Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  We are in turn collected and driven to our accommodation in batiments durs, long low huts, like grey steel tents, put up by the French in the 1950s. A television is on in a small communal area just inside the door of the hut and a rugby match between Ireland and England is playing.

  The crew, lured by beds and bathrooms, crash out in their rooms, and I’m the only one to witness England’s defeat and Eamonn O’Brien’s unconfined joy.

  Day Seventy-Three

  HASSI-MESSAOUD

  I feel thoroughly disorientated. I saw with my own eyes last night that we were in the middle of the desert, but this morning I step out of our hut to find it surrounded by tall swaying trees. Green lawns and flower beds border the road to the communal dining block. Hassi-Messaoud means ‘the well of the man called Messaoud’, and I can’t imagine he would recognise his watering hole since the oil men got here. A network of electric pumps works round the clock to bring water up from hundreds of feet below the surface, enough to support 15,000 trees and 40,000 people. This tiny postage stamp of greenery, this blip in the wastes of the Sahara, has flocks of ducks and herds of goats, palm trees producing the very finest deglet noir dates, cows producing four barrels of milk a day, tennis courts, schools, swimming pools, fountains and a cinema.

  This eerie similarity to a piece of provincial France is not accidental.

  When oil was first discovered in the desert in the 1950s, Algeria was an integral part of France, not a colony, but a series of departements, as much a part of the mother country as Aveyron or Vaucluse. The French purred with pleasure at the news of this firstever discovery of oil on its territory and immediately put in the investment needed to retrieve it, creating, amongst other things, the man-made oasis of Hassi-Messaoud.

  At almost the same time, however, the Algerian uprising began and by 1962 France was forced to grant full independence to its most obstinately defended African possession. The French dream of a Saharan equivalent of North Sea oil finally died in 1971, when the Algerian oil industry was nationalised, without a cent of compensation to the French government.

  Nevertheless, French influence still clings to the place. The VIP dining room is called the Salle Bleue and is decorated with a nice touch of Gallic surrealism, featuring nets, fish tanks, underwater grottoes and other watery themes. At lunch, to which I’m entertained by the executives of Sonatrach, the Algerian state oil and gas company, French is spoken and there are many courses: salad, hardboiled eggs with caviar, carrots, lettuce and tomato, grilled swordfish, lamb chops, omelette, lemon tart with cream, fruit and coffee.

  ‘We eat well before Ramadan,’ jokes one of my hosts.

  The only thing missing is a bottle of Beaujolais, but the ban on alcohol is, I’m assured, a general rule in all drilling areas, anywhere in the world.

  The Algerian executives seem comfortably westernised. The head of the base refers to his countrymen as ‘Mediterranean people’ and dinner-table conversation revolves around such bourgeois topics as children’s education, keeping fit, summer holidays and life in Algiers, to which most of them return for three weeks’ leave, every four weeks. I ask them the reasons for the high level of security at Hassi-Messaoud, the massive fences, the armed guards, the watchtowers. Do terrorists strike this far south?

  A few swift glances are exchanged around the table, a wordless debate as to how much I should be told. Oil workers were killed in 1992 but since then it’s been safe. The boss man leans back, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. Apart, that is, from ‘Glass Eye’.

  Glass Eye? Some nasty infection carried by blowing sand?

  No, Glass Eye is a bandit who steals vehicles and reads Islamic tracts to his captives.

  Ah, this is beginning to sound familiar. Does he ride around at the head of a fleet of Land Cruisers full of armed men?

  General nodding. That’s the man.

  Also known as Louar, the One-Eyed One?

  They seem awfully impressed with my information. I’m awfully impressed by Glass Eye’s range. We’re 800 miles from the border, where I first heard of him.

  To be honest, they’re happier talking about hydrocarbons than one-eyed bandits. This doesn’t make for jolly banter, but it’s interesting to learn that the oil which has paid for Hassi-Messaoud, the Salle Bleue and this six-course dinner is no longer the biggest money-spinner for Algeria. They currently produce less than Britain’s North Sea fields. Natural gas reserves, I’m told, put her fourth in the world league after Russia, the USA and Canada.

