The Pillars of Hercules

We've just returned from a cruise in the western Mediterranean passing twice between the two great blocks of rock - Jabal Ṭāriq (Mount Tarik), our Gibraltar, and Jebel Moussa on the Moroccan side - known as the pillars of Hercules. This meeting place of two great continents and two seas is one I have visited often enough before, usually by sea when passing to and from East Africa but also....

....by land, when crossing from Spain to Morocco and back in 1962 on my abortive attempt to return to Rhodesia.

Gibraltar is always spectacular, particularly when one is passing it in the early morning on a glass-still day. We stopped for six hours on the way back when the midday heat rose into the upper twenties, and amused ourselves by sitting at a pavement cafe to watch crowds of tourists go by and comment on the Spanish-ness of everything - except the red pillar boxes and policemen in British-bobby helmets.

Shortly after leaving Gibraltar for Southampton I had what was a memorable moment, what is likely to be, for me, a last glimpse of the mainland of Africa, the continent which I consider to have so influenced my life.

Deserts

A desert, I used to tell my geography students, is a place which is deserted of humans, so the Earth's greatest desert is its five oceans, taken together, with the Antarctic and Sahara left far behind. Yet, when we think of deserts, what comes to mind is extreme heat and dryness and sand dunes....

....yet most of the hot desert areas I have seen - mainly in North Africa and Namibia - are almost sand-less rock deserts like the one above - and they're far fiercer, far more awe-inspiring, far more frightening than their sandy cousins.

In a sand desert, the 'erg' of the Sahara, there are lots of sand grains being blown around and rippled and sculpted into often magnificent dunes. In a rock desert, the Saharan 'reg', it's as if a giant has gone berserk, picking up great lumps of rock and throwing them around and, in so doing....

....carving the landscape into strange shapes which often look as if they've been sandpapered.

My most vivid experience of being close and intimate with a desert comes from the long hitch-hike I did from Algeria along the north coast of Africa to Egypt and then up the Nile to Luxor, and then back again. There were times when my companion and I were dumped at the roadside in the middle of the desert, sometimes to sit for many hours waiting for the next lift to come along. From this, I learned to love the desert, to be very afraid of it, and very respectful, but I was totally enamoured.

I doubt whether I'll ever experience a place like this again but I'm so, so glad I have.

All pictures in Namibia.

My Father's Pubs

My father loved a good pub, by which he meant an establishment which was fairly quiet, had atmosphere, good bitter, good company, and the right sort of landlord

The pub shown here is the Cinque Ports in Old Town Hastings. It was small, didn't serve food, tended to discourage the sort of 'day tripper' who came to Hastings, and had young, very friendly landlords - sadly, I have forgotten their names.

From the time he retired to England in 1961, my father went down to the pub for a couple of beers almost every day, so he was the sort of customer worth cultivating - look carefully at the picture and you will see a cake with a candle on it, probably to celebrate a birthday. He was also very good company, so in many of the pubs he frequented a small group of regulars would form around him.

Along with the Cinque Ports, this was one of his favourites, the Ferry Inn on the Isle of Oxney near Appledore in Kent. The landlord was George and, although the pub never seemed to have many customers, my father enjoyed George's company so visited it fairly often.

It was where I found him on the day I arrived back in England from a six-week expedition into North Africa in 1964. I recall walking in through the front door of the pub and finding the bar empty except for George and my father. They turned to look at me and then turned away - and my father made some sort of derogatory comment.

I think they thought my companion, Michael, and I were gypsies or vagabonds. They certainly didn't recognise me, which isn't surprising as, during the trip, I had grown a beard. Once my father acknowledged his son we joined them for a beer, and an exceptionally good one it was.

Deserts

The term 'desert' in relation to a landscape tends to mean a hot, dry place with very little in the way of vegetation or other forms of life, so places like the Sahara and the Namib spring to mind. In an earlier, and perhaps more correct English sense, it meant a place which was deserted of human life, so might equally refer to Antarctica or the northern Canadian tundra.

