Sandstorm In The Sahara

Motorhead don’t play directly after Marianne and Michael. Nor does the last green before the Sahara turn directly into pure sand dunes. After the green comes the stony desert. The first islands of sand spread out in it. The last rivers run out into nothingness. Two more mountain ridges, then all I can see in the distance are shimmering sand dunes. 52 days to Timbuktu.

For the Touareg, even this is part of the Sahara. Large kasbahs bear witness to ancient caravan history. The temperature rises to just under 40 degrees. That’s quite low, explains a tar round in the shade of a kasbah. It soon gets up to 55 degrees here. A car passes by every half hour, almost exclusively jeeps, hardly any tourists.

The road ends in M’Hamid, 42 kilometres before what I imagined the Sahara to be like. A sign warns “Attention! Desert!”. I have to grin. For the first time on all my journeys, I believe the statement that I can’t get any further here in my car. Only jeeps. Often enough only with the help of another car. Clay walls brace themselves desperately and often in vain against shifting dunes. The road is protected on both sides by straw mats.

It is incredibly quiet. The autofocus of my camera becomes a deafening noise. I hear a car approaching. Ten minutes later I see it too. A pair of sand trousers sweep across the road and play with one last tree. If the Doors had made a video for “The End”, it would surely be here. I turn around and drive 40 kilometres back to Tigounite to the meeting point for my Sahara bivouac.

Less than an hour later, I realise that I’m just a poor man’s bumblebee. All of a sudden, a sandstorm hits Tigounite. Visibility drops to less than 100 metres. I pick up my guide, and just 30 minutes later we arrive on a track that I recognise from the 2006 Paris Dakar Rally. Special stage, day five, through the real desert. This is the Sahara, just five kilometres off the road. The guide cheers me on: “Plus vide, il faut passer du sable!”.

It bumps and rumbles, then I almost get stuck a few times in small fields of sand. The bumper hits the ground and flips inwards for repair. Gusts of sand chop across the washboard track. We have to close the windows, the temperature rises immeasurably. Half an hour later we arrive at the Bedouin camp. Yes. This is exactly how it should be: a few tents. Large dunes. And a huge sandstorm over the Sahara.

The Berber explains to me that there is often a sandstorm when it rains in the northern Atlas. It has been pouring with rain there for the last five days. The sandstorm is correspondingly violent. Within seconds, fine dust creeps into every orifice I know and two I have never seen before. There is even a centimetre of sand on the tables in the guest tent. I can barely get out of the pile-carpeted door facing the wind, then I can’t get in at all. The tent is shaking. I drink another cup of tea and then doze off the worst of the storm with flies dancing salsa on my nose.

After two hours, the sandstorm has calmed down a bit. It’s now only around 30 knots. I have someone show me how to tie the Touareg turban correctly, put on the thickest sunglasses and pack the camera in a bag. This is how the desert should be… maybe with a little less wind and more sun, but that’s fine. I climb up and down steep dunes. The sand is the finest virgin dust, no tracks, I’m the only one here. In Merzouga you can always see tracks in the sand, even in the pictures taken by professional photographers. Shooting pictures is difficult now, even at a height of 1.70 metres the camera is sandblasted. The sky remains hazy today.

My luck is harshly interrupted. All of a sudden, an avalanche of acoustic rubbish of the lowest category pushes its way through my turban. I look downwind and see a circus tent of the Zirkus Krone calibre. It’s probably a kilometre away, but it sounds like it’s right in front of me. There must be 50 jeeps parked in front of it. Unbelievably loud All American Shit Hop distorts my face. What is that? It’s like shitting on an altar! Can’t you give it a rest in the desert? Only my guide prevents my planned petition to al-Qaeda (I pay for the materials and rubbish disposal, you take care of the rest): The party is an exception.

I went into the desert with the fear of not being able to hear the silence because of the tinnitus. Completely unfounded. The desert wankers a kilometre away have a nice loud diesel generator. They use it to pollute the desert with even louder techno of the worst kind until four in the morning. The crowning glory is a mass gangbang on quad bikes. The tracks in the morning say: drunk as a skunk.

I get up before dawn, put on my turban and head for the dunes. Now it’s finally quiet. Now the desert is as it should be. A light rain starts to fall. I walk up and down the dunes and am happy. Two hours later, my Berber hosts are still not awake. I wake them up and say goodbye for another long journey.

A few jeeps overtake me on the road back towards Tamegroute. They are the desert wankers from Zirkus Krone. They drive during the day just as they party at night. Off the tarmac to the left, into the gravel. Stones jump up and I have another nice hole in the windscreen.

Every jeep has a number. Command caravan desert coma. One of the desert wankers throws up from the jeep with the number 31. “Night Falls over Kerbala” is playing on my iPod, which is now legal again. I often have trouble recognising what’s good. I should be more grateful when I have the opportunity to hate and despise something abysmally and completely.