constanttrek

Zen and Zing

December 27th, 2006

As usual, other photos are coming later – but this time it isn't because the connection is bad, it is because like an absolute idiot, I left the cable that connects the camera to the computer back in the camp. 

 So here I am in total civilisation (more on that in a moment) with an awesome connection – and no pics to upload. But the great news is – I now have a PERMANENT awesome connection.  Yep, folks, all equipment is back, replaced, fixed, SOLVED, and my communications are finally a goer once again.  I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. 

I am actually in the capital of Mauritania – Nouakchott.  After arriving in Ayoun el Atrous two days ago, I jumped straight into a bush taxi and trundled the long (but far from lonely, as I shall tell you about later in this post), somewhat uncomfortable distance to the sheer bliss of a decent hotel room and my first hot shower in two months.  Even though there were options for getting the equipment sent to Ayoun, I am just so terrified of something else going wrong, that I thought it safer to turn up and collect it myself.  And now it is in my hot little hands; I have my repaired laptop back; a new RBGAN; and I guess that all that means I shall actually have to start working, now!

 It was a thought that crossed my mind more than once on this leg, that I should make the most of my enforced peace whilst I have it.  And there could simply have been no better time to do that than  walking with Mohammed.  If Khabuz was the King of the Desert, Mohammed is the King of Zen. 

Now, one could say that I am rather more “Zing” than “Zen” (not that I'm complaining – the Zing Thing has brought me a rather wonderful dose of joy in recent times) and that I am not always the easiest person to live with.  But I have never, ever had a calmer, lovelier, kinder walking companion than the Zen King; and by the end of this leg, I was feeling rather zen-like myself. 

After leaving Tidjikja, we headed out onto a plateau that ran for about 80km, blissfully easy after the tough dune haul I had just done.  After the initial stretch, we made a long descent down through a mountain passage, and the country that opened up was just divine.  A long oued, a riverbed, that has over the centuries carved a huge valley into the terrain, meant lush feed and a wonderful variety of trees and shrubs for the camels.  On either side, huge dune mountains reared up, so that we walked daily through a passage of green, surrounded by golden, slumbering dunes, all the more beautiful for not requiring me to walk over them! Very unusually for me on this walk, we got into a routine immediately – something I really like, but often find difficult to impose on others.  But Mohammed and I seemed to run to the same kind of clock, and so just before the dawn I would wake to hear him quietly stoking the fire (I hugely appreciate a guide who makes the fire in the morning for tea – it is seriously kind, and since I have done it every day since Nouadhibou, it was like having a holiday for someone else to take that on board).  By the time I wandered over he would already be brewing tea.  He even put a blanket down for me to sit on; I felt a bit like Lady Muck at that, and laughed and told him so, but he continued to do it and you know what?  Gosh it was nice. 

We drank our tea every morning in a peaceful silence, me making the second and third brews whilst he prayed, and both of us wandering about and packing various bits up in between munching the normal biscuits and nuts.  Packing the camels was the least hassle it has ever been.  Mohammed is the first guide I have ever walked with who seems to be able to manage to pack up without yelling, getting flustered, or arguing with me; he let me get on with packing the camel I always pack (the one carrying the electronic stuff – I'm a bit precious about that these days), he would pack Beiyal, the little one, and we would both turn up to pack the Bolshy Sod together.  Every day it was quick, painless, and effective; we didn't have one bit of baggage trouble for the whole way.  Even better, whenever I pointed out a different way of doing things, or suggested something I thought would work, he happily did it, and even smiled when it worked. 

Whereas I often feel clumsy and slow with guides, not to mention bemused when they are yelling at me in Arabic to do something and my comprehension has a delay switch on it, I found that in Mohammed's company I got faster and more efficient, and that we never had any trouble understanding what the other wanted.  It is just so much easier to be with someone who doesn't get flustered; and it helped me to be calm myself, and reminded me that this really is the only way to operate, and I have vowed and declared to really, really work on emulating him from hereon in.  I can hear most of my family and mates laughing at the image of me attempting to be calm and placid.  