There is something utterly beautiful about a hot, dry desert. Perhaps it is its simplicity, that it is land stripped to the bone; perhaps it is the silence, the sense of vastness, perhaps it is the colours, less at midday when the intensity of the light bleeds them out of the landscape, more in the clean light of dawn or the dusty light of evening; perhaps it is its emptiness, a place where one can be utterly alone with oneself; certainly it is the wonder of the desert night sky, where the stars burn so bright and close one feels one could reach out and touch them. Perhaps, too, a desert's beauty also lies in a sense of awe, that it is a terribly dangerous place, a place where man must tread only with the utmost wariness.

I have seen two of the world's great deserts, the Sahara and the Namib. I spent time in the Sahara when I was hitch-hiking in North Africa, time sitting by the side of a road with nothing to look at but a barren landscape, time spent hunkered down under the heat, time spent appreciating my puniness against its magnificence. The Namib I visited for a few days, enough to remember and to wish we could have stayed longer.

In both deserts there was something very special indeed about those places where the land met a greater desert - in the older sense of the word - the sea, and where it also met the sky, so three deserts met; and the breakers which washed onto the beach mixed their three elements together, earth, air and water.

Death in the Desert

One of the maths teachers at my prep school, Glengorse, had a badly scarred face. Being small boys, it intrigued us, the more so when we discovered that he had almost died in the Western Desert when his tank had been hit and 'brewed up', a horrid term which means that the tank had caught fire.

He wasn't the only teacher to have fought in the war: the headmaster had been in De Havilland Mosquitos, the history teacher in corvettes. Such information was useful in assisting us to persuade a teacher to follow a 'red herring' - that is, to talk about things which were nothing to do with the subject but, usually, far more interesting. It turned out that the maths teacher was only too happy to oblige.

One day he described ambushing German convoys. The British tanks would wait 'hull down' behind the crest of a dune and then charge down the steep slope, enabling them to get close before the Germans could retaliate with their very effective 88-millimetre anti-tank guns.

Years later, in 1963, sitting in a cafe in Tobruk while hitch-hiking back from Egypt, Michael Atkinson and I met the chaplain of the nearby British RAF air base at El Adem. He told us that the bedouin occasionally came in to report human remains they had found out in the desert, some of them British, and some still sitting in their tanks. He would then go out and collect and, if they were British, inter them in the big Commonwealth war cemetery outside Tobruk. When we asked him why it had taken twenty or more years to find them he described the math teacher's tank ambush manoeuvre and how, once brewed up, the tank would be steadily overwhelmed by the moving dune, only to appear, years later, on the upwind side, with the desiccated bodies of the crew perfectly preserved inside.

That evening, a few miles west of Tobruk, after a day of frustratingly short lifts which had left us stuck out in the desert, we had laid out our sleeping bags by the side of the road when we heard a truck approaching. We rushed out and flagged it down. It was a British one-and-a-half tonner. The driver said he was quite happy to give us a lift to Benghazi but we'd have to travel in the back. Fine, we said. OK, he replied, but there's a body in there, in a coffin. We climbed in and rolled our sleeping bags out again, this time on either side of an RAF officer who had drowned that afternoon in an accident while snorkelling.

I tell this story because the incident in Tobruk came to mind this afternoon when I had one of my sudden picture memories, of one of those desert cemeteries, high-walled to keep out the sand.

Picture of Tobruk Commonwealth cemetery courtesy

Maher A. A. Abdussalam on Wikimedia Commons.

The North Africa Hat

The little brown suitcase contains some very strange things, including this hat. I wore it on the long hitch-hike in North Africa but only, I think, when we were on our way home, so it was probably bought in Egypt. I have no recollection of what I wore on my head in the earlier part.

For someone who, while waiting for a lift - and this could be for many hours - sat or, more usually, squatted in the blazing Sahara sun, it was totally inappropriate.

I have never worn it since and really don't know why I haven't thrown it away except.... having a tangible souvenir of long-ago events somehow makes them more more immediate in the way a photograph doesn't. The hat was there, the picture wasn't.

More and more, these days, that sort of tenuous connection to the past seems important.

Hand Grenade

Sometimes, when you're hitch-hiking, you get stuck. It's an occupational hazard, it's something you have to learn to accommodate, and one of the ways of coping with it is to find distraction.

