Sand

The headwind was extremely powerful, and we burned through a full tank and most of the jerry can by 4pm, when we pulled into In Salah; a town, it seems, beset by sand. I saw huge dunes piled over garden walls, and houses abandoned to the inexorable drifts. The desert around the town is covered with enigmatic sand mounds, where it turns out they have trucked sand removed from the streets.

Late afternoon at I-n-Salah

Faysal drove through the red dirt streets past red stucco houses with light blue doors to find his friends, we had coffee with revered poet Hadj Toumi, and we were invited into the home of Kasem Chermel for tea. Boubaker was there, playing on the lute, and we were treated to his music video on Kasem’s computer system: three musicians in traditional white garb playing music in the dunes.

Boubacar

Boubacar
I liked the music, but possibly only because of the circumstances. It struck me as incredible that Kasem had achieved this level of quality by recording and mixing in the very room in which we sat, on a not-quite-state-of-the-art computer system, with very limited resources.

Kasem on drums, with the inevitable tea. Visions of asphyxiation from the charcoal burner inside the closed room proved unfounded.

Kasem had also made slide shows highlighting interesting features of the area around In Salah, and so I got the virtual tour of the petrified forest, the hot water springs, a small lake. I had thought to visit them personally, but Faysal had a schedule: it turned out he actually did have a meeting in Tamanrasset in two days.

Kader Hafaoui, Sub-Director Parc Nationale
For dinner we all went to the home of Kader Hafaoui, sub-director of the immense Parc Nationale. The park covers the entire Wilaya of Tamanrasset, approximating the size of France, and it employs 600 people spread throughout every settlement in the park as wardens insuring the protection of the environment.

It is quite an achievement.

Kader put us up for the night, and in the morning Faysel and I headed south. We thought we would make it well before dinner.

I-n-Salah, Algeria