 Don't worry, there's still plenty of Zing hanging about… 

We quietly walked our distance every day, away just as the sun came up, and were done after five or six hours; the camels munched contentedly for the rest of the day and evening, and are the fattest I have seen them since Nouadhibou, to my endless joy.  Mohammed is a true camel man and in his care the camels were calm, content, and a dream to handle.  If Khabuz knocked them into shape, Mohammed soothed them into peace and tranquility.  So even the camels are a bit zen these days. 

There was but one thorn, so to speak, amongst the roses.  There is ALWAYS a bloody thorn.  Or, in this case, a hundred million of the sodding things. 

I have walked through sand.  Stones.  Mud.  Snow.  Rivers, mountains, heat, and wind.  But until this leg I had never had the particular joy of walking through prickle country.  And I am talking serious prickles.  IN Australia we call them bindis; I think others would call them burrs or some such.  And you wouldn't think anything so small could really warrant an entire post.  But these…oh my sweet Lord, I have never walked through anything so painful, annoying, or just incessant.  They clung to the camel blankets, to the saddles, to the baggage, to every bit of clothing I possess.  They drove up into our feet, scratched our legs through the clothes, and left spikes sticking out from wounds that got red and inflamed.  Our walking day was punctuated by indignant shrieks from one or the other of us as yet another particularly vicious one drove into a toe or sole, and the camels waited patiently as we danced about one footed pulling the nasty little critters out, trying not to get pierced in the finger at the same time. 

My camels, I realised after a few days, have learned a rather unique command for Arabic animals; the second they hear me screech the F word at high volume, they come to an abrupt halt.  It's quite an amusing trick. 

Our water break, which we took every day after about three hours, consisted of the same conversation in Arabic every single time: 

Mohammed:  Walayla Paula, yasser uniti!  YASSER!(Great God Paula, there's loads of prickles) 

Paula:  WaLAYLA yasser!  Uniti MUSHKIL!  (You bet your arse there's loads.  Pickles BIG problem.) 

Mohammed:  Wallahi uniti MA zain.  Ma zain.  (By God prickles are Not good.  NOT good.) 

Paula:  WALLAHI Ma zain.  (You bet your arse they suck). 

 By this stage, perched on a lone rock or two to avoid getting pin-cushion butt, pulling the little spikes out of our hands where they got driven in every day from the camel ropes, to which they stick like glue, we would both be laughing, and frequently the laughter turned into hysterics as we discovered prickles in parts we never knew existed. 

 We were only a day into the walk when Mohammed told me to forget about propriety and roll my trousers up, tie my skirt around my waist, and keep the melekhva well tied up out of the way; I looked a right classy sight striding along with my trousers rolled up to the knee, my dress bunched up about my waist, and bright red welts on every exposed bit of flesh.    Mohammed, bless him, seriously couldn't have cared less; I honestly think I could walk naked and he wouldn't even notice.   

But prickles aside, our days were extraordinarily peaceful.  Both of us came down with the local dose of the flu, which every nomad we came across seems to be suffering from (it is the desert winter – although anybody from Melbourne or Europe would crack up at the term “winter” when it is still close to thirty degrees at midday, the nights are cold, and most nomads have little in the way of warm clothes) and Mohammed got really knocked about with a hacking cough.  So after we had walked our twenty five, unpacked the camels, hobbled them, made Gofiya and tea, and eaten a few biscuits, it was flat out and sleeping under the nearest tree for us both; for me it felt like the first time I have been really rested since getting back on the walk, and I really treasured the solitude and pass-out time.  Late in the afternoon we would both wander off to do our thing, collect wood, look at the camels, have a wash, make bread, whatever, and then it was time for our little dinner ritual – build the fire, make tea (never served until after Allah Akbar), eat a few dates, and then the rice or pasta.  After dinner was always Arabic lesson time for an hour or so – I learned more on this stretch than I have in all the preceding ones.  Mohammed speaks only Hassaniya, and he was incredibly patient in teaching me.  I find I understand more and more as the days go by; although I am a long way from fluent ( a LONG way) at least I understand the gist of conversation now, and can answer most of the questions I get. 

