Adventure Divas (32 page)

We bogged down in the sand frequently, despite having drained air from our tires for better traction. We dug and dug and Aghali told us the story of the Swiss couple who left their jeep to seek water, and died. It takes two days to die of thirst out here. “Never leave the jeep,” Aghali says. Fulfilling the task we charged him with, Aghali eventually found the tracks of a caravan: hundreds of pancake-shaped indentations leading into the distance. Vanessa and I swapped excited smiles, and wondered at his navigation. We knew the caravans existed, but our production challenge was that we did not know where they were at any given time. These caravans only cross this ocean of sand twice a year, when the sands are firm enough to sustain them. Aghali carried on, following the tracks into a seemingly intangible expanse; our small expedition felt like a cohesive dream wandering into another dimension. We were fully vested in Aghali’s skills. No caravan, no show.

The Tuareg have controlled sections of the Saharan routes since the seventh century and have often fought for that territorial right. Currently, there is intertribal rivalry among two primary tribes of the region, the Tuareg and the Fulani. But these desert tribes are also dependent on each other for commerce, so tensions stay at a low boil.

Two hours after initially spotting the tracks, a heat-jittery, amorphous black mass appeared in the distance.

Caravan.

We drove toward the mass and then Aghali and I jumped out of the jeep. We walked faster to catch up, then slower as we came apace with dozens of veiled, indigo-draped men leading hundreds of camels in a teardrop formation. The caravan did not stop.
“Efraiy a dassa a dai wadouwen?”
(“May we join you?”) we asked the
madugu
(“leader”).

The
madugu,
Oumarou, simply smiled, then swung his chin toward the distance.
“I walla.”
(“Yes.”)

In camp I watch
as Oumarou walks among the dappling of fires, surveying the site, his broad chest thrust out and his sword still at his side. Silhouettes of folded beasts against the horizon provide the only definition between earth and sky, desert and camp. I crawl behind a bundle of hay into my sleeping bag under a rack of stars, the rest of the Milky Way a dusty night-light. Stars shoot to the rhythmic euphony of Oumarou’s boy pounding millet, and to the gurgly, garage-band cacophony of camel digestion. A chunky sliver of the moon hangs, low and heavy, like the belly of a pregnant woman rocking on all fours. Despite the tea, sleep comes fast. Too fast. I do not want to miss any of this, but I am quickly swept away by the fabled sandman.

The next morning
I am conscious of how pure and clear-headed I feel. Every day that I walk across this stretch of the Sahara, leading a camel with lovely eyelashes and an ornery persona, feels epic. The Tuareg nomads have no word in their native Tamachek for
tomorrow.
Today is today and tomorrow is . . . not today. Talk about living in the present. Because survival is so tenuous, the Tuareg culture moves straight to the point, in almost every respect. Appropriately, the Tamachek language is all consonants, no mealy-mouthed vowels. Like the cop Kiran Bedi in India, the Tuareg acknowledge and leverage life’s transience. Walking this path of immediate existence is teaching me, too, about every moment.

Some nights I simply walk into the desert a half mile or so from camp and lie down to sleep. There is nothing to be afraid of, as here, in the middle of the desert where temperatures can reach 160 degrees, few creatures can survive. The desert’s sterility is freeing. Day doesn’t break in this desert. No birds or cicadas or garbage trucks to gong the collective morning bell. Instead, dawn creeps up. There is simply a silent lightening that mysteriously grows from imperceptible, to
there.

Oumarou nods for me to help him one morning after I’ve walked in from the distance. He has me hold his camel’s tether while he cauterizes its wounds (caused by the rub between hard, unforgiving saddles topped with heavy weight) with a sizzling piece of iron. This is a daily, predawn ritual. We load up the camels with hundreds of pounds of blankets, millet, hay, dried tomatoes, and onions, and set off to walk.

