listen to africa

2am, Monday: My head is pounding from the French and the dust and the relentless movement and I excuse myself and lie down to try and sleep. We lie there, a row of five people being pitched from side to side in the night. Nobody sleeps.

5.30am, Monday: The train is stopping! We’re in Choum! We scramble for a torch and the four of us (one of our companions jumped off the train in a tiny settlement in the middle of the night) throw everything out of the wagon in a panic; the train only stops for a few minutes here before continuing on to Zouerat.

Car headlamps blind us. People shout “Taxi! Taxi!” Dher and his friends give us directions, shake our hands, wish us well and disappear into the darkness. Battered and exhausted, Huw and I wait until the cars have gone and then fall into a deep sleep right there on the trackside, by a sign reading “Danger of Death”.

7.30am, Monday: I’m woken up by the sound of delicate clip-clopping breaking the desert silence. It’s a group of goats trotting along the railway track; they seem to know exactly where they’re going and the clip-clopping is quick, cheerful, lively. In my half sleep, it strikes me as a deeply beautiful sound but I can’t summon the energy to dig out the sound recorder. Instead, I lie there, wiping dust out of my eyes and listening. Huw, already awake, lights the stove to make hot drinks heaped with sugar; we haven’t eaten since yesterday morning and today we’ll need all the energy we can get.

8am, Monday: We wheel the bikes across compacted sand tracks to Choum, a small town in the heart of the Sahara. We plan to cycle the 120 kilometres of piste to Atar where we’ll pick up the tarmac road. We know we should start cycling now, before the heat really kicks in. Instead we find a restaurant – an open sided adobe building with mats covering the floor – and lie down. There is no food so we order coffee and cold drinks. A woman lights a stove and a boy is dispatched to a shop for the soft drinks.

The restaurant starts to fill with people curious about the cyclists. One man asks us whether we have any English tea. We don’t. He disappears and comes back five minutes later with a plastic bag of Lipton tea bags, three cans of tuna and a can of green beans. “For the journey,” he says, and shrugs off our thanks.

9.30am, Monday: We seem to have met half of Choum’s inhabitants and all of its children. The begging stakes are higher here; the children don’t ask for a present or a pencil; they ask for our bikes, our sandals, our panniers. In a way, these more extreme demands are easier to deal with; we don’t have to do constant battle with our tortured liberal consciences about the morality of giving or not giving (creating a culture of dependence? Or partaking in a culture of gift-giving where the haves help out the have-nots? Etc.).

Eventually, we summon the energy to leave. A man approaches. Where are we going? It is impossible to cycle to Atar from here, he says. It is too hot. There are 120 kilometres of nothing – nothing, do we understand? The piste is very sandy. How much water do we have? 25 litres. It is not enough, it is nowhere near enough. We do not understand how hot it will be later. We must drink ten litres a day, each – if we do no exercise. With exercise, we must drink more than ten litres, much more.

Touring cyclists hear this kind of talk all the time and, usually, Huw and I smile politely and then take no notice. But we’re worried about this heat, this stretch, and he’s giving voice to lots of our unspoken concerns. We thank him and say we are going to try, we will see what the piste is like. He shrugs. “My name is Shikali,” he says. “If you come back, you can sleep in my house, wash, relax and wait until the cars for Atar come this evening. I will be there.” He points to a shop across the square. We thank him and leave.

11am, Monday: We were planning to go ten kilometres into the desert, cook up a meal and sleep through the heat of the day, and start pedalling in the evening. We’ve now pushed our bikes a few kilometres along a track and still aren’t sure if this is the right way to Atar. People pointed us in this general direction, but several tracks veered and criss-crossed and disappeared into the distance – which one to take? There’s nobody out here to ask.

The heat is hard to describe – I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything like it. Even Huw, the camel, has already drunk four litres of water this morning (the same amount as as he drank during our whole six weeks of cycling through France…). We are drenched.

We look at each other. “I’m starting to feel this is verging on foolhardy,” says Huw. I don’t argue. We make a shelter with our tarpaulin and decide to sit out the heat of the day there and work out our options.

We really, really want to cycle this stretch (note to my previous cycling companions: yes, that “we” includes me :-). So far, we’ve cycled every kilometre – apart from the ferries and the train ride – giving us a warm glow of achievement. But, with all our kit, 25 litres is pretty much our weight limit in terms of handling the bikes in sand. If we can cycle three hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, we might make it to Atar in two days, depending on the piste. But “might” isn’t a good word when working out water quantities in the desert. We have to allow for three days and, in this heat, 25 litres isn’t enough for drinking and cooking for two people over three days – it’s less than we need and it leaves us no margin for error at all.

We swallow our pride and push the bikes back to town, feeling down. But first we pour most of our remaining water – now as hot as a cup of tea that’s been left to cool for a few minutes – over our heads, and are dry within minutes.

Monday, 3pm: Back in Choum, we go straight to Shikali’s shop and buy cold (as in not hot) water and soft drinks. “Bring your bicycles through here,” he says, opening the side door to his yard where there’s a well, two defunct car shells, a small herd of goats, some piles of scrap and a toilet. He shows us into his adobe store room. “What do you think?” he asks, smiling at the mess. “It is not much, but it is in the shade and you can sleep.” We thank him again and he leaves us to it.

For two hours, I sleep on the concrete floor while Huw sits on a row of ripped out car seats, wide awake, exhausted, his suppressed flu coming into full swing. When I wake, he is pale and pouring with sweat and I’m suddenly enormously relieved we decided not to cycle. Shikali comes to check on us. “We are making tea if you want to join us.”