  Our hosts are determined that, before we move on, we should visit the gas production plant, 200 miles northwest. There is a plane that leaves every morning, at half past six.

  Irresistible.

  Day Seventy-Four

  HASSI-R’MEL

  One advantage of being up at five is to witness the industrialisation of the Sahara in its most dramatic form. Dozens of flares blaze away in the desert, creating the eerie illusion of a false sunrise. The rigs, hung with arc lights for round the clock production, are dotted about in the sand, buzzing with the might and menace of rockets at their launch pads. This, you feel, is the work of the gods.

  Barely visible in the glare from the working lights are the dim, huddled Bedouin encampments outside the security fence, a reminder of what it must have been like here before oil was discovered, when the nomads and their families came to find water at Messaoud’s well. The only way they can get close to it now is to take on some menial work inside the base, but they’re removed from its green and pleasant avenues at the end of the day.

  Hassi-R’Mel is cooler and fresher than Hassi-Messaoud, and its airport cleaner and less frenetic. We’re given a VIP welcome, which means tea and biscuits on arrival at the airport and a turnout of executives, including my host for the morning, the impressively titled Head of Quality and Quantity Control. His name is Salah Benyoub, an amiable and unassuming middle-aged man, dressed in striped shirt and wearing a baseball cap over a hairless scalp, which, he readily tells me, is the result of recent chemotherapy. He has worked here for thirty years and speaks good English, which, he says, is the lingua franca of the oil and gas business. It’s an international business too. Salah has been to Texas and vacationed in Vegas.

  ‘Did you lose any money?’

  ‘Of course. That’s what you’re meant to do isn’t it?’

  Once tea and polite introductions are over, we’re driven over to the heart of the operation, the CNDG, the National Centre For Despatching Gas. This proves to be a huge and rambling complex of multicoloured pipes (yellow for natural gas, brown for liquid nitrogen, green for composite), looking more like some computer-generated model than the real thing. Gas from far below the surface comes up in molten form, is treated and eventually chilled to minus 170 degrees, at which temperature it is sent through one of two pipelines, either west to Spain, under the Strait of Gibraltar, or east to Italy, under the Mediterranean. When it reaches the other end of the pipeline it is warmed and expands to 600 times its volume. Every cubic foot that leaves Hassi-R’Mel turns into 600 cubic feet at the receiving terminal.

  It’s all a bit much for me to take in, but I do like the thought that the yellow paint on the pipe at the back of my cooker matches the yellow paint of the 4-foot thick pipes rearing above my head in the middle of the Algerian desert.

  One thing I will remember from this froth of facts and figures is that by 2005, at the cost of $5 billion, there will be another route across the Sahara. It will be laid at a minimum of 6 feet below ground and will connect Europe to the gas fields of northern Nigeria. This will mean a lot more yellow pipes at Hassi-R’Mel and add a new name to the long and not always illustrious list of cross-Saharan trade. Gold, salt, slaves and, now, natural gas.

  Day Seventy-Six

  IN AMENAS

  It’s ironic that, given the mighty size of Algeria, the first trace of the oil that transformed the country was found within strolling distance of Libya, near the village of In Amenas. Since then, natural gas has been discovere
d too, and there are four big fields running along the border, being jointly developed by Sonatrach and BP-Amoco. In Amenas now has an airport, maintenance depots, storage yards and a lot of Brits.

  I’m driven out to a drill site at the base of one of the steep, flattopped, sandstone escarpments south of the town, accompanied by an Algerian from the BP/Sonatrach partnership. His name is Tobba, a geologist by profession, who came out here in 1983. He’s a genial man, small and wearing a BP cap.

  He’s the first Algerian I’ve met, apart from Said, who’s been to England and I ask him for his impressions. He was struck, he said, by the contrast between the beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of public behaviour. He was with his wife and children and found the sight of embracing and kissing in the street very hard to deal with. The same with drinking. He didn’t mind bars but was embarrassed by people drunk on streets where he was walking with his children. As Tobba is clearly an educated, decent man, neither severe nor prudish, these criticisms hurt. Arabs generally behave with dignity in public, and in a society which takes no alcohol, there is a marked lack of that unreasoned, aggressive posturing that flares up so easily back home.