Because of the singular nature of our activities, the small crew, and our complete disconnection from the outside world—no e-mail, no satellite phone, and only two dodgy walkie-talkies—this shoot is calm, strangely free from Adventure Divas worries that usually permeate everything. Our financial debt has risen as fast as the economy has fallen. The energy of running a business on ideals and curiosity (rather than capital) has begun to sour. Jeannie is, understandably, tiring of being behind a desk and wants to divagate herself. The hotel in New Zealand is threatening to sue, and an avalanche of details is giving me the personality of . . . a camel. Maybe Adventure Divas wasn’t meant to be; maybe we should cash it in. Out here, I see the beauty of simplicity.

Soft folds of taupe cover the distance in every direction; the huge blue sky clicks like a puzzle piece into the landscape’s curved edges. My reaction to the emptiness is strangely devotional. I am falling in love with a place—which I have never done. The elements—the heat, the walking, the sand—are demanding, but they leave me raw and happy. I have a strange desire to submit to this desert. I have experienced many fine places in my travels, always wondering if I would ever be taken enough to stop, to shelve the nomada within.

Sometimes the relentless green growth of the Pacific Northwest feels demanding, as if it is taking up too much brain space. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly says our consciousness has limits. That is, our central nervous system can only process so many bits of information—sounds, sights, emotions, thoughts—at once. “It is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second, or 7,560 per minute, or almost half a million per hour. Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far.”

Here, in the belly of the Sahara, the stuff of consciousness is not cluttered, and the precious bits go a long way. An uncanny space-time relationship strips me of everything. Vanity. Ego. Time. Anxiety. Irreverence. Out of the corner of my mind’s eye, I get a glimpse of what it must feel like to simply exist. And I guess this is what I mean by being in love. I have never been anywhere so desolate and I have never felt less alone.

It figures I would fall in love with a politically destabilized region, on a caravan that does not traditionally include women, in an environment that cannot sustain life.

But even love needs an oasis. When I finally see Fachi, it’s like mainlining a fruit smoothie, and I realize how starved I have been for color. I am desperately happy to see this cliché come to life: palm trees in the desert sea, and its mirror-image mirage, tantalizingly close. I want to sprint toward it, but the Blue Men of the Desert keep us at their steady pace.

Fachi’s buildings consist mainly of
ancient mud-brick fortresslike towers with tiny rectangular windows. It is one of the oldest inhabited towns in the Sahara. There was once an enormous saltwater lake here, but it evaporated under the heat of the fierce Saharan sun, leaving behind an area rich with salt deposits. The Kanouri people, who control the salt deposits, are the descendants of slaves who have lived near and mined out the cliffs of Fachi since the eighth century.

Like thousands before us over hundreds of years, we are here to feed and water the camels, and to trade. Fachi has always been a lively intersection of cultures and peoples, and stopping here makes me feel part of the larger nomadic order. We walk a procession of six camels through Fachi’s narrow streets, which are lined by low mud walls and surrounded by wind-sculpted trees. We are followed by a band of small children.
“Cadeau, cadeau”
(“Present, present”), they call to us, half-playing, half-begging, the legacy of a French school that once existed here but fell away after independence.

Our camels groan with relief as off come the tomatoes, onions, and millet that will be traded for salt. Landlocked Niger has no commercial salt mines or seawater for evaporation. Nor does Morton’s have a holding here, and imported salt is too costly. Human beings need salt to live. Thus, in Niger, this oasis is vital.

Oumarou indicates I should go with a Kanouri couple whom he seems to know. Perhaps he trades with them. The couple takes me down to their plot of circular pans, disk-shaped formations in the ground, from two to five feet in diameter, which are filled with brown, briny water that evaporates in the sun, leaving the residual salt. The man and woman slowly wade into the water-filled pans and begin shaking the silty contents through a strainer. They are accustomed to working in 120 degrees. The woman hands me a strainer, and I step into one of the round bodies of water to help with the work.

“Ahhhhhhh!” I scream, as a dozen razor blades, or perhaps a school of piranha, lay waste to my feet. The intense saline content of the water sears my cuts and blisters. This is a pain I cannot take. The couple is amused, but sympathetic, and the woman nods toward some shade. I hobble away and duck behind the clay wall, and breathe through the pain. My livelihood may have its strains and psychic entropy. A life mining salt in the middle of nowhere is pure, and perhaps simple, but most certainly it is brutal. The couple works in the blazing sun until they have two calabashes full of rough animal-grade salt, and then we all walk up and out of the salt “mining” area to find the rest of our crew.

