The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  I know it is trouble already. I unroll my sleeping bag on the far side of Allain’s car to write by flashlight, but I watch the camp instead and three Mauritanian men moving among the tourists’ cars, a flow of blue robes, head-wraps floating around their necks. I watch them and they do not know even as they leave the cars and come walking back close together, talking in their language, passing the wide space where I sit. They stop and stand there a few moments and come forward. They are standing high above me in one form of blowing cloth, and then one man crouches down before me, a gentle gesture, respectful, human. He asks me why I am alone, and as I do not know how to answer, he looks at my papers and asks me what I am writing. This. I wave my hand across the camp, the land. He nods. He tells me they are enroute to Morocco to find work and make their way to Europe. And you, they ask. Where are you going? I tell them I am on my way to West Africa, to Senegal and Mali where I have traveled before and made many friends. He asks me for a cigarette and thanks me. He says they will leave me in peace, and after they walk away I find the words: something about the desert, not being able to obtain a sense of nearness, even the details at your feet. It is made for distance. Your mind cannot stay down and so you must let it go.

  They come back for me, the three Mauritanians. They bring me to their fire on the edge of camp and make a space for me on their soft flannel blanket closest to the coals that glow in a pocket of sand. They have promised me tea and the small teapot is already on the coals. But they, themselves, have a bottle of wine from one of the French, a gift. Mustapha keeps the bottle close to him and they argue over it from time to time. He speaks eloquently, a poet, a man of the world. He has lived in the south of Spain, speaks fluent Spanish, French, a little German, Arabic and his own dialect, Hassaniya. Muhamed lived in Stockholm once, and has a Swedish girlfriend and child there. Their visas expired and they were told to leave, and now they will try again to get back after years of work.

  I ask them: Are they not sad to leave their home, their desert?

  This? they say. There is nothing in the desert.

  But I am held in this moment in time, sitting in a pocket of sand surrounded forever by miles of sand and stars, with these men who are my friends who I will never see again.

  The bottle drains and they turn to me. Will I not go and ask my friends for another bottle? I tell them those people are as much strangers to me as they are to them. Muhamed and the other man go off to search for themselves. Mustapha, lying on the blanket, speaks of art and beauty and the search for truth.

  He says, “Quand tout le monde sera gâté, pollué, ils vont venir au désert, ici ou c’est pur et propre.” When the world is ruined they will come to the desert, here where it is pure and clean.

  He says the scientists had said that one day the desert would be a paradise.

  In the cold morning my sleeping bag is wet with dew. Over the hills above camp where I sat one morning, years ago, to warm myself and contemplate the desert of bluish light and veils of rose and white and ochre, is a garbage dump. Plastic, sardine cans, thousands of water bottles, stink of shit. The land is strewn with toilet paper and cigarette packages, as far as the eye can see.

  On the first convoy we called ourselves a “mini UN”: French, Senegalese, Japanese, Dutch, Belgian, German, and Canadian. We followed each other in a long wavering line and the crossing was slow. Mile after mile cars were stuck and we got out and walked through the sands, felt the burning on our skin, had a look in our eyes of being drugged or dreaming in this endless land of light. We helped each other, dug sand away from other people’s wheels and pushed. The people of the Land Rovers, like the Dutch couple, Lou and Dirk, brought out their ropes and sand-ladders and became our saviors. In these interludes there were the characters that emerged. Manfred and Marcus always stayed close to George’s car and whenever we came to a stop the three of them went off to investigate, tall George in the middle, small Manfred on one side, Marcus on the other. Sour Manfred never made me forget I had intruded on his brotherhood. He ignored me, gave me dark looks, and if I spoke he always said something to put me off. Once, he lost his tailpipe in the sand. It made me smile when he came walking up to us with it in his hand and shrugging his shoulders. The Swiss boy wove among us with his sugary smiles and asked everyone for money and cigarettes, until people knew to avoid him. The French man’s bus appeared against the sky like some strange moving red tower. Usually it was stuck on some horizon and needed everyone to get it out.