  The drill site is a square patch of ground, fortified by an 8-foothigh sand wall, known as a berm, and heavy security paraphernalia, including a wall of lights outside, a chicane at the entrance, guard towers and a protection force of gendarmes. I later learn there are fifty of them. This is how important the gas is to Algeria.

  A board at the entrance lists the personnel on site, along with their job titles. It reads like a cast list in a theatre programme. There’s Tool Pusher, Company Man, Chief Mechanic, Driller, Assistant Driller, Derrick Man and (very Shakespearian this) Roughnecks and Roustabouts.

  We seem to have arrived at a bad time. The site is being dismantled and the 180-foot-high derrick lies on its side awaiting collection. A small group of British workers is supervising an Algerian workforce of loaders and drivers in blue boiler suits and turbans. Willy Wallace, a roly-poly Scot with a Viva Zapata moustache, fingers the stiff creases of a tight and suspiciously pristine outfit.

  ‘They made us wear these. Must have known you were coming.’

  Willy’s life seesaws between down-to-earth domesticity and the almost recklessly exotic. He’s been on rigs in the North Sea, Colombia, the Congo, China and Kazakhstan. Colombia was ‘scary’. He was shot at and, as he put it, ‘had to hide under the desk a few times’. Kazakhstan was the only place in the last nine years where he didn’t need any guards with him. The other half of his life is back home in Scotland, with his wife, a son at Stirling University and a different set of drinking buddies, for whom Coca-Cola is no longer the strongest thing on offer.

  He waves vigorously as a 50-tonne truck toils slowly by, the driver waving back from a cab high above our heads.

  They’ve been on this site for sixty-two days. Working round the clock, it took them thirty-two of these days to drill over 8000 feet down into the desert. Gas was found but not at sufficient pressure to make production worthwhile. They’re moving on to another site, identified for them by the geologists after a three-day seismic test in which 600 miles of the Sahara was wired up and an artificial earthquake created.

  According to Willy, expenditure on the ultimately fruitless work has been augmented by certain below-the-line items.

  ‘We had a visit from Glass Eye. Took 60,000 dollars worth of surveying equipment.’

  We drive back into In Amenas. A few huts and palm trees linger on the outskirts, a dusty hint of what the village must have been like before it was engulfed by the oil industry. Now it’s dominated by compounds full of storage tanks and drilling equipment, watch-towered and double-fenced. The wind scythes across the desert, tearing at a foliage of plastic bags caught on the razor wire. A filthy sign welcomes us: ‘Throw Your Litter Away For A Clean and Beautiful Village.’

  Tonight the Brits working here have laid on a party for us. As Mike Batley, our portly, solicitous host, cooks sausages on the patio of a bungalow, we could almost be back in Maidenhead. Except that we are on the equivalent of an industrial estate, with the steel walls of a maintenance shed rearing up behind us.

  Mike has worked abroad for much of his life and makes me feel like a novice at this travel thing. He, on the other hand, envies our freedom to move about Algeria. Oil workers are virtual prisoners in their camps, and he bemoans the fact that we have seen more of the country in seven days than he’s seen in seven years.

  Beers appear from the fridge, and a bottle or two of Algerian wine loosen tongues around the table. Everyone seems to like the desert. Mike notices how it sharpens the senses.

  ‘We’re spoilt for smell,’ he says. ‘Smell a rose in the desert and it’s much more acute and intense.’

  Sue, a drilling engineer from Aberdeen, finds the desert different, unusual, exotic, whilst John, a geologist from Holmfirth, is passionate about sand dunes. South of the site we visited today there are some of the biggest he’s seen. Five hundred feet high.

  When the conversation turns to the wider picture, the geopolitics of oil, the subject becomes murkier. Someone makes the point that the USA has vast petrochemical reserves, but it knows that the longer it can keep them in the ground the better, so American foreign policy is led by the need to find cheap energy sources beyond its boundaries.

  It all seems academic here, full of sausages and red wine, under a huge sky in the serene silence of the Sahara, but a few thousand miles away, in Afghanistan, another desert is being blasted by B-52s, and no-one knows what fury this might provoke.