Hitch-hiking in the deserts of Libya in 1964, we often passed the time by throwing stones across the half-melted tarmac at objects on the far side of the road. There were plenty of targets: the second world war may have ended almost twenty years before but the debris of the North Africa campaign littered the place.

This was one of the targets, a British hand grenade, and after we'd knocked it out of the sand where it was embedded - and hence were sure it wasn't still live - I picked it up and kept it. It reminds me of the longest wait for a lift I have ever experienced, over twenty-four hours in the heat of the desert highway west of Tobruk.

A hand grenade is a horrible piece of machinery, designed to splinter into shards of searing shrapnel when it explodes. I have often wondered who pulled the pin on this grenade, the circumstances in which it was thrown, who it was thrown at, and whether it did injury.

We had given up on lifts and were asleep when, at ten that night, we heard the sound of an approaching truck. Between then and eight the next evening, in four lifts, we travelled over a thousand kilometres, 750 miles. That's hitch-hiking.

North Africa Letters

In over 70 days away I sent home a total of thirteen letters and postcards and my mother dutifully typed them out and sent copies to my great uncle Sir Stanley Reed, who had helped finance the trip, to Gill Rothwell, and to Michael's mother. She must have sent them the top copies because the copies she kept - in the Arab chest - are poor quality, which caused problems when, recently, I wanted them turned into digital files using optical character reading. The result was about 75% accurate, meaning that a great deal of editing had to be done.

The letters are interesting to read for several reasons. One is that they show how easy it is to do a prolonged journey if the traveller, like Michael and I, has a supreme optimism that nothing will go wrong. In some ways it is also interesting to recall the incidents we omitted so we didn't worry our parents. While such occasions were rare, they were unpleasant and, more important, suddenly exposed our vulnerability. The letters also display a youthful arrogance, an assumption that others are as thrilled by what we were experiencing as we were. So, for example, I felt no compunction in expecting my parents to send additional money to bale me out when funds ran low. Finally, there are places where their tone makes difficult reading. I have to allow that, at the time, I was fresh from public school with a public school sense of superiority. There are phrases that make me cringe but, without the sublime self-confidence, I don't think we would have dared that journey.

The letters bring home how wearying such travelling is. Particularly when hitch-hiking, we never knew, from one day to the next, what would happen or where we would be. We were filthy; we both had cuts in our feet which were infected; we were undernourished; and we became increasingly tired of each other's company. By the end I was longing to be 'home' in England.

The text of the letters can be downloaded as a .pdf file here.

From the letters it is possible to work out where we were each day. However, since the last letter was from Gibraltar, the last few days, through Spain, Andorra and France, were not recorded. The dates are available for download asa .pdf file here.

North Africa - 4

Once beyond Benghazi we were in the 'western desert' that had been fought over in the great North African battles of the second world war. The place was still littered - and dangerous - with the wreckage of the many battles. The desert preserved everything, so we slept in the little depressions called 'fox holes' which the soldiers had dug themselves for protection. All along the road we passed the beautifully kept cemeteries, Commonwealth, German and Italian. At Tobruk, just inside the Egyptian border, we fell in with the padre attached to the big British air base at El Adem who told us that the Bedouin still called him out into the desert to retrieve the perfectly preserved, mummified remains of British soldiers and airmen.

I had the Kowa camera with me which I had bought in Aden but hardly used it and, sadly, many of the pictures I did take were very poor. However, this picture, taken on our flight back from Tanzania in 2012, shows the desert road near Mersa Matruh in Egypt. The tourist developments visible along the coast weren't there in 1964.

We drank a cold lager on the Corniche in Alexandria, just like John Mills in the film 'Ice Cold in Alex', then pressed on towards Cairo. We slept beside the pyramids and saw the Tutankhamun treasures in the Cairo museum. Then, aided by a mad Irishman, we blagged a free ride on the train up the Nile as far as Luxor.

We visited the magnificent temple of Karnak and hired bicycles to ride up to the Valley of the Kings. We were 40 days into our trip and, for the first time, slept in a bed with sheets, because the Youth Hostel took pity on us and allowed us in even though we weren't members.

