlight, blowing smoke out the thin crack of her window. More laughter from somewhere among the cars, the wind ruffling the sleeping bags, the cold sifting in, the stars. Later the moon rose.

  Years later, under the stars and a half-moon, I sit in this same parking lot now pressed flat and gray over time by the tracks of thousands of laden cars. There are a few concrete buildings to one side. The Mauritanians camp close to the desert, recline in their dark robes on the soft sands around their open fires, and soon the smells of grilled meat, of hot sugar and tea come on the wind. The tourists open butane stoves in the backs of their cars, bring out coolers and packages, hang gas lamps from their camper vans, and stake their bright nylon tents of red and oranges. They pull out camp chairs and pour glasses of wine.

  Allain and the boys are leaning against their cars, rolling a joint, talking about that time in Algeria, or how many times they did the desert with souped-up motorbikes and junk cars, or about their equipment, what they bring, what they need for this journey of journeys, and the dangers. One man has a story about a Polish man on a motorbike who lost the convoy a year ago. Someone with a radio called the gendarmes and they sent out a search. It was a Mauritanian family traveling alone who found him when they stopped for the night to camp. The woman heard a noise over a hill like someone sleeping, snoring. He lay there half-dead and the jackals had eaten parts of his feet and lower legs. The story makes them laugh, shaking their heads with disgust. Even though it is real they keep a distance from it, but allow it to add an element of danger to their own journeys. It makes them feel stronger, wiser.

  Now they are talking about bypassing Nouadhibou and going on to the capital, Nouakchott. There is a fork in the main track after the last border control and if you choose the left route it leads through the desert another 400 kilometers along the ocean. You are meant to take a government guide, but they have decided to go without one. The three of them, Allain, an older man in a Renault, and a young man on a motorbike. I wanted to go to Nouadhibou, but no one else in this convoy going there has room for me.