{"id":57764,"date":"2022-07-21T01:00:22","date_gmt":"2022-07-21T00:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/?p=57764"},"modified":"2022-07-20T23:12:00","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T22:12:00","slug":"in-algerias-tassili-najjer-national-park-a-land-of-rock-forests-and-stone-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jazairhope.org\/en\/in-algerias-tassili-najjer-national-park-a-land-of-rock-forests-and-stone-giants\/","title":{"rendered":"In Algeria\u2019s Tassili N\u2019Ajjer National Park, a land of rock forests and stone giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a visit to Algeria, writer Henry Wismayer and photographer Marcus Westberg venture into the country\u2019s awe-inspiring (and seldom visited) interior.<\/p>\n

In another gulch of geological marvels, at the end of an arcade of russet outcroppings, stands The Hedgehog. Its uppermost dome is a carapace of rumpled stone; its underside is scoured smooth by eons of wind and rain. Its weight is born improbably by three slender columns. A stubby snout is turned askance, as if sniffing the air. That a lump of rock could have been eroded into this shape by an accident of elemental forces seemed absurd. But then everything felt surreal after two days in Tassili N\u2019Ajjer, where this kind of natural artistry was becoming routine.<\/p>\n

If this is the first time you\u2019ve encountered the name, you’re probably not alone. Truth is, I\u2019m not sure I would have found my way there at all if it wasn\u2019t for a message I received from a fellow writer, recently returned from Algeria, who dodged my questions about its northern cities, historical sites and Mediterranean coast, and said: \u201cYou\u00a0must<\/em>\u00a0go to Tassili.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"LEFT:<\/div>
LEFT: \u201cThe Hedgehog,\u201d among the most remarkable rock formations in Tassili N\u2019Ajjer; RIGHT: From the top of the park\u2019s biggest dunes, sandstone pinnacles appear to stretch on into infinity \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Located in the southeast corner of\u00a0Algeria<\/a>, Tassili N’Ajjer National Park covers 72,000 square kilometers of the Sahara Desert, which makes it slightly bigger than Ireland. Across this vast space, the desert erupts in a great jumble of sandstone pinnacles, tabular mountains and colossal dunes of polychromatic sand. Unesco, which inscribed the park as a\u00a0World Heritage Site<\/a>\u00a0in 1982, describes its otherworldly landscapes as \u201crock forests\u201d.<\/p>\n

By the time photographer Marcus Westberg and I flew over the yellow wastes of the Algerian interior on the two-hour flight south from\u00a0Algiers<\/a>, Tassili had assumed the dimensions of a traveler\u2019s grail. In my imagination, it seemed to promise something emancipatory and surreal: the coveted illusion of having a giant tract of the planet to ourselves.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Driving<\/div>
Tire tracks lead across a rubble field towards the \u201crock forests\u201d of the Tadrart Rouge \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We landed at Djanet, Algeria\u2019s south-eastern outpost, on a hazy afternoon. Our guide, Abdesalam Ayoub, Salam for short, was waiting for us at the baggage carousel. Salam was willowy and convivial, and wore a magenta headscarf that marked him out as Tuareg, a member of southern Algeria\u2019s dominant Berber tribe. We hopped into his friend Lahcen Abadi\u2019s venerable Landcruiser and set off east along an empty asphalt road.<\/p>\n

If Tassili was obscure, Salam admitted as we drove away from the airport, it was to some extent a conspiracy of geography and geopolitics. Geography, because our destination was extraordinarily remote, slap bang in the middle of the Sahara. Geopolitics, too, because we were close to Libya and Niger, two countries gripped by political dysfunction and Islamist insurgency. Algeria, fearful that instability, leaching across these once-porous nomad lands, might precipitate a repeat of its own terrible chapter of militancy in what Algerians call the \u2018Black Decade\u2019 of the 1990s, maintains an extensive military presence along the borders. We passed a large barracks within moments of hitting the road.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere used to be camel trekking up there,\u201d said Salam, gesturing to the Tamrit Plateau, a monumental escarpment, which is presently off-limits, as its inaccessibility hampers military patrols. \u201cNow very few Western tourists come here, and nobody goes onto the plateau.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our destination was no less special, Salam assured us. We were heading further south, to a region of this sprawling wilderness which, though close to the Libyan border, is secure \u2013 a place known colloquially as the Tadrart Rouge.<\/p>\n