  “I hate that bus,” someone said.

  “You have too much weight,” others said. “Get rid of it.”

  He grumbled and swore at them, “What the hell am I supposed to do? Leave it all here? Putain!”

  The military were ever hidden among us, but then they appeared in their jeep as we pulled up behind the line of cars on a high hill. People got out and walked down the line. Was this the Mauritanian border? No one knew. Far below us we saw a post and soldiers. One soldier was walking down the line counting the cars, another stood at the head of the line. The cars went forward one at a time. When it was our turn we drove down the hill and through an entrance of two posts and stopped. George and I stood before a table out in the desert. All of our passports were there in plastic bags held down by stones. The soldier rummaged through the bags and found ours. Mine blew away in the sand and his aide ran after it and caught it. They stamped the pages over and over with an inkblot that was going dry and then we officially entered Mauritania.

  Farther on in the day was a place of green tattered army tents, desert men, goats, camels on the hills and a wooden hut where we picked up our passports. We climbed a steep hill of shale and from the top we saw far away the thread of sea and a lit city on a peninsula, and the sun going down, a burning red disc into gray dust. Nouadhibou.

  Night fell. The Australians were worried about riding in the dark. Their motorbikes slid in the sand, toppled over. They could not see where they were going, but they had no choice. We drove on in the deep sands along the railway tracks with the dancing red lights ahead of us in the night, until we came to another open space where we were told to park. A long wait.

  “Africa-five-minutes,” George laughed.

  We got out to stand in a crowd before a cardboard hut that smelled of milk and sheep, where we were to fill out tourist forms. People were worn, tired, sun-scorched, layered in fine dusts and grit. They were sharing their last cigarettes, looking for constellations in the stars, shivering in the wind, wrapped in their styles of desert clothes, now pale, bleached by light, dust-colored. It was the place where people parted ways or continued together in chosen little groups. George and I, we spoke in the way of travelers: “Today I know you, tomorrow we say good-bye.” They would stay in town a day or so and then they would go on to Nouakchott. Did I want to come with them? I thought I wanted to go inland by train, and so soon we would part ways. Children were laughing, waving as the convoy pulled into town, past metal shop-fronts and unlit back streets, goats and dogs on the loose, wind-wrapped women, floating sunset veils, men with wrapped heads, long sky-blue cloth.

  “If I ever get out alive …”

  I can’t seem to finish the sentence. This is nothing like the first convoy. It is even more beautiful with the danger. I stare out at the desert, pure, swept, with prints of birds and mice, the beaded shrubs, the white shells and shale rock. It could be a paradise, a place to walk barefoot or lie across and sift sands through the fingers, but for the deadly sun, the burning winds. All that is in the air, all that touches the land is fire.

  Nouadhibou. It must be fifty kilometers away, but we are not sure and we are not going there anyway. I hold down panic, remain in the hands of these three men I do not know. Allain, with his sad eyes, his child-like muttering and cursing, his questioning. While we drive he always tells me what he is doing as he learns the ways of the tracks, as if I could help him affirm that we are okay. I am only half here, a spirit, a woman.

  And Claude in the little white Renault ahead of
us, with its two long wooden planks strapped to the roof rack, his balding head, dark baked skin, tall, stooping, gaunt, always quiet. When he speaks I hear nothing but mumbling. And Bruno on his blue motorbike, with the words “Teneré 2000,” that he rigged up himself. Ten times in the desert, Algeria, Libya, Niger, five times in the convoy, three times alone, first time to Nouakchott without a guide. He is the one who leads us, with thick silver-rimmed sun goggles, always grinning, playing the fool. It is not that he has no fear, it is that he is laughing at the gods.

  The gods were with us on the first convoy and we arrived safely and sanely in Nouadhibou. There was sunlight coming in everywhere at the Youth Hostel, Chet Baker played on Jean’s sound system and later Edith Piaf. The Japanese boy, Mitsu was in the kitchen with the desert boy, preparing a feast of lobster and fresh vegetables, a gift from the old French man, Jean, who was pacing the sunlit hall, slowly, meditatively, listening to the music, a baseball cap on his white head, low on his eyes. We had all spoken badly of him in the desert, the old man and his bus. Who would bring a bus into the desert?

