Gotta be the Freak o' the Week

A note to start with: when you call a French guy on Tuesday to make plans to leave on a trip, and he tells you that you will leave next Thursday at 5am, what he really means is the coming up Thursday at 5am. Don’t be fooled, “prochain” is a slippery concept, both “upcoming” and “next.” And don’t be surprised, then, when on that coming up Thursday morning you are awoken by a Polish priest knocking on your door at 5:40am and then looking confused when you open it in your underwear.



But all in all it is not a bad way to start a trip you know nothing about. By the time you actually wake up and realize that you are on the road into the Algerian desert with an elderly French man and a young Polish priest, neither of whom you really know, its too late to have any preparation anxiety, and you can promptly fall asleep in the back seat.



Once it was light enough to really take a good look out the window of the 1970s-era Renault Espress we were in the mountains on the northern coast. Dense with vegetation, and soggy from the week straight of rain, the green mountain pass reminded me of the view from a distance of the Black Hills in South Dakota: so green, in so many shades, that you really could mistake it for some darker color. The drive through the pass was dramatic, as the rain clouds were stuck there, creating swirling mist and a moisture not yet coalesced into rain.

We had to take the route straight south from Algiers instead of the normal one that veers to the west because the roads in that direction had been cut off by flooding inland. While it does rain quite often here during the winter, the downpours we had were out of the ordinary.



Through the mountains we came down onto an arid plain, the Mitidja. The descent was too dense with fog to see much, but things got progressively less green as we leveled off and pushed south, kind of like you would expect, I guess. What I did not expect was that in many places it looked like the Badlands…so thus far in my sleep-deprived mind my personal Matrix-machine is malfunctioning and looping me back to a rainy trip back home from the grandparents’ house in Rapid City. I hate the sun!



We stopped and ate at the “Algerian McDo[nalds’]” as Marek, the Polish priest, says. What this meant was that we pulled off the road to a small building at which we ordered skewered mutton brochettes, french fries, and a spicy Algerian soup, all complete with as much bread (baguettes, as always) as one can eat. It was all pretty delicious, and fun since it was grilled literally right in front of our table.



The desert of rocks ¬– for we are not in the dunes as yet – is pretty odd landscape. It is a true desert, even more uninviting than the dunes, with nothing but flat-topped, squared-off hills of rock jutting up from the flat land.



After 10 hours in the car we made it to Ghardia, a city built into a ravine carved into the ground by a river. We actually drove down to get to it. You could look from the road across miles and miles of country and not see a thing, but as you approach the canyon reveals itself and there’s a city down there. It is a pretty fun effect, like you get to see inside the seams of the earth or something, and there’s activity down there.



The city itself is fairly divided between the “Arab” and Mozabite communities. The Mozabites are a Berber group that builds A-shaped minarets on their mosques. The men wear distinctive pants that are super baggy in the crotch and pleated, along with a white skull-cap. Once a woman gets married she can only leave the house when completely covered except for one eye. Only one, though. But at least we saw women, which was a first since we left Algiers. Really, I did not think it possible to drive through multiple towns, for 10 hours, and not see a single female, but it is. As our host in Ghardia said, “yep, it’s much different from Algiers out here.”



The town itself is very cute. The main square was filled with people getting ready for evening prayer, and the vegetable/fruit/food section of the market was pretty amazing. Especially the fish area. Fish in the desert, why not. The wonders of modern refrigerated container shipping. At night many of the mosques put a green light up in the minaret (green is the color of Islam), which is a pretty cool sight because the rest of the town is completely dark. Just moonlight and green-lit lighthouses. Make up any “steering people away from the rocky shores of impiousness” metaphor you want.