Discover the world’s most intriguing experiences with our\u00a0weekly newsletter<\/a>\u00a0delivered straight to your inbox.<\/em><\/div>\n
\n
\"Abdessalam<\/div>
Tuareg guide Abdesalam Ayoub (Salam for short) approaches a solitary mesa, not far from the rock pinnacles of Moula Naga \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Into the rock forests<\/h2>\n

By the second morning, after camping the first night on the periphery of the park, we had adopted the positions that would become customary over the course of our road trip: Salam, driver Lahcen and Zaoui the cook,\u00a0shesh<\/em>\u00a0headscarves immovably wrapped around heads and necks, sat up-front; the Landcruiser\u2019s trunk stuffed with food and camping gear to sustain us for six days and nights in the desert. And in between, Marcus and I, agog.<\/p>\n

The thing that grabs you immediately is the topography, the astonishing scale and spectrum of vertical shapes. There are towering buttes springing from gravel plains, and cascades of brown rock that look like unsieved cocoa. Wide tracts of sand lead into amphitheaters of towering, striated rock. Numberless caves perforate the mesas.<\/p>\n

The ridgelines, exposed to the full sculptural force of the wind, are a gallery of arches, columns and balconies. This endless variety of shape and silhouette means that the landscape quickly became a paradise for pareidolia, the tendency for the human brain to perceive recognizable images in random forms or patterns. A honeycombed scarp becomes the ruins of a desert ziggurat. Ridgetop pillars become high-browed heads, turned to one another in silent conclave. (One night we would sleep, in Salam’s words, “behind the massive penis,” a columnar rock whose figurative qualities were, I\u2019m afraid, quite undeniable.)<\/p>\n

\n
\"Guide,<\/div>
Salam presents a large etching of an elephant herd, one of over 15,000 examples of rock art in Tassili N\u2019Ajjer National Park \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few miles past the military checkpoint known as \u201cthe door,\u201d which marked the threshold of the Tadrart Rouge region, we pulled up beside what looked, at first glance, like a blank slab at the base of a cliff. Only as we got closer did we see the pictures: a herd of cows; a group of athletic hunters running after a swine-like quarry; a supine giraffe with intricately dappled hide. This was our introduction to what is one of the most significant concentrations of prehistoric\u00a0rock art<\/a>\u00a0in the world.<\/p>\n

The principal medium is oxidized sandstone, the same reddish pigment that stains many of the dunes, crushed and mixed with bonding agents like blood and cow milk. Some of the most elegant and enduring artworks are engraved, painstakingly etched onto boulders with a thousand strokes of a rounded stone. Between them, the pictures describe millennia of prehistory and chart the social evolutions that have been shaped by the region\u2019s desiccating climate.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Cave<\/div>
Paintings of piebald cattle decorate an overhang near the sandstone pinnacles of Moula Naga \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The oldest, some of which are thought to have been drawn 10,000 years ago, depict the megafauna we now associate with lands farther south \u2013 elephants, giraffes, lions \u2013 revealing that today\u2019s desert was once fertile grassland. Later, Neolithic pastoralists settled the land, displacing the wildlife. They left behind elegant glyphs of the piebald cattle they reared on what remained of the savannah. The youngest drawings, disdained by Salam as \u201cnot old\u201d (though many are older than the Roman ruins found elsewhere in Algeria) are abstract depictions of camels, symbols of the austere, semi-nomadic life that the Tuareg would inherit. Counter-intuitively, the refinement of the artistry deteriorates in this latter period. Whatever opportunity the early people had to linger in place and indulge artistic impulses had evaporated as desertification took hold. In the Sahara, ceaseless movement was a precondition of survival.<\/p>\n

Wonders, revealed<\/h2>\n

After a day or so, I already had a feeling that we were in the grips of somewhere to rival the world\u2019s great awe-scapes, those singular places \u2013\u00a0Antarctica<\/a>,\u00a0Patagonia<\/a>, the\u00a0Himalayas<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 where vast desolation resolves into a humbling form of beauty. But this was at least partly intuitive. We weren\u2019t seeing the rocks in their best light. Throughout our second afternoon in the desert, sirocco winds from\u00a0Morocco<\/a>\u00a0had filled the skies with orange dust. This had the effect of reducing visibility, but the haze also bled the rock of texture, depth, color and shadow. At Moula Naga, where we camped on the second evening beside a shaft of rock shaped like a camel\u2019s head, you could look directly at the sun, a weak silver orb, half an hour before it hit the horizon.<\/p>\n

