I returned at the beginning of October from a two-week trip to Algeria that included nine days camping deep in the southern Sahara. This image out of the thousands I took is certainly not my “best” image from that trip, but it is very representative, in many ways, of our time in the Sahara.
Plain fact: Algeria would not be a travel destination that many would ever consider. If one wanted to experience North Africa, Morocco is by far the numero uno tourist destination. Egypt also — though it has been up-and-down politically over the last 30+ years — is still the largest North African destination for many tourists (though certainly far less for the desert experience than for its pyramids). Tunisia is well-developed and oft visited by Europeans, though by an order of magnitude fewer Americans than Morocco (~40,000 to ~400,000). That leaves two other north African countries that feature vast swarths of the Sahara, brilliant blue Mediterranean coasts, and numerous Roman and other ruins from Classical Antiquity: Libya and Algeria. Libya has been on the State Department’s no-go list for at least 50 years and remains so despite a few tour agencies offering advice and services. Algeria has had its share of political turmoil including a nasty civil war that consumed a better part of the ’90’s and tens of thousands of lives but has fitfully been trying to emerge from its isolation. I had traveled to Morocco and Western Sahara as part of a private two person tour a couple of years ago and it had whetted my appetite for seeing and photographing more of the north African deserts. I used UK-based travel agency Native Eye to organize our Moroccan tour, and they did a very good job for us. So, when I floated the idea of going to Algeria to three good friends, everybody gave a big thumbs up. I looked at what Native Eye had to offer as far as their regular group tours and selected one called Jewel of the Sahara, which spends most of the tour time in the deep southeast of the Algerian Sahara. We then modified it to fit our own interests by adding a couple days in the capital, Algiers, as well as touring Roman ruins along the Mediterranean coast.
Back to the image: it is highly representative of one of our daily activities in the Sahara. After a light breakfast we would break camp and with a camera (or two) and a water bottle (or two) we would begin hiking. A couple of the hikes were relatively short as we were picked up an hour or so later by our vehicles. But often the hikes were 3-5 hours long (the longest was 9 hours!) and typically we would end up finally meeting the vehicles in the shade of some rocks as they prepared our mid-afternoon lunch. The four of us were led by our tour guide, Lamine, up and down sand mountains, across gravel plains, through dry wadis, over occasional limestone and dolomite outcroppings and all the time I never quite knew exactly where we were going, but he always got us there. (I also never saw him take a sip of water!) These hikes usually started around 10 in the morning and found us midday in 95°F temperatures with nary a cloud to be seen. Suffice it to say that with swelling sand dunes as far as one can see and rocky escarpments ringing valleys strewn with Neolithic rock carvings and medieval pottery shards with a few scraggly acacia trees to add a touch of desiccated green, it felt like a true Saharan experience.
This shot of our guide and my three companions is the last image I took before putting my camera in my bag for an hour or so as when we reached the crest of the dunes, the wind was whipping sand all about us threatening to get into every noon and cranny of clothing and camera. I understood then especially why the locals wear the turban: plenty of cloth to wrap around one’s mouth and nose leaving just a thin eye slit. When I took the image, I was thinking that it was purely a “documentation shot” as the sun was inconveniently placed just above the subjects. But, in retrospect, that gives their shadows quite a dramatic look, arguably making the shot work at a higher level. I didn’t need to do a lot in post-processing with it. I opened the shadows up just a bit and increased both the saturation and the exposure without blowing out the highlights. There was a bit of lens flare, which I took out and there were over 50 dust motes that needed to be removed but fortunately Lightroom’s new Dust Distraction Removal tool works like a charm. In the end, I quite like the image; amidst all the dunes and mountains, sandstone layering and lone acacia tree photographs I took, this image offers a refreshing difference.
If you are interested in more images of Algeria, including many Milky Way photography images, check out my related galleries.
Words and Image Jeff Clay