In his living room, four men are sitting on mats. They shuffle up to make room for us. Shikali begins the long and lovely ritual of tea making – boiling and re-boiling the water, frothing the tea between cups, pouring it with a quick snap of the wrists. Men come and go, always engaging in a long, rhythmic exchange of greetings when they arrive (sometimes so long and so rhythmic that you worry they’ve got stuck and won’t be able to stop). Goodbyes are cursory, unsentimental – another legacy from their recently nomadic lives?

Monday, 6pm: Sitting outside Shikali’s shop, too hot to move, we meet Mohammed, a Gambian who lost half of his luggage on the same train as we arrived on. He lives in Atar but is waiting in Choum until somebody brings him his bags on a train coming back from Zouerat.

Mohammed is floored by the heat here. “I know Atar, I know all of Mauritania but, until now, I did not know Choum,” he says. “I will never come back here. It is too hot, too much. Next time I go from Nouadhibou to Atar, I will take a car all the way south and all the way north again, just so I don’t have to come back to Choum!” Is Atar cooler than Choum then? we ask, hopefully. “Yes, it is cooler! Atar is 56 degrees this week, something like that. Not like Choum.” We have no idea what the actual temperature is (the high forties sounds more likely than high fifties) but we feel a bit less wimpy now.

Mohammed invites us to drink tea with him outside a restaurant. He has been here only as long as us but he knows everybody; people shake his hand, stop to chat a while, drink tea. We order food and invite Mohammed and the Mauritanian teenager sitting with us to eat. Mohammed accepts; the teenager looks delighted and shocked at the same time and refuses until we – Mohammed, Huw, me – all insist. We wait – for the sun to go down, for the food, for any car going to Atar – and we wait.

The sun does go down and, although it feels no cooler than it felt at midday, the dusk brings an impression of coolness with it. We all sit and enjoy the evening sounds: the children laughing, the call to prayer, the hissing of the stove, the reciting of the Koran’s verses on a tape in Mohammed’s ghetto blaster, the gentle chatter. (Again, beautiful sounds and again, no energy at all to even contemplate getting out the sound recorder…)

Three hours after ordering, a communal plate of couscous with a few strips of meat arrives. After pouring water over each others’ hands, we eat, scooping up balls of couscous in our right hands, everyone careful not to take more than their fair share. It is delicious. We’d assumed we were paying for everyone but Mohammed insists on paying his share and the teenager, who can’t afford to pay for the food, buys a small bottle of squash for us all – and refuses to drink any himself.

Shikali comes up to us. It turns out he’s spent the afternoon negotiating lifts on our behalf (we thought we were just waiting for the cars that meet the evening train to arrive) but the best offer he’s managed so far is 15,000 Ougiya (about 40 Euros) for us and our bikes. “It is too much,” he says, “It should be 5000. I will keep trying. The problem is that these people think tourists are rich.”

Monday, 10pm: “Come, I have found a lift for 7000,” says Shikali. I go over to talk to the driver. 7000? 7000. OK. Maybe I’ve agreed too quickly, because the driver now asks to see the bikes. Shikali and I take him through to the courtyard. He is shocked – dramatically shocked, melodramatically shocked – at the amount of luggage. 7000 is not possible. There is too much luggage. There is not too much, I say. Lots of people have more – sacks of onions, small tea chests… No, it is different, he says, and it is too much. We need to pay 12,000. Shikali and I both try, but he will not budge.

Shikali takes me to one side. It is too much, he says. “We can get a cheaper lift, but it may take a long time. It is up to you.” I factor Dher’s “Mauritanian local time” into Shikali’s “long time”. I think about Huw being ill, and the air conditioning being three hours away. I cave in. I go back to break the news to Huw, who I know would not have caved in. For once, he looks grateful for my lack of will power. The driver comes over and tells us to rest and sleep – he will be back after he has collected people from the train.

Midnight, Monday: I’m shaken awake by Huw, who still hasn’t slept. The car is here. We unload the panniers and they’re added to the roof rack – insignificant drops in the huge ocean of luggage already up there. One of the panniers – one of the big ones – falls onto Huw’s upturned face and the clip hits him in the eye and cuts his eyebrow. Black eye time. The bikes are hauled up and we clamber in and settle down among a copious Mauritanian family with amazingly well behaved children. Mohammed climbs in too; his bags arrived on the evening train. And off we rattle to Atar, along corrugated tracks and sandy piste and, later, hilly paths, feeling both sad and relieved that we’re not cycling. Every bump drives us into the metal bars of the seats whose padding has all disappeared. I spend a lot of the journey thinking that, while people travelling by public transport seem to think we’re brave for cycling, I have an inordinate respect for anyone who travels any length of Africa on public transport.

3am, Tuesday: We’re in Atar! The Mauritanian family – babies, toddlers and all – lays out a cloth to sleep on the ground of the taxi station. Assuming all the hotels are closed at this time, we do the same. Mohammed, with too much luggage to make it home without a taxi, sits next to everyone’s luggage and keeps watch.

7am, Tuesday: Mohammed shakes us awake from a deep sleep. Smiling, he announces: “It is morning!” The station is bustling. Mohammed wishes us well before climbing into a taxi. The Mauritanian family is up and cooking tea. Excellent idea. We light our stove. Three taxi drivers with big smiles wander over, wish us good morning, ask us how we slept and admire the stove; they’re especially impressed that it can run on petrol.

We drink, delaying the task of finding a hotel so we can savour the idea of a bed and an air conditioned room just a little bit longer (deferred pleasure). We don’t yet know that the hotel will be just around the corner, the room will have an en suite bathroom with a bath, the air conditioning will work flawlessly and that soon we will be cool and clean and sleeping – under crisp white sheets – while our favourite sound in Atar hums on:

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