\n
\"The<\/div>
Three views of \u201cThe Cathedral,\u201d where several tall apertures have been eroded through a series of buttes \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The next morning, I awoke to urgent scuffling in Marcus\u2019 tent, a sure-fire sign, for anyone who has traveled with a photographer before, that dawn conditions had improved. Within minutes, we had apologetically chivvied Lahcen from his morning fire, and rushed back to \u201cThe Cathedral\u201d, a wide plain surrounded on two sides by rock towers with 50-foot-high apertures punched through the upper reaches. Yesterday, these godly windows had appeared flat and spectral. This morning, they stood in perfect relief against a deep blue sky.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a miracle!\u201d declared Salam, when we returned. Given the views that were now materializing in every direction, this did not feel like an overstatement.<\/p>\n

While the others broke camp, Salam led us on a walk south, across a valley basin. In places, the floor had a thick whitish crust, filigreed with hexagonal cracks. This crust showed the extent of the water\u2019s reach during the summer rains when Tassili becomes a staging post for migrating birds. Colocynth, a desert herb with spherical gourd-like fruit, proliferated across the dried-up watercourses and Salam encouraged us to crunch the seed pods underfoot, liberating the contents as a kindness for the birds and gazelles.<\/p>\n

\n
\"LEFT:<\/div>
LEFT: Salam approaches a valley basin; the lighter sand shows the extent of the water\u2019s reach during seasonal rains. RIGHT: Colocynth fruit, known colloquially as \u201cdesert melon,\u201d proliferates across the valley basins \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The low dunes, meanwhile, were a transcript of the previous night\u2019s activity. Beetle tracks scuttered in drunken crescents. Raven claws spun in circles. A jackal\u2019s paw prints padded an unerring meridian across the sand. The whole tracery was crisscrossed by the tiny depressions of the jerboa, a weird chimerical rodent with outsized ears and kangaroo-like legs, which we often spied raiding our camp in search of crumbs.<\/p>\n

It was a day of wonders. We saw enigmatic glyphs from a time before writing, and sandstone eroded into almost every conceivable shape and size. Rocks like mushrooms. Rocks formed into perfect parabolic archways. Rocks that looked like skyscrapers, or spacecraft, or preposterous two-ton hedgehogs.<\/p>\n

In the evening, Marcus and I clambered onto the giant orange dune of Tin Merzouga. The spine was a perfect wind-sharpened arabesque, and we scurried along its edge, aprons of displaced sand avalanching beneath each footstep. From its 304-meter crest, we gained an extra-terrestrial overview of the lowlands we\u2019d spent the day exploring. Serried ramparts stretched to the horizon, the colors deepening with the lowering sun. On the opposite side, looking northeast, terracotta dunes rippled into\u00a0Libya<\/a>, just 20 kilometers away.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Standing<\/div>
The author stands on a crest of sand on the climb up Tin Merzouga, one of Tassili\u2019s largest dunes \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In that moment, I understood the pull of the desert in a way I never have before. Everything was somehow both exquisitely still yet impermanent at once, the whole tableau rolling and eroding, grain by grain, fluxing on a scale too gradual for humans to perceive.<\/p>\n

I had spent much of the day considering the human story narrated by the rock art, only to feel it now shrink to a pinprick in the face of the desert\u2019s other chronology, the dizzying arc of geological time.<\/p>\n

Where the desert means freedom<\/h2>\n

For the next three days, the pattern was established. In the mornings, we walked or drove to a particularly beautiful point in the park \u2013 usually the lee-side of a mesa \u2013 where the crew decamped for lunch, leaving Marcus and I free to wander into slot canyons, and onto flat-topped inselbergs, seeing how far we could go before the geology barred our way. These expeditions yielded broadening perspectives, but also ceaseless discoveries. In places, millennia-old shards of stippled pottery, together with fossils of simple plants and organisms were as easy to find as chewing gum on an urban pavement.<\/p>\n

\n
\"TOP:<\/div>
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Breakfast on the periphery of the Tadrart Rouge region; Salam holds ancient pottery shards collected over the course of an afternoon in the Tadrart Rouge; Chef Zaoui builds a cairn on top of a low promontory \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we returned to camp, Zaoui would be waiting for us with thick coffee and\u00a0aliwa<\/em>, a green wheat soup. All three of the guides felt like fast friends. Versed in the nomadic spirit of hospitality and sharing, the Tuareg are natural hosts. Zaoui, whose face was stained gray from years of wearing an\u00a0allichu<\/em>, the traditional deep blue veil worn by Tuareg men, was even at pains to nourish the local fauna. When, at one lunch stop, a herd of camels approached to scrutinize us, he ambled up with a large bowl of water, which the boldest three drained within 20 seconds.<\/p>\n