And boy, do I get a lot.  Of the same ones.  I'm used to them, but it can get a bit wearing; Mohammed remarked, after a week, in some amazement, that it must drive me crazy to answer the same thing day after day.  I've been answering them for over two years though, and the desert ones for the best part of a year; I can go through the routine on autopilot. 

“Where have you walked from?”

“Where are you walking to?”

“You WALKED from WHERE?”  (This comes whether I have said the last town, or explained the whole journey; I rarely explain the whole journey.  They struggle enough with the last four or five hundred km.)

“And you WALK?  You don't ride the camels?”

“You are here alone?”

“Are you married?  Where is your husband?” And the latest one – the one new to me, but asked by every nomad we meet in Mauritania - “Are you muslim?  Catholic?  Jewish?” 

The lovely thing is, Mauritanian muslims have the genuine Islamic respect for “people of the book” - Christians, Jews, etc.  I have had it explained to me by a hundred fires, that the prophet Mohammed preached respect and good relations with the people of the book, and that Mauritania proudly maintains diplomatic relations with Israel – here everyone tells me that Israel maintains an embassy in Nouakchott – and, further, that anyone who pursues war in the name of Islam is no true Muslim.  The pride in Islam and adherence to it's true code is deeply embedded in Mauritanian culture, in the best possible way. 

Although a word of warning – if you happen to be Buddhist or some other such code, best not mention it if you come travelling here; there is nothing but contempt for those who don't respect and believe in the One True God. 

  I know I said this in the last post – but the men really are lovely here.  I find the company of the nomads we meet, a true joy, and their conversation interesting. The men, that is. But I am going to be really honest here – brutally so -  and say that I have never, ever struggled so much, to find a woman I like.  I have yet to meet a woman in the Mauritanian desert with an ounce of hospitality, gentility,or just simple kindness.  Women here harass me; they demand presents with an arrogance and presumption that I  find offensive; they do not offer hospitality, or, if they do, it comes at a price; and they are rude, demanding, and coarse.  It is rare for me to make a sweeping generalisation, and especially a negative one, but in this case I have seen nothing to contradict my initial opinion, and a great deal to confirm it.  I dislike them so much that I will actively walk out of my way to avoid going anywhere near a tent. 

The ride here was a perfect example.  Bush taxis are never a great source of joy, more like something you go into with a healthy dose of acceptance, knowing that anything can and will happen, and that the one thing you can rely on is that the journey will be neither quick nor uneventful; I have had more than my fair share of such rides and don't get too wound up about them anymore. 

I got into this particular vehicle and it was the usual mad squash – two in the lone front seat and three in the back, with the “fourth” place (that would be the one where it takes two people outside the vehicle to get the door shut) taken by local travellers going between villages.  In this taxi there were two blokes in the front, and one in the back, with myself and the lovely Mariam.  Mariam made it very clear to me from the outset, as she hawked and spat out the side of her melekhva, that she would sit by the door; and I would be in the middle.  Whenever a fourth passenger tried to climb in beside her she told him in no uncertain terms that he was to sit on the other side of me, and that under no circumstances, was the fourth place EVER beside her.  Look, I don't tend to get wound up by this kind of thing; the middle spot is always the least comfortable, the hard bit of the seat and with nothing to lean on, but I can doze off into dreaming and at the end of the day – it's easier than walking.  So I sat there as she coughed and spat and hacked away with the kind of ferocity normally reserved for giving birth, and thought about the Zen King, and that this really wasn't a big deal. 

