Tea in the Sahara - Part Two

After a two hour flight south from Algiers, we arrive in Adrar at night, as it's not possible to safely land a plane during the day in the summer.

Due to family connections, we're met on the tarmac like visiting dignitaries - I'm whisked directly through the airport to a waiting car, while Mr. Fresh Hell helps retrieve our bags.

My first impression of the desert is the heat - I know, the Sahara in August - any but a fool would be surprised that it's hot. Yes, it's a dry heat, but the kind you feel sticking your head into a 400 degree oven.

The heat is tactile, and it envelopes me in a thick velvety wave. The night sky is vast, densely packed with stars. It will take me almost 2 days to adjust to the temperature.

We stay with our family in their home - thank God that they have all the mod cons, including air conditioning in the main living and sleeping rooms. The plumbing is dicey, but Mr. FH and I are well versed in cranky North African toilets and we adjust quickly, although I'm somewhat surprised to learn the water is turned off every night at around 10:00 pm.

We stay indoors during the heat of the day - it's only around sundown that the town comes alive. Adrar is a fairly large city for the area, and boasts its own university. There are the usual shops - bakery, grocery, clothing, hardware, and auto mechanics. There is a fair amount of activity during the day but they, no mad dogs nor Englishmen, certainly don't rush about in the noonday sun. Life has a slower pace here, a rhythm connected more to the earth and less to the demands of commerce.

Mid-morning of our second day, we drive west of Adrar to a small village - there we meet with a friend of the family, whom I shall call Kind Man. We're shown an ancient saint's tomb, a whitewashed conical building of stone. These are dotted throughout the Sahara -unfortunately, the Arabic name escapes me. The relief as we plunge into the village oasis is astonishing. The huge date palm trees provide shade from the sun; still, I cover my head with a light cotton shawl and am grateful for the extra covering.

The village children are gathered by the water as we approach. The water system is called a "fouggara", an ancient and ingenious system for the capture and distribution of groundwater. Using the earth's own gravity in part the water, distributed in little open-air channels within the tradition of an ancestral social organization, is shared out to individual gardens for the cultivation of palms, mainly, with some cereals and fruits as well.

If the children, all of them black, are surprised to see a fair haired white woman touring the oasis with their neighbor, perhaps the first one they've seen in their life, they show great restaint and merely scamper away shyly. I've already been to some remote sections of Morocco, so I am accustomed to their stares - I know from experience that if they could see my hair their curiosity would overcome their fear and they would challenge each other to reach out to touch it.

I am loath to leave the cool of the oasis but Kind Man leads us to his home in the village, where we sprawl on cushions and rugs piled on the floor and enjoy the traditional hospitality of dates and cool water.

We spend a pleasant family evening, enlivened with a difficult commodity in a Muslim country [but which can be had for an inflated price and the proper connections], perfectly frosty beer - probably the best I tasted, although it was only cans of Stella Artois.

The next afternoon we drive 250 kilometers north to Timimoun - the landscape changes subtly as we make our way north but the emptiness and flatness of the desert during the trip is astonishing to me. Montana has the sobriquet of "Big Sky Country", but there's simply no comparison to the vastness of the Sahara sky.

In Timimoun we collect a local guide, who takes us on a tour to a natural cave hewn into the side of a mountain - on the mountain's opposite side are man-made caves carved out of the rock by religious hermits, dating more than 2,000 years ago. The view from the caves is a panorama of a huge oasis [or palmerie - the term is interchangeable], with hazy mesas reminiscent of the American Southwest rising in the far distance.

At the foot of the mountain is another small village huddled on the edge of the palmerie; while descending the mountain by footpath I hear young men singing, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the local religious school.

Towards sundown, our guide directs us to a deserted stretch of dune not too far from the highway - unfurling a flat wool rug, he lights a fire in the sand and treats us to a formal Saharan tea. He makes a traditional Algerian tea; a base of Chinese gunpowder black tea leaves sweetened with block sugar and enhanced with wild mint - it is a perfect refreshment.

The timeless silence of the surrounding land, the slow majestic setting of the sun, and the archaic simplicity of our intimate tea party is a memory I'll cherish for the rest of my life - this, truly, is a dream realized, a moment that no coffee table book in the world, nor any hollow acclaim, can ever replace.