It was hard to resist the speculation that the Tuareg seemed grateful for the pretext to be here. Most evenings, while Marcus and I scrabbled about in search of high ground, the three men would unload the gear, light a fire, then congregate for a competitive game of boules.<\/p>\n

The other two deferred to Lahcen, who was the eldest by some years. On our last evening, camping on the sand, in the wide-open, we found him in his habitual repose: legs crossed, supervising a pot of mint tea, which he always brewed with liturgical solemnity, only to adulterate the result with a great slew of sugar.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Guide,<\/div>
Lahcen Abadi brews mint tea in the shade of an acacia tree \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He had been born in 1950, he told us, in sing-song French, down near the Malian border. His early years were free and idyllic, spent moving from place to place by camel caravan. \u201cHe knows the desert from here to Mauritania,\u201d interjected Salam admiringly.<\/p>\n

In the turbulent final years of French colonial rule, as Algeria\u2019s populous north became mired in a brutal war of independence in which between 400,000 to one million people died, the Tuareg, in Lahcen\u2019s telling, existed in a tranquil parallel world. \u201cThere were no border posts then,\u201d Lahcen recalled. \u201cWe went where we wanted.\u201d Everything changed after Algeria secured independence in 1962. Borders ossified and bureaucratized as the young nation asserted its frontiers. Emancipation for the wider country ironically augured less freedom for the nomads.<\/p>\n

Now, Lahcen admitted, tourism was a necessity, the obvious diversification for a nomadic culture anxious to maintain its spiritual affinity with the desert. Covid had been \u201ccatastrophique.\u201d He feared it would only hasten the diaspora north, where many Tuareg now worked in the oil and gas fields. \u201cMost of the young people don\u2019t want to live the old life,\u201d he said \u2013 the universal indigenous tragedy playing out in slow-motion.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Guides<\/div>
Lahcen, Zaoui and Salam chat around the campfire at dusk \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That night, as the moonrise made way for a thick canopy of stars, Lahcen made Tuareg bread. He crafted a heavy disc of dough, then placed it in the fire, in a bowl of hot sand, raking the embers back over the top with a stick. Ten minutes later, the bread rose up through the ash, like a monster\u2019s pate emerging from a tiny volcano. We ate the result, a dense, chewy loaf, combined with Zaoui\u2019s lentil stew, which, like everything he conjured from his rudimentary kitchen, was delicious.<\/p>\n

Paradise lost<\/h2>\n

It was late afternoon the next day when we lurched back onto the tarmac road. The purposeful locomotion felt uncanny after six days of fishtailing over grit and sand.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Guide,<\/div>
Salam describes the legend of \u201cthe crying cows,\u201d one of Tassili N\u2019Ajjer\u2019s most celebrated artworks \u00a9 Marcus Westberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On the way back to Djanet, there was one last treasure for us to see. At an agglomeration of outcrops, a mile or so from the road, we stood and appraised a celebrated etching known as \u201cthe crying cows.\u201d Hewn into the base of a rock tower, the etching pictured a huddle of long-horned cows, their bowed heads turned towards the viewer. Upon each face welled a single tear. Even by the standards of Tassili\u2019s al fresco galleries, the workmanship was outstanding. Local myth holds that they were drawn by a cow-herd, who had traveled to this area in search of a spring only to find that it had run dry. The weeping cows were a projection of the artist\u2019s own despair, as he watched his animals perish one by one.<\/p>\n

How paradoxical, I thought, as we returned to the road. The very same land that betrayed the artist would, to a distant future generation of traveler, come to feel like a sanctuary from the world his descendants made. My phone signal pinged back to life. And like that, the notion passed, receding into the dunes.<\/p>\n

Fancy Algeria<\/a>\u00a0can arrange a six-day tour of Tassili N\u2019Ajjer, including domestic transfers from Algiers to Djanet, from around $700 per person.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Source : https:\/\/www.lonelyplanet.com\/articles\/algeria-tassili-najjer-national-park<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a visit to Algeria, writer Henry Wismayer and photographer Marcus Westberg venture into the country\u2019s awe-inspiring (and seldom visited) interior. 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