We get to Oumarou and the trading area just as the transactions are completed. Vanessa is calculating. “Thirty days of nonstop walking across the desert will earn each man approximately five hundred dollars,” she says. “A hard way to make a living.” The camels sigh with the practice of knowing martyrs, as the Blue Men lash heavy pillars of a dried salt-and-mud mix on either side of their humps and ready the camels for their return trip.

I dread saying good-bye to Oumarou. We won’t be returning across the desert with them; we are on to our next story. Television shoots enable countless intense, brief relationships with extraordinary people. Mostly I am inured to this constant parting of ways with another human you know you will never see again in your life. Yet this time, reality hiccups. We do not know each other, really, and in my raw state I am probably heaping extra meaning where none is due. But his world has tweaked mine, unexpectedly.

“In taoudet”
(“Safe travels”), I say from three feet.

“Inshallah,”
Oumaru responds, with just a hint of a nod, and then turns east, Orion now on the other cheek, to lead his men on the walk back across the Sahara.

I climb back into the twenty-first century, Aghali shifts it into gear, and as we drive toward Timia, I feel time begin to fill the hourglass again.

The desert approaching
Timia is different than the nothingness of the Te Nere. A hazy dense sky swirls pockets of dust, and volcanic craters pock the distance. Trees buck reality and insist on growing out of mountains of rubble, standing in defiance of an otherwise apocalyptic landscape.

Timia is home to the sedentary agriculturalists called the
kel oui
Tuaregs. We wend our way up a dry riverbed in the Land Rover, and when we arrive at Timia we are taken aback by its greenery, lushness, and fertility. We set up camp on the outskirts of the oasis and spend the evening discussing the plan for tomorrow’s filming.

“How many cups of this do you think equals that first cup of Tuareg tea? Caffeine-wise,” I ask Tim groggily the next morning, as we stir up our fourth cup of Nescafé.

“No idea, mate,” he says, then adds, “Did you know Aghali killed a viper in camp last night?” He pushes his plastic cup, midair, toward a clump of scrubby bushes. This news sends a
craaaack
through my desert Eden. I have been free and safe at night because I believed I was. Tim shows me where the dead snake was tossed. It is black and limp, two millimeters from decapitated. “Snakes. It
had
to be snakes,” I say. The Tuareg believe the desert is filled with evil spirits; I wonder if they assign anything to animal visitations.

The festival is in full swing by midmorning. Dozens of women swathed in indigo with bangles and black veils sit in tight circles rapping on the
tinde
drums and bellowing. All this a preamble to the day’s main event: a series of camel races.

The contestants, who have walked days or weeks to get here, line up in ornate regalia, proud atop their camels. I am growing downright fond of the versatile camel. Not only can a camel carry half its own weight; its milk can feed forty human babies in inevitable times of drought. But today they are not wet nurses or pack animals; today each of these beasts is expected to behave like a thoroughbred. Today, they are honorable steeds whose good looks and speed may bestow status, and a bit of prize money, upon their riders. Frenetic drumming and ululating is the backdrop to an inaugural ceremony led by the village’s blacksmiths. The blacksmiths seem to be the grand poo-bahs of most things ceremonial, probably because of their association with fire, the element of creation. In phase one of the competition they call out numbers one by one, and steed and rider, both layered in colorful blankets and fringe, sword swinging from the rider’s hip, join a circle running around the blacksmiths. They are judged by their regalia and pedigree, white and leggy camels being considered the most beautiful. The drumming and ululating and throngs of onlookers keep the atmosphere at a heady pitch.

The blacksmiths bless the event, and one of them drops a sword that sets ninety camels and riders off in a hurricane of hollering and hooves for the first of three races. As they thunder past, I note a few significant differences between a horse race and a camel race. First of all, there is a hump to deal with; secondly, there are no stirrups; and third, well, despite the beating they’re getting, the camels never actually break into a gallop. It’s more of a fuel-injected hyper-trot. Ouch.