Driving across the Sahara – Part 1

First, an account of how I learnt to drive and how I obtained my license (a grimly comic tale) and then the saga of some of the most enjoyable driving I’ve done. Fear not, all this will not take as long as driving across the Sahara. My parents never had a car; no great matter, as public transport in England is so good.   I started taking driving lessons shortly before leaving home to work in northern Nigeria, where I was warned there would be very little public transport and where the scorching climate ruled out walking any distance. I turned out to be quite a good learner, except that I had very dodgy clutch control, and hadn’t mastered this in time to take the test before I left. Arriving in Nigeria I teamed up with a colleague who’d been driving for years and together we took out a car loan and were then joint owners of a spanking new white Volkswagen Beetle. More lessons followed, given by colleagues. And I had one memorable lesson from the campus doctor, a very amiable but highly eccentric Egyptian. (I remember consulting him once when I had a badly swollen throat and offering him my — unfounded — opinion that I might have mumps, which disease was endemic to the place. His eyes widened in consternation. “Ze momplets?” he protested, “no! Ze momplets is for ze kiddywinks!”) One story will illustrate his methods as a driving instructor. I was heading down a narrow dirt road leading up to a busy tarmac highway, with huge tankers roaring along it transporting petrol to the oil-barren Republic of Niger. As I neared the junction and slowed down the doctor roared at me: “Have no fear! Go! Go!” (I had fear, so I didn’t.) Come the test and, being a natural swot, I sailed through the question and answer bit. I believe I didn’t do too badly on the first part of the practical, which involved reversing the vehicle slowly around a double S-shaped course of empty oil drums — though for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what real-life situation this was supposed to approximate. Then the examiner tested me on a drive through town. At a point the traffic had come to a complete standstill (and traffic in northern Nigeria involves vehicles, donkeys, camels and goats) and I ground to a halt. The examiner turned to me and asked: “is it permitted to stop on a pedestrian crossing?” I thought to myself, this is a trick question, and leaned out of the window to admire the pedestrian crossing I had stopped on top of. The traffic in front lurched forward and I started off again, observing to the examiner: “no, it is not permitted. Who would dream of doing such a wicked thing?” The day came to visit the relevant office to see if I’d passed my test. The official consulted a big volume that I am sure had bugger-all to do with driving test results, told me I had failed and then said, with a cheeky grin, “here is your license.” I’m ashamed to say I capitulated and did the needful (I’ve only ever paid four bribes in West Africa; an account of the second occasion will follow later in this piece). Now that I could drive — theoretically if not legally — there was no stopping me (well, only in front of pedestrian crossings). A few months later, however, when two British friends, Ed and Hilary, suggested we take a few days off and visit the beautiful desert town of Agadez, I was a little nervous about the prospect of driving that distance and they said we could all go in their car (another white Beetle) and they would do all the driving. Now, the Nigerian border with Niger is about an hour’s drive from Sokoto, where we lived and worked, and Agadez is around another five hours north across the Sahara. We knew the Trans-Saharan Highway was under construction, all the way south from Algiers, but could find no-one in Sokoto to tell us whether the stretch of highway we needed had been completed. There were, though, two small towns on the way, Tahoua and Abalak, where we were sure we could stay overnight before a regretful journey back home if we were faced with only a Beetle-impassable road further north. So we set off. Chris Dunton

                              To be continued