Long After The Sahara Was Green

Crossing Africa: An Unexpected Route

This passage over Africa was different, as the plane veered east, deviating from the typical western route over France and Spain. We headed towards Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, leaving Genoa to the east to cross the Ligurian Sea, with the islands of Corsica, France and Sardinia (Sardegna), Italy, also to the east, before making landfall over Africa at Skikda, Algeria, a coastal city whose port has been a gateway between Europe and Africa for centuries. Constantine, the dramatic "City of Bridges" perched on a limestone plateau, shows prominently on my map, but it lies much further west of our route.

Pretensions to slumber never came, and one feature of the in-flight maps was missing: the detailed "Flying over..." section that leaves me mesmerised for hours on end. It offers snippets about places up to 250 kilometres away that I may never visit, yet I remain intrigued by their histories, geography, culture, and the people who have made those places their homes.

Above the Sahara

Soon, about four hours into the flight, we were already over the Sahara Desert. I expected to see an ocean of sand without form, stretching into the horizon, but I was in for a surprise.

This place looked as if it were once verdant, the land carved through as rivers sculpt landscapes, as if Eden decided to relocate to the Amazon, took its goods, but left the house bare. I have since learnt that this intuition was remarkably accurate: the Sahara was indeed a green, fertile landscape during the African Humid Period (approximately 11,000 to 5,000 years ago), supporting rivers, lakes, forests, and diverse wildlife before orbital shifts and climate feedback mechanisms transformed it into the desert we see today.

Yet a barren landscape it is not. The circles that resembled cylindrical containers, arranged in patterns clearly indicating human intervention, were in fact irrigation systems in the desert, humanity's ingenious attempt to recreate what nature once provided across the entire region.

I did not spot an oasis from above anywhere from Algeria into Niger. This is a harsh place, where daytime temperatures can soar to totally uninhabitable levels.

Settlements and Landforms

My map showed named settlements within 50 kilometres of our flight path: Djanet, known for its proximity to the UNESCO-listed Tassili n'Ajjer plateau with its ancient rock art; Ghat, a Tuareg town near the Libyan border that has served as a trans-Saharan trade post for centuries; and Tamanrasset, the largest city in southern Algeria, as we flew towards Agadez in Niger, once a crucial caravan centre and sultanate on the trans-Saharan trade routes.

I see alpine landforms, but not of ice. These are gullies eroded by winds rather than water, dunes drawn by the hand of nature, moving as if alive, and they surely are.

A Desert Redefined

A desert is more than its definition. It offers another perspective: the presence of hardy species of flora, fauna, and animal life that thrive in what we might consider impossible conditions.

As we continued south, the landscape gradually shifted. Flying over Nigeria, I caught sight of place names that stirred something deep within me: Jos, the highland city built by tin miners; Bukuru, where I attended primary school; Rayfield, where we lived; and Vom, the veterinary centre where we took a school trip. These are places emblematic of my childhood, each one a marker of memory suspended between earth and sky.

Now, flying past Douala, Cameroon, to catch a sight of the Gulf of Guinea, I realised something striking: from over 30,000 feet, some nine kilometres in the sky, there had been no clouds above the Sahara. Not a single wisp dipping its toes in that vast expanse. I suspect I need a deeper understanding of the ecology of that extraordinary place.

A Google NotebookLM AI Audio Overview Discussion of this blog

Travelling light

A state of insignificance

Here we are, over 10 kilometres high in the air, with 5 hours and 40 minutes remaining until landing. The clouds over North Africa look well below our aircraft, and you can see the shadows cast by each cloud formation, whose names I quite easily forget.

However, as recognisable names appear on my flight map, we have begun the cruise over the Northern Nigeria states, including Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, and the many hamlets that have become states for clannish gubernatorial contests.

Before you scoff, Agadez, a province in Niger, is nine times the size of Niger State, the largest state in Nigeria, which is about one twentieth the size of Algeria's Tamanrasset Province, the largest in Africa.