  Day Seventy-Seven

  ON THE LIBYAN BORDER

  Roads are rare in the Sahara. They are usually built to exploit resources of some sort, and once they reach those resources they stop.

  So it doesn’t surprise me that the road to Libya, after winding its way across a grubby oilscape of grit and shale, littered with pipes, empty cable spindles and rusting Portakabins, comes to an abrupt halt at the top of a cliff. The debris also comes to an abrupt halt. Instead, there is a magnificent view of towering, shining dunes, soothed by the wind into graceful, sensuous contours and stretching out to the east as far as the eye can see. This is Libya.

  Between the dunes and the edge of the cliff is a flat and sandy valley floor, about a mile wide, and in the middle of this is a single acacia tree. This marks the border.

  There is no fence or wall or guard-post or flagpole or barrier to be seen. Just the tree and, beneath it, an indistinct cluster of white dots. I’m told by one of our tireless escorts that the tree is a famous meeting place, where people on both sides of the border, Libyans and Algerians, get together to take tea and exchange news and gossip.

  We drive down off the falaise and I join a group of them for local dates and strong mint tea. The sun slowly declines, turning the colour of Libya from gold to russet. It is a grand, remote, spectacular spot and for once a border lives up to its romantic expectations.

  LIBYA

  Day Seventy-Nine

  TOBRUK

  It’s a warm, clammy evening on the north coast of Libya. A coach has disgorged a number of elderly Britons at the door of the blandly modern Al-Masera hotel. Once in their rooms, they will be able to push aside the net curtains and look out over the sea, where a sharp curve of the coastline has created a perfect harbour. It will mean more to them than the average tourist, for sixty years ago they nearly died defending it.

  At Tobruk, the Sahara meets the Mediterranean Sea and we are less than 250 miles from the Greek mainland, closer to Europe than at any time since leaving Gibraltar. A hundred and fifty miles the other way, to the south, is the Great Sand Sea, a massive wilderness of parallel sand ridges, hundreds of feet high, rolling across the desert like waves in a hurricane. In the Second World War, the battle for control of Egypt and the Suez Canal was confined to the area between these two seas, a thin strip of land, whose only outlet was the port of Tobruk. The fighting was fierce and Tobruk itself changed hands five tim
es between 1940 and 1942. But for eight crucial months, between April and December 1941, despite being surrounded by the enemy and bombed from the air, Allied troops clung onto Tobruk and kept open a vital supply line. The siege cost many lives, and the men filing into the hotel, some shuffling in on the arms of others, some with sticks and some in wheelchairs, are returning, one last time, to the place where they lost so many friends.

  Considering theirs is an eight-day trip and they’ve already done the battle site of El Alamein earlier today, the veterans are holding up well at the supper that’s been laid on for them. It could be something to do with Avril, Lady Randell, a vivacious woman with short-cropped blonde hair and unquenchable enthusiasm, who has organised many of these reunions. It could also be something to do with the fact that being together again reminds them of happy as well as hellish times.

  I find myself sitting next to a smart, tweed-jacketed man called Ray Ellis, with thick white hair and a ruddy face. His regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, were trapped by the Germans in a corner of bleak desert known, ironically, as the Knightsbridge Box. They had already been in the desert for a year, without a day’s leave, when, under heavy attack, they were given orders ‘to fight until the last drop of ammo’. Ray it was who fired the last shot, before being captured, taken to Tripoli and put aboard a coal-carrying cargo ship bound for Italy. This journey, which he spent crammed together with all the other prisoners in a sealed hold, with one meal a day and the constant fear of being blown up by British air and sea patrols, was, he admits, more terrifying than anything he’d endured at the siege of Tobruk. On arrival, he and his colleagues, filthy and emaciated, were paraded through the streets of a small town near Naples. He was at his lowest ebb, when, out of the jeering crowd, came a young girl, who ran up to him and pressed a peach into his hand. He pauses here, not for breath but to let the emotion register, as if the peach had just that moment been handed to him. He nods gently at the memory, and goes on.