His fee was a nice red Landcruiser VX, which I managed to sell him on the side. Sure enough, his local connections, wily ways, and of course, language helped us out of some sticky situations. Left: Satellite photo of Waw-an-Namus m , a volcano in south-central Libya. Right: A 12, km2 section of a s French map of the Grand Erg de Bilma in northeast Niger, one of the lesser-explored regions of the Sahara.
Providing detailed travel advice for 9. Mauritania : Good security for at least km east, inland from the Atlantic Coast. A newly opened border has revived a colonial-era trans-Sahara route from Algeria across the Tiris Zemmour in the north, Scott points out. In Mauritania, you have to search for the points of interest.
Expect a few military checkpoints. The main pistes are unpaved but marked, but be cautious about traveling inland away from them, because of the risk of mines. Morocco : Straightforward access and safe. Tunisia : Avoid the Libyan border zones and the far south, which is a military area. The Tunisian side of the sandy Grand Erg Oriental in the southwest is the only place to experience the Sahara.
Mali : A handful of travelers visit the country, but few, if any, travel overland over great distances. Best to consult an experienced travel agency, such as the Mali-based Papillon Reizen. Still, there are serious security issues in the area, and access is not guaranteed at the moment. If you are still interested, consult the local agency, Niger Travel and Tours. As with northern Mali, you can forget about visiting its deserts for a long time. While its capital, Tripoli, is not in the Sahara, it is sometimes possible to visit there with specialist adventure travel companies, such as Untamed Borders.
BET is a highlight of the Sahara and open to visitors. Overall, the country is relatively safe, as long as you avoid Lake Chad: The surrounding forests are a Boko Haram hideout. Sudan : Traveling east of the Nile is not much of an issue.
Then a whoosh, a roar and several gigantic locomotives shot by in the other direction. Wagons heaped with dark hills of iron ore thundered past, bathed eerily in the glow of our passenger carriage.
I picked out three figures, crouched around a charcoal heater; then herds of goats, standing motionless on the ore. Seconds later, the wagons were gone, leaving only clouds of slowly settling dust. Our train jolted to life again. Around 12 hours after leaving Nouadhibou, we shuddered to a halt in the frigid darkness at Choum. For a few seconds there was silence, then voices and torchlight. We peered over the lip of the wagon. Headlights were lazily swimming in the gloom below, and the sounds of urgent activity issued from the neighbouring wagons.
Knowing we had only a few minutes, we hastily hauled our bags down the ladder to where an ancient Peugeot was waiting.
Beside us, the wagons began to roll again, booming past us through the dust before vanishing into the night. The driver, who seemed to have mistaken us for locals in our robes, began chattering away in Arabic, but the gentle motion of the car soon lulled me to sleep.
In a guesthouse in Chinguetti the next evening, fronds of date palms whispering above us, my head still reverberated with the roar and rattle of rolling stock. Chinguetti was a place of fascinating dislocation, its ancient libraries and nameless streets collapsing slowly into piles of stones amid an endless sea of billowing golden dunes.
Out of time, it was an elegiac picture of vanished glory, a place that was slowly forgetting itself. But for almost a week, specks of iron ore dust continued to trickle from my ears. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. An exhilarating train journey across the Sahara. Both of them took the caravan back home. My uncle felt comfortable and free from worry: if the caravan left, he mounted his camel; if the caravan halted, he pitched his tent and rested. But our city-dweller was exhausted and overwhelmed with worries about his slaves: one was wasting away, another was hungry, this one escaped, that one got lost in the erg [duned desert].
When the caravan stopped, each attended to his own affairs. Our city-dweller was entirely worn out. During this time, he looked at [my uncle], who was seated peacefully in the shade with his fortune. And then there were the small, but numerous and in the end obnoxious, daily inconveniences: the omnipresent fleas, which you would try to drive away by wearing cords soaked in mercury around your neck; the numerous flies everywhere there was a rotting carcass i.
Was it really useful? He thought so. The Masufa must have laughed a lot at these city-dweller pastimes. Finally, there are the demons, which Ibn Battuta says are numerous in the desert. These imperceptible deities like to toy with isolated travelers. Mischievous, they seduce you so that you end up losing your way. The caravan tempers these harsh conditions with strict discipline; it diminishes them through distractions.
You will put distance between yourself and the column only at your own risk, the Berber leader must have said. The camels, indeed, walk as if to the beat of a metronome. They will stop when they receive the order to do so, that is to say, at the planned halt on a beeline route. And while the camels carrying the loads were underway at a regular pace, under the guidance of the impassive Masufa, those who paid for the crossing would amuse themselves hunting addax, letting their dogs run free, and riding a bit ahead of the caravan to let their horses graze and to enjoy the invigorating wait.
The weather on this zone is harsh. It can be extremely hot. Its central section is still little-used though, and still requires special vehicles and precautions to be taken to survive the harsh environment and climate of the center of the desert. Daytime temperatures are scorching, and fuel and water are in scarce supply along much of the route, so you'd better hope the needle doesn't touch "E" and that your radiator doesn't blow.
And even the newly paved portions of the road often disappear under immense drifts of sand that block the route for days at a time. To use information contained on this site is to do so at your own risk. The website is for information purposes only and we assume no liability for decisions made as a result of the information provided here.
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