  The Germans had gone in the morning. And the others of the convoy were somewhere in town, at the other inn down the road or the campground on the edge of town. The young Swiss couple, Sarah and Udo, were doing their wash in buckets in the shower stall. Mine was already hanging on the roof terrace in the glowing afternoon sun.

  Billie Holiday’s voice came and Jean said, “it’s too bad I didn’t meet her before she died.” He seemed to have known everyone.

  We had a feast of fried lobster, potatoes, onions, bread, avocado salad. Jean brought out a gallon of red wine. The good thing about having a bus, he told us, was all the things you could bring. He told me stories. He lived in the south of France with his Japanese wife, his children, a dog, a cat, two pet rats. He had a bathtub out in the garden under the eucalyptus trees where he bathed even in winter, and he had tamed the magpies. They flew down from the sky when he called. But he never stayed. He went traveling. He had been through the desert too many times to count.

  Hamid, the desert boy, had become Jean’s guide. Jean had found him or the boy had found Jean somewhere at one of the last police posts where the gangs of guides gather to descend on the tourists. They got on each other’s nerves most times, swore at each other one moment, the next moment they were laughing. They were the same, troubled, free spirits. Hamid sat at our table wreathed in smoke from the sweet rolled herb he lit, one after another. He was a street kid, had come in from the desert at some point, with long natty hair, a silver amulet around his neck. He was temperamental, seductive, burning. Every woman became his operation and I was not spared. He followed me, kept me within his periphery, put on tapes of Algerian desert music for me. I had forgotten about the war and the tribes backed by Algeria fighting for independence. I said it reminded me of Spanish guitar. He rose in a storm of anger and strode off.

  From the roof terrace in the evening I could see all the rooftops of the desert port city, the antennas and the gray desert, the sea. I heard the grunting of the camels and sheep, children playing their clapping games, laughter. When you are alone in a strange place people come to you or they find you or you find them and you learn what you have to learn. The sun was going down orange into the sands, the muezzins’ wailing broke from so many mosques. Later the desert boy told me his day had been like a pilgrimage.

  Allain and I are stuck again. Bruno has disappeared over a hill, but Claude stops his car on the hill, unties his planks from the roof and walks down to us dragging them behind him. Bruno returns, laughing. Each time someone gets stuck he rolls another joint and they take their time smoking. He tells them what to do, smiling, teasing. I see he is strong. He could get out of here on a whim. But what about Claude, with his smoker’s hack deep in the lungs, his heavy lonely look, evasive eyes, unable to accelerate the car out of the sand while we push. Bruno drives it out, gunning the engine, and then it is overheated. They fill their radiators. Bruno asks Allain how much water he has, wondering how prepared he is, questioning his capability.

  “Vingt litres,” Allain answers in defiance.

  Allain, with his minimal equipment, having to borrow Claude’s planks, not knowing how to place them or how high to jack the car, or that you have to lift the car on each side to get the sand under the wheels. And myself? I dig sand away from the wheels and the chassis, help to gather and lay shrubs and stones for friction under the tires.

  “This is what we do in Canada, in the snow!” I tell Bruno laughing, trying to be a part of them, because there is no other way. No return. Too late. I can’t walk away now with my two bottles of water.

  Hours ago when we left the last border post it was pure abandon. “La vrai piste.’’ The real track. What I remembered years ago. And then we got stuck and then it was Claude. We have been stuck eight or ten times. Bruno says we have gone no more than twenty kilometers. There were so many tracks before. Now everything is blown over with sand. We’ve been out here four hours.

  Bruno will never say if we are lost. He is not lost, but Allain has begun to get nervous. “Ca m’étonne on n’a pas croisé la route espanõl.” He’s looking for the Spanish road, the old eaten one-lane tarmac we followed paved all the way to the Mauritanian border, and here it has all but disappeared, decayed under the sands. He says, if only we could see the train we would know where we are, the tracks that run from Nouadhibou across the desert to the phosphate mines in Zouerate.

