Berber Graneries and Ghadames

Thursday 24th November. At about 3 or 4 in the morning it started pouring with rain. Unfortunately it was still doing this at 8 in the morning when we realized the sun was not going to be there to dry all our camping stuff. Most of us had left wet weather stuff at home as a bit unnecessary for our sahara journey. Even some wadis started flowing.
We traveled for about an hour before visiting one of the fortified berber granaries. This was in a town that sounded something like Gasrihajj. It wasn’t on our map or in the guidebook – footprint from 2000 which has been quite basic and looks like it could be developed a lot further. This confused our guide as when I asked our guide the night before where we were camping, he’d scanned the whole of north west libya, southern Tunisia and eastern Algeria to find where we were. But I was confident we were still in north west Libya. I think his confusion was heightened by not being able to find the place name.
We continued on in the rain for another couple of hours until the spectacular hairpin bends upto Nalut and took a sharp left to a nice hotel overlooking the old berber settlement for a coffee, before exploring this area. We then drove another hour and took the rough camping option again, driving off the road across to some dunes. It was still raining, but a good setting.
Steve found some of his whisky in an old coca cola bottle. Our guide is also partial to fairly heavy measures of whisky. A sip of John’s glass was enough for me to warm the throat, but after half a wine glass Ramadan got up to get some more. I stopped him saying none of us were drinking any more. I didn’t want to see all the whisky drunk before we’d got to cold Algeria.
Friday 25th November Ramadan heard Robbie William’s CD in our car this morning and indicated that at the border he would like to put it in his pocket. Just in case I hadn’t understood this he explained to me fully. I’m worried that John may find it difficult to part with Robbie, although he’s beginning to warm to the idea, chuckling as he’s imagining Ramadan singing along to Robbie. We had a coffee stop in Darj, where I took Gadaffis billboard picture and Barbara and I had the added excitement of seeing some camels pull in to the petrol station.
We arrived in Ghadames by early afternoon. John and Steve went to do car oil changes before our next big desert drive while the rest of us went exploring the old town of Ghadames. No one lives in the old town, but it is a UNESCO world heritage site. We wandered around quite a maze of old walls around the palmerie before we ended up in the central whitewashed buildings of the central old town. We’d wandered quite a way before we saw a man painting the entrance hall of his old house and he invited us in for a look round. He explained that there are four tribes in Ghadames – Berber (which he was), Taureg, Hausa and Garamates. The women traditionally painted the houses before they were married, mainly in red with some yellow and green, but he was trying to copy the traditional style and doing very well. The old down has no services with ash being traditionally thrown down the toilet. He has had an Italian family staying in his house, although there are no services. It certainly had a far superior character to many Libyan hotels. Up on the roof was the kitchen and where the women spent all their time, but with the houses so close together it meant the women could quite easily communicate with each other. In the summer when the men also went up to sleep on the cool roof, they had to duck so they didn’t seen the women of the neighbouring houses. He also said that Ghadames was bombed during the second world war. We continued wandering around the old town, quite a long wander, past the football patch and irrigated areas. It was lucky we had Lucas with us to help us find our way back.
That evening John was spotted by a Dutch couple. These were the people who had contacted him on the Sahara Overland forum about joining us for the crossing from Libya to Niger. They’d taken 28 hours to cross from Tunisia to Libya. They were a day late for meeting their guide, but they already had Libyan Visas. However the border police would not let them through without a guide. When contact was made with Arkno, they diusowned them for being late and didn’t trust them. So they had to spend a night in their rooftop tent in the Libyan border area. Fortunately the next day a senior border police official got involved telling Arkno, they had to provide a guide for the Dutch tourists. This was then the same day we crossed and he may have been worried about having a couple of Dutchies camping in their rooftop tent again as Gaddafi was passing through. This made John feel better as it appears in Libya there is still no option but to have a guide.
The Dutchies, Michael and Karin had a different guide booked in Ghadames for the desert driving before Niger who would be far more familiar with the area than our guide Ramadan. So we organized to join up with them. The new guide has his own four wheel drive car and could put Ramadan in there with him which was a relief for Kathy and Steve to get their space back.