Like any novelty, the beginning of our ride to Essakane was fun. At first. I’m sure not many of us westerners had taken such a ride before, in an open bed of a pick-up truck. You had a sense of an adventure up there, with the desert wind blowing in your face and Saharan sand, stirred by rolling wheels, clouding up the view behind. For once it felt kind of sublime not to travel like a spoiled brat in an air-conditioned car, unwilling to dispense with a single bit of luxury just because you were in the desert. It was going to be cool to one day claim you rode through Sahara like a modern-day Tuareg.
Even if, truth be told, well-off modern-day Tuaregs nowadays traversed the desert in precisely such vehicles as we, for the duration of our short-lived bliss up there on the back of the pick-up truck, dismissed as wheels for geeks and dorks.
Either way, the fun bit of it started to wear off pretty soon and the discomfort bit increasingly kicked in. Those of us who were sitting along the edge of the truck bed were slightly better off in terms of space. But that advantage over those who were less fortunate to claim such spots for themselves quickly evaporated in the face of the fact that we had to cling fast to the edge, just to make sure we wouldn’t tumble over and out. The driver apparently didn’t give a toss about the huge human cargo and chased his car as fast as circumstances would reasonably permit it. Even a bit faster. And desert roads are by no means smooth highways. Where there are roads at all. On stretches, it was just sand and dunes which the driver attacked and negotiated in most creative angles. Each dune was an adventure in its own right. And each one posed a risk that once we cleared it, we would end up one or two people short.
So we rose and fell, like a surfer on sea waves, every time with a jerk and sometimes with a twist. And every time the small of your back, or even your ass, took a hit as the truck landed – and you together with it – into a horizontal position again. Suddenly, the road to Essakane – or whatever there was that passed under the name of a road – looked way too long for anybody’s liking.
Everybody tried to put as brave a face as they possibly could. The success of that particular effort was closely linked with the specific position they were sitting on. But I can attest to it that pretty soon nobody laughed.
When somewhere in the middle of nowhere a village materialised before our eyes and our truck pulled over for no accountable reason, there was an almost audible collective sigh of relief. I had no idea why we stopped as no one could detect any activity to explain the cause to this stop over. But nobody cared. We probably cherished this fifteen-minute break as much as we would have a bottle of water on this hot Saharan sand.
I was the first to jump out, even before I knew we’d be there for a quarter of an hour. Around us, there were a number of low mud-brick houses, some of them surrounded by circular fences of dried – or parched – shrubs. There were even a number of low trees which, inexplicably, found enough water to survive on. And yes, there had to be water somewhere. None of us could see any, but there had to be a spring somewhere because there were people, there were cattle, and there were goats and donkeys.
A bit farther off there was a mosque, too. Tiny, as this part of desert wasn’t exactly bristling with life, but it was there. Big enough to accommodate the needs of the villagers and very much in the mould of those bigger ones I’d already seen, constructed in the Sahel architectural style.
I approached one of the local guys who’d been sharing the cosy comfort of our pick-up truck since Tombouctou and asked in my rudimentary French:
„Excuse moi, comment s’appelle cette place ici?“
Evidently, it was good enough for him to understand and he told me the name of the village. But I didn’t get it. So I asked him to repeat it for me. He did. And once again it made no sense to me. Then I took out my little travelling notebook, opened the first empty leaf for him and offered it together with a pen. But as I did it, he stepped back to a safe distance and declined, almost in fear. I was confused. Had I done something wrong?
But what was not obvious to me, appeared to be quite obvious to an English guy who closely followed the whole thing.
„He can’t write,“ he explained simply.
So that was it. Well, not the one to give up that easily, I asked another guy to write the village name for me and it turned out this one wasn’t illiterate. It wasn’t exactly a novelist’s handwriting, but good enough for what I needed.
According to this guy, the name of the village was Nibkitieid.
Having stretched our legs a little, roaming around a little, those said fifteen minutes later, we resumed our journey again.