Many lessons aboard

I expected a bit of turbulence as we passed through these high-altitude clouds, but they soon fell behind us. The mystery of air travel is not one of bafflement but great interest.

I rarely watch films; I am more engaged by the stories, the history, the geography, and the culture of the places we fly over. There is much to learn, even on my tenth trip to South Africa.

If you have been flying since the age of five, you realise that no matter how far you are travelling, this case being 9,800 kilometres from Amsterdam to Cape Town, the world has become a smaller place.

What you need is time; the time to travel around it, at least once, and experience what makes our world a wonderful place.

Incredible India: Streets Flummox GoogleMaps and Rotten Middlemen

Pains for trains

It was probably a wild thing to choose a Christmas morning for adventure by my standards. The opportunity had come to travel to Agra by train and I was so up for it.

Apparently, the tickets had been arranged and booked by a colleague though I became a bit suspicious when it appeared the night before things were more tentative than planned.

The schedule was a pre-dawn pickup from three locations for the train station but things began to go awry from that point. It suddenly became apparent how inscrutable the street and house numbering system was in New Delhi.

Beyond GoogleMaps

Apart from the major roads which had names and buildings with numbers; the residential areas normally known as Nagar; the houses were on plots with a numbering system that seems to have bedevilled GoogleMaps that they have not even bothered to assign names to the roads.

I found it incredible that so-called taxi drivers were clueless about the numbering system; in fact, it seems those who know; know their way by rote rather than by joining up the dots as they go.

At this time of the day, most roads were gated, fenced off and locked with Delhi Police barriers; we felt we were caught in an interminable maze as we tried to negotiate our way round the neighbourhood.

Recessive Geography Gene

What struck me more was how guards, workers and presumed residents could not help when asked for directions, it was as if the intricacies of basic geography that allowed for knowing where you were and charting where to go even in close proximity to your location had been so underdeveloped in their brains it had become a handicap.

Eventually, we packed into the taxi, overcrowded by one and made for the railway station only to get a confirmation from the railway officials that our tickets were literally duds. Thankfully, we had not paid for them yet.

Then a tout came in useful, he took us to “government registered” travel agent who said our tickets were not confirmed reservations but on a tentative waiting list with no guarantee that we might get to travel. Beyond that, we were also at the wrong station to use the tickets; one of the bureaucratic conundrums of India would have meant going another 20 kilometres to the appropriate station.

The middleman dirty man

In the end, we could not get a train, one was fully booked and another had been cancelled but we had the option of a four-wheel drive cab with high backs and head rests – the journey would definitely be a lot more comfortable than the one I had the week before.

It took 10 Indian minutes for the cab to arrive which by my watch was nigh on 40 minutes, at one point the issuing of an ultimatum with the threat to cancel the deal seemed to move things forward a bit and cab arrived. What we learnt off later on when we returned was the travel agent had earned a 33% commission with a 3-minute phone call and was ready to have us dumped at the point of embarkation close to midnight rather than ensure we were safely delivered to our hotels.

With a colleague of mine, I walked into his office and told him in clear terms that I will brook none of that nonsense, I guess he was taken aback at the forcefulness of my rebuke and our revelation of what his agency had creamed off to the driver that he had to ensure the driver took us back to our hotels.

That is just common courtesy, in all places where I have been picked up anywhere for tours, I have always been delivered back to my hotel as part of the deal.

It seems many businesses are able to get away with treating tourists to India shabbily with the impression nothing will come of it. Well, that will end with me, I have obtained the business cards of all these businesses and I will be publishing a list of people and businesses for tourists to avoid when in New Delhi.

We did it

My second journey to Agra had begun, this time with the possibility of doing the Taj Mahal, the Agra Fort and Akbar Tomb in Sikandra.

Whilst all the arrangements did not seem to fall into place, the day might well be quite eventful nonetheless and it was.