It was mid-August and we had to make a decision. We could press on south but there wouldn't be time to return to the UK for the start of the university term. We were running out of money; we were tired and thin as rakes; and Olga Omo was in Colomb-Bechar waiting to be collected. On the 15th, we turned back.

If we'd worked hard at hitch-hiking to get as far as Luxor, we worked even harder on the way back. In one 24-hour period in Libya we travelled 1,000 kilometres. At no point were we ill but our bodies were suffering: we'd both had diarrhoea but the main problem we had was with our feet, where cracked soles had become infected mainly because, throughout the trip, we had walked in sandals. By the time I reached Saida in Algeria - Michael had diverted to Oran to pick up mail - I was all in, but a group of young people saw me sitting at a sidewalk cafe and bought me a meal in a restaurant and a bed in the local hotel. Bless them.

We left Colomb-Bechar on 8th September and crossed to Gibraltar on the 12th. I have all these dates because, as promised, Michael and I both wrote home regularly. My mother typed out the letters and forwarded a copy to Uncle Stanley. She kept the originals, which I still have.

That said, the events of the last few days, between Gibraltar and home, were not recorded. The cylinder head gasket went as we drove up through France. By that time we were broke. A small garage - I wish I could remember where - replaced the gasket using one of the spares I had had the unusual foresight to bring, on condition we sent them the money once back in the UK, which we did.

We arrived home sometime around 17th September. We had travelled an estimated 15,000km in about 75 days, an average of 200km a day. While I was away my parents had sold Amberheath and moved to Orchard House, a rented cottage in Appledore in Kent.  Gill Rothwell had found someone who didn't go travelling. I was supposed to be leaving shortly for a geology field trip on Arran but couldn't go: my cut foot had become septic and I could hardly walk. And I was back in England.

North Africa - 3

We reached Colomb-Bechar on the 15th July, ten days after leaving England, arranged to leave Olga at the prefecture, and then sat in that sweltering, dusty town for six days trying to get a lift south. The normal flow of massive trucks had stopped: there had been floods in Niger! So we gave up on that route, determining instead to hitch-hike east along the north African coast before working our way up the Nile to Uganda. Fortunately, we both had proper backpacks, so we loaded them and turned north.

Algeria is beautiful, its citizens generous with their lifts and only too keen to tell of the terrible war of independence they had just fought with the French. We travelled fast, to Saida the first night and to Algiers the second, the last lift with a man who owned a plumbing business and allowed us to sleep in his warehouse, which was close to the city centre. We spent three days in Algiers while we waited for visas for Egypt - for which this picture was taken.

Throughout the trip we ate simply, subsisting on local bread, tins of sardines, grapes, tomatoes and melons. We only allowed ourselves the occasional cup of coffee in a cafe and, very rarely, a proper restaurant meal. The lifts were good but we walked when we couldn't get one. We weren't proud: our slowest lift was in a cart pulled by a camel. We washed when the opportunity arose, and bathed in the irrigation channels or, when we were near it, the Mediterranean, where we found some stunning beaches.

At night we walked well out of a town or village, rolled out our sleeping bags and slept by the roadside. Nobody bothered us. Our main worries were scorpions and, if we were near a village, the local dogs, which often kept us awake with their barking.

On 28th July we crossed the border into Tunisia, at which point the lifts dried up. In the weeks to come we learned to sit in the dirt at the wayside and wait but we were impatient so, for the first and only time, we caught a bus....

....as far as Gafsa. On the 30th we were at the Libyan border, at Ben Gardane, where immigration found I had a problem with my visa. I had no choice but to turn back for Tunis, leaving Michael to cross into Libya as his visa was about to expire. The journey marked in blue was done in just over two days, some of the fastest hitch-hiking I have ever done - and in that time I collected the visa.

Along most of the Libyan coast the desert runs down to the sea but, in Roman times, the area was one of the breadbaskets of the empire. Leptis Magna, between Tripoli and Misrata, is one of the finest Roman cities in North Africa. When the guards closed it at night we hid. We slept in the ruins, took baths in the ladies' toilets (much cleaner than the mens'), and imagined what it would have been like to live in Leptis' neat houses, to walk in its public squares, and to enjoy its magnificent theatre.