  Nothing fazes Bruno. I keep looking back across the land to see a plume of smoke, a flicker, a speck. No sign of the convoy, the train. Nothing. Space simmering in the heat. Thirst. I keep looking at these men, the surface of their faces, the red skin, bristled chins, dirt under the fingernails, old clothes grease-marked, sun-faded. Who are they?

  In the stockyards of Nouadhibou the rail men were hitching the big red bus to the flatbed with cables and rope and old pieces of twisted rail ties, while we sat on a sand hill with our baggage in the shade of the boxcars. Barefoot boys played behind us, rolling their bodies down the sand slopes.

  Close to evening all of us entered the French man’s bus, the Australians, Mark and Daniel, the Swiss, Sarah and Udo, the Dutch, whose Land Rover was hitched behind the bus, the Japanese boy, Mitsu, Hamid, the desert boy, the Frenchman, Jean, and myself. The train maneuvers continued, more flatbeds and cars loaded with sacks of coal and wood careened past us on other tracks. Our own flatbed was hitched onto the engine and moved far down the tracks and left again. A CD player on the floor played Mariah Carey. The children played on the sand hills outside our windows, watching over us. The conductor came on board to look us over and tell us we did not have long to wait. He had orange tinted ski-goggles over his eyes and he seemed to be smiling insanely.

  Now it was Georges Brassens, French folk music on our magic bus. How bizarre: sitting in a bus on a train on the tracks. Some of us crawled out the back door and moved along the flat bed past the rigging that held down the Land Rover and the motorbikes. We were hitched again to the engine car. We heard the conductor giving orders on the radio.

  “Reculez le soulard renard!” Back up the drunken fox.

  Was this the name they had given us? Because all afternoon everyone had been drinking from another of Jean’s gallon bottles of rosé. Our car lurched forward again and we hung onto the motorbikes for balance. Mark grabbed an iron ring on the post of the flatbed and swung himself out over the tracks, yelling out above the drone of the engine with the wind in our ears.

  We were somewhere within a one kilometer iron-ore train on its way north to the mines in Zouerate. We moved out into the desert under the night sky. The bus swung back and forth, jolted hard against the cables like a ship in strong waters. Clouds of orange dust rose from the tracks, billowing in the light of the lamp on the car ahead of us. We could not see the head of the train, nor the caboose.

  We shared our food, dates, peanuts, biscuits, water. The rosé came to an end. Daniel and Mark sank down in their seats wi
th their knees pressed against the back of the seat ahead of them. They lit their silver Mauritanian pipes and the sweetness of pure local tobacco curled around us. It had been six months since they left Australia and began their bike tour from Europe. They didn’t know when they would return. Daniel wondered if I missed home. He asked because he wanted to say he had been away too long. How would anyone at home understand him when he went back? How could he relate again to the sedentary life? This is what we shared: were we escaping something on our journeys? Were we a band of exiles? Did we have a purpose? I spoke about my intended journey by horse and they understood. To travel the land of no fences.

  Old Jean had tied himself up in his suspended bed. Once the bus swung out too wide and snapped back with a bang. The mattress and Jean were slowly sliding down, but Jean didn’t wake up. Mark went down and tied him up again and he stopped snoring.

  Udo and Sarah were trying to sleep. Their presence was always quiet, subtle. They were absorbing everything but they kept it all to themselves. Mitsu was reading. He barely spoke a word of English, and had no French in a land where French was the official language. The Dutch couple was sitting at the back. Once in a while the woman, Lou came up and sat beside me. She had drunk too much and had passed the point of laughter. They were friends of everyone. It was how they traveled, on their way around the world, a life journey. She said it was the only way to live. She sat down beside me. What she wanted to know was: what was it like to travel alone, a woman, because she had never done it. Ah, yes, it was wonderful to be free. I told her some stories, and she told me some more, and then everything went quiet. How it felt sometimes to want to be free and still be held.