 But I got increasingly amazed by her; she would demand to stop in a little settlement, then hit the bloke in front on the head, hand him money, and order him off to buy her this or that bit of food or drink; if what she wanted wasn't there, she would order him off to another shop.  But she did not exit that vehicle.  The blokes were there to do her bidding, and they did, humbly and without complaint, and not only that but put up with her espousing her ignorant and often incorrect opinion  on everything from politics to tent construction.  One of the guys in the taxi was a university lecturer on his way back to Paris, where he works; he was incredibly interesting, but even he listened to her patiently and without argument.  I began to realise why the women are so bloody obnoxious – there is this absolute belief here that women are to be treasured and looked after, and therefore they are not contradicted, or told “no”, but rather pandered to and nurtured, at all costs.  Ok, I know that the other side to that is probably that the women have little rights to anything other than a life in the home; but to be honest, I'm not so sure.  They seem very active in politics and many are employed in good jobs.  They just…rule the roost. 

So Mariam chuntered away, and stuck her arm in my leg, and hogged three quarters of the space in the back forcing the rest of us into a corner, and when we stopped to eat she threw herself down with much weary sighing and ordered the men to bring her tea, food, whatever. Food stops on the taxi route consist of a tent by the side of the road with a meat carcass hanging up; one picks the best looking carcass, stops, asks the bloke to cut a hunk off, and lies down on the mattresses on the ground, drinks tea, and eventually eats the barbequed meat.  There are normally a variety of hawkers wandering about with trays of bread and little cakes, and a shop nearby with cold drinks, etc.  There are also usually a cloud of flies and goats wandering in and out; you just put your melekhva over your head and crash out.  Mariam and I sat in one tent and the men in an adjoining one, usually; she still managed to lecture them through the fabric seperating us.  The meat here is always good though, and after two weeks in the desert, I was gnawing bones and devouring freshly cooked liver along with the best of them, not to mention hoeing into the delicious fresh bread.  Anything cooked by someone else is good in my book. Late at night we stopped at another of these little places, only this one had a concrete room with doors that closed; we ate together and then the driver said that since we were only three hours from Nouakchott, we would sleep here tonight and carry on in the morning.  Another thing I got used to long ago is the communal sleeping thing, so we all lay down on mats in the room and pulled melekhva and turbans up and dozed off, joined throughout the night by other carloads turning up, eating noisily beside us, then lying down and snoring in turn.  When the proprietor finally closed the doors at about four in the morning there were about thirty of us lying in there; at six thirty it was time to pray again, splash some water on the face, and get back in the car.  And if I though good old Mariam had smelt a bit heavy the day before, believe me, she could have singlehandedly cleared a shopping mall the next morning.  It was sheer joy for me every time she raise her arm and flung it over my shoulders, treating me to a powerful waft; thankfully I never get in these taxis or onto a bus without the scented mix the nomads make that you rub into your hair when you can't wash it – it smells great and is used by men and women, and I handed it around liberally.   

When the taxi finally trundled into Nouakchott (about 36 hours after we left) Mariam demanded that he drive her about four kilometres off the track, to the camel souk, which we then drove around for half an hour whilst she leaned out the window and yelled at every passing male to find her family.  She finally did, thank God, and exited, at which there was a general sigh of relief and much lighting of pipes (nobody smoked in the car whilst she was in it) and stretching of cramped body parts.   

On the tip of the driver I went to a local hotel.  I have pretty low expectations when it comes to hotels, but Nouakchott is a big city with mod cons, and so I thought that even the low priced local one should be ok.  But the electricity didn't work, and neither did the hot water; I looked over the road, and there was this huge glistening modern hotel, and I just thought:  oh, sod it, and marched over and asked if they took visa.  They did; and so I write this in the equivalent of traveller's paradise, after a blissful hot shower, my computer plugged into mains power.  I am only here for two nights and I figure I may as well enjoy luxury whilst I can get it; I am indulging in some serious prickle pulling-out whilst I have privacy. 