We left Leptis on August 3rd, almost a month out from England. For most of the next stage the road ran through rocky, empty desert. Traffic was light. The local people were less friendly and generous. The lifts became increasingly hard work. I have always thought that we finally mastered the art of long-distance hitch-hiking - and, believe me, it is an art - on the desert roads of Libya.

North Africa - 2

We drove south along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. After the mad dash through Europe we slowed down, stopping at a beach where we set up camp and....

....assisted in our discussions by a small and very friendly tortoise, for the first time began to think realistically about our plans. Olga drank petrol - I think she did less than 15 miles to the gallon - so we simply couldn't afford to drive her much further, yet we had to return her to the UK as my parents had put a hefty deposit on her. So we determined to make for Colomb-Bechar, which stood at the north end of one of Algeria's two trans-Sahara roads, where we would leave Olga and start hitch-hiking.

Half way across Morocco we came across two Germans, a young man and his heavily pregnant wife, who were cycling down to South Africa and, like us, planned to cross the Sahara from Bechar. Their sense of adventure buoyed us up, so we squeezed them in, along with their dog, tied their bicycles on the roof, crossed the Atlas mountains, and plunged into the desert. It wasn't the great sand dunes which one imagines but rocky, often utterly flat terrain with flat-topped hills. The road was a series of braided, rutted and sand-filled tracks so, for the first time, the Land Rover came into her own.

We drove from oasis to oasis. The shade, the water gurgling in the ditches, the birdsong, all were in stark contrast to the bleached landscapes and heat of the desert. We drew beautifully sweet water from the wells. At each oasis we had to register with the Cait, giving our estimated time of arrival at the next. The roads were patrolled by lone men on a bicycle like the one pictured.

The last oasis in Morocco, Figuig, was seething with troops. Had we done our homework we would have known that Morocco and Algeria had only just called a truce on a border war. The border, the Cait told us, was mined. It would be very difficult to cross. We couldn't drive hundreds of miles north to get round the problem so felt our way across it, through barbed wire entanglements and past the wreckage of vehicles. The Algerian army officer who met us thought we were idiots: we'd crossed a minefield. Idiots? He was right.

North Africa - 1

In the early summer of 1964 Michael Atkinson, an Etonian whom I had worked with at Bernard Mizeki, hitched up to visit me at Keele from Cambridge, where he was reading classics. He came to discuss the proposal that we should spend the three-month summer vac travelling down to Southern Rhodesia to revisit the school. We would do it overland, crossing the Sahara on one of the great highways through Algeria, then making our way through Central Africa - somehow avoiding the Congo, which was a mess - to Uganda and Kenya, after which we would follow the route we had hitched together the previous year down to Southern Rhodesia.

It was a ludicrous plan, given the time we had and the fact that we would have to be back in England by October, but we set about implementing it with innocent - or was it almost criminally careless - enthusiasm. We did little research, relying on the sort of day-to-day luck we had enjoyed on our previous expedition. We had no fixed route, no plan for if anything went seriously wrong, no insurance that would get us home if we were ill, and the only way of contacting home in an emergency would have been by telegram.

However, we agreed that to hitch the whole way might be difficult so we made it a load harder for ourselves by buying a vehicle, which I financed by asking my great uncle, Sir Stanley Reed, for £500, a very large sum in those days, which he happily gave me on condition that I wrote to him so he too could enjoy the adventure. With £350 of the money I bought an ex-War Department Land Rover which, for some obscure reason, I named Olga Omo. Within days of buying her she began emitting clouds of dense white smoke: she had a cracked cylinder block which resulted in rapid corrosion of the cylinder head gasket which allowed the cooling water into the cylinders. It was a major problem but, undeterred, I bought some extra gaskets and, on 5th July, we left Amberheath for the Dover-Calais ferry.

By the 9th we were in southern Spain where Olga broke down. Neither of us had any mechanical knowledge but a local garage fixed the problem - a minor one involving the points in the distributor - and we....

....crossed from Gibraltar to Tangiers the following day. I was ecstatic, back in Africa in a part of the continent I had not visited before, at the beginning of another great adventure which might, just might, enable me to find a job and not have to return to England.