Mohammed is with the camels.  I would absolutely love it if he would keep walking with me; but he has been terribly ill, and still isn't up to scratch; he is an old man, and he also doesn't know the route after here (although to be honest it is pretty straightforward, and I would rather have Mohammed any day that some fast talker who says he knows where he is going).  But Mohammed has told me not to worry, he is going to interview prospective guides whilst I am away, and he assures me that he will only hand me over to someone he totally trusts with both me and the camels.  He is just so, so kind; I feel really lucky to have walked with him.

 From here I walk to Bassiknou, the last town before the Malian border, although now that I have comms, I won't need to go in and stay there (oh HEAVEN); and from there, Timbuctou.  I am only about 750km from Timbuctou now; it is on the same section of the map that I look at every day.  I am on track to get there by the end of January, or the first week of February; somewhat to my surprise, given the delays and frustrations, I am only about a week out of schedule.  As long as I can keep walking at the same pace, things are looking good. I will be thrilled to finally get to Timbuctou.  It is similar, in my mind, to what Santiago de Compostela was on the European walk – the end of the first stage, the first big milestone. 

 Every tourist operator here takes great delight in telling me about Regis, the French bloke who walked “direct” from Chinguetti to Tomboctou a couple of years ago; he took the tough route, and did it in 60 days.  He also took 8 camels, which I believe were close to dead at the other end; and paid Khabuz an extortionate sum of money to give him the GPS co-ords for two little known wells, although in his book he claims that he walked the whole way without taking water.  The more I walk the more I realise that there is always someone who has done it bigger, better, or tougher than you.  But I figure that I am doing it in only 40 days more than him, including walking a 600km stretch he never did, from Nouadhibou; and I will get there in good health, with happy, fat camels, and see a lot of interesting country on the way.  I just don't think too much about other people's walks anymore.  I know what is and isn't possible, what is good for camels and people and mental health, and when I hear someone rambling on about doing fifty km a day or some such I just roll my eyes and have a bit of a laugh.  Twenty five to thirty is a good, solid, realistic pace.  Anything over that, day in, day out, means tired, skinny camels, and a seriously exhausted Paula.  I have a long way to go and I intend to make it; I don't plan on killing myself to compete with those who have gone before me. 

The other favourite tale relates to a Canadian bloke who walked this way four years ago; he had his throat slit just over the border by Tuareg bandits.   I have heard more about this particular incident than I ever desired to, believe me.  But he was walking without a guide, and I rather feel that guides are the equivalent of a passport; travel through dangerous areas without one, at your own risk.  I don't plan on crossing the border without a good local guide, so you can stop panicking. 

Now last – but it probably should have been first – Merry Christmas.  I have to say that in Mauritania, for obvious reasons, Christmas is non-existant; I totally forgot about it until I got to Nouakchott and saw a news broadcast and realised it was boxing day.  I hope you all had a good one, and for those still fighting fires up around my home town of Mansfield, I wish you all good luck and continued safety, and hope that the rain holds and the fires don't spread.   

One rather magnificent thing about this thoroughly modern hotel – sorry, I know I said I was onto the last thing, but this just has to be mentioned – is that it sells the odd can of cold alcoholic stuff.  Rather bowled over by this astonishing stroke of good fortune, I then found another, when I ran into two South African blokes out here working as a pilot and engineer respectively.  Not only did we pass a very pleasant few hours toasting Christmas and everything else we could think of, but Mark, the pilot, also exceedingly kindly donated all of his spare kit – which means I am now the proud owner of a sensational duck down pillow; some seriously great fudge; and other bits and pieces that  make life generally a rather more enjoyable place to be.  It was sheer bliss to have a conversation in English, and to find two such lovely blokes to chat to.   

I will be back walking in about three days, and, all being well (I have a big dose of wariness about such promises these days) I will be updating you more frequently.  And adding in some pictures. Cheers;  I might just go and sample another of those cold bevvys, and toast you all once again….    

Entry Filed under: trekking