The long way down south in a kayak

By

Christian Bodegren

I have quit my work to do a trip, adventure, expedition, journey, or which ever name you glitzhammers prefer to use.

Maybe I’m selfish by doing this for myself, but hopefully I can inspiring somebody else to take a bit in this big tasteful cookie we prefer call earth. If I can inspire one person to do and learn more I have a succeeded. I have never been into thinking about to do things first or on record time which seems to occupied many people out there. In my mind I’m always going to be the first to seeing and feel and getting inspired in my one personal way. And therefore, I have planned to start this journey at the very top off Venezuela where the mighty Orinoco delta reaches  the ocean.

In a kayak this time, against the current. I plan to paddle along the river systems for ten months, heading south. the mission is to see how the people live and how the nature survive along the river systems, in this big and interesting continent. I still have plenty off things to do in Venezuela when I arrive before I can put the kayak in the water. And it  always take some time before you get into the routines and start to relax on a journey like this.

Like for example, getting use to the new sounds in the jungle during the night, which keep you awake or getting used to the new climate which makes your body react in different ways. And I cannot plan for everything, but I am just trying to reduce the bigger mistakes, which could be a danger for your health and life. In some way, that is the way I like my outdoor life. Because we humans always try to bring order and control over everything in our life and our surroundings. The nature has always  a different agenda about this subject . An agenda whiteout perfect corners and straight lines which in our minds it’s not what a controlled surrounding should be. But from the smallest thing to the biggest,  it’s a fascinated system, like a puzzle which its perfectly links together, the ecosystem. And everything have purpose in this chain, which we are constantly trying, and succeeds, to break.

I hope we are finding our way back to the reality and stop fighting against the nature and start to living with it. That is what I’m going to try to do it for the next ten months in a kayak cross the South America.

Please follow my trip and stay updated in www.christianbodegren.com

1. 10 best books about adventure and travel to read over Christmas

2. 5 most complete travel books ever

Lately I have been given a lot of opportunities to review other people´s books and I have said no, because the books were just not interesting enough. I don´t want to waste my time reading nonsense. However, this last month I have received two really good books, so I have decided to do just that, starting as of August 2011 to review interesting and challenging books.  (So, please, if you have a book you want reviewed, please send it to me.)

THE SAHARA

A Cultural History

by

Eamonn Gearon

(Signal Books)

Let me first say, I really love the Sahara. First time I came across this vast desert, back in 1988, I basically crossed it partly from west to east and than north to south. On a bicycle. Probably six of the most demanding months of my life. What I remember the best is the variety of the desert. Seldom as flat as I had imagined, great ravines, great dunes when around and the desert as a whole was not impossible at all to cycle. Of course there were some parts when pushing was the only way to move forward, but most of the time, it was more than ok. I also remember the sense of being content and happy, most all the time. And I remember the sheer beauty of the Sahara! The colors! But most of all, I remember all the time by oneself far away from most living beings. That is such a strong sense of happiness, it is really hard to describe. I admired the story about the loner at Assakrem, Charles de Foucauld. I still do. I have often thought about his life lately. But the reality was, one wasn´t never really by oneself. Most of the time, something turned up. Either as millions of treks after beetles when getting out of the tent in the morning or some humans, mostly Tuareg, turning up from nowhere. And plenty of tourists showing up in the horizon at least once a day, mainly in a Peugeot or some big German Unimog. Almost all of them travelling in caravans of many. I don´t seem to remember the heat too much or the nasty harmattan, the strong wind, even though, when I look in my dairies, this is what I write about most of the time. the heat and the wind.

Eamonn Gearon touches on all these issues and Charles de Foucauld in his very readable book with the subtitle A cultural History. I thought I knew quite a lot about the Sahara, its history, its spirit and its exploration. But I learned a lot of new, important knowledge by reading this easy to read and I thoroughly enjoyed this comprehensive book about this vast and alluring desert. It covers most things about the Sahara when it comes to its history, subjects like rock art, the history of exploration, travelers, tourism, wars, the spread of Islam, film and literature, and a bit about its inhabitants of today.

There´s also no doubt that Eamonn loves the Sahara himself and he is very good at finding the exact explainable words from others who he writes about or from himself describing Sahara´s raw alluring call and soul. Which only a person can do who have the right passion and understanding for a place. He is also a very good story teller and it is easy to read his enthralling book.

My only reservation is that this is a book mainly for the English speaking world, primarily the British one. Pretty much all references to pretty much everything like literature, film, exploration of today and before, deal with people with a British background. This of course is nothing new. The British market in itself is the biggest in the world for travel and exploration literature, this is a fact, but they often forget the rest of the world. Therefore many British explorers, for example today, always point out that they´re the first in the history or in the world to do this or that, when this is very seldom the truth. But this is a British thing. I am personally very much an anglophile, but I still notice this excessive British concentration on its own Britishness. As for example, they also put so much emphasis on explorers/adventurers having a military background. In my book, that is the worst background for an explorer. Some of the most famous British explorers and adventurers, could only be famous in Britain. Having said this, let me point out:

The Sahara; A cultural History by Eamonn Gearon is a vital piece of equipment for any traveler going to the Sahara!

Eamonn Gearon wrote a very well read piece earlier about the Sahara. Read it here!

The Sahara: A Long Way Away from a Cultural Desert

by

Eamonn Gearon

In keeping with anyone blessed with an active imagination, as extensive as my wanderings through the Sahara have been, they are nothing compared to my mental journeys through the Great Desert. The greatest journeys are not always physical, and one can be transported just as easily in an armchair as on a camel.

I was a child the first time I entered the Sahara, sitting on my father’s knee. We were at home in Wiltshire, that fat, green English county best known as the home of Stonehenge. Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony, the Pastoral, was on the record player. My father always played Beethoven when he remembered Egypt in the 1950s.

Although he was there in an official, military capacity – something to do with a canal by the name of Suez – his memories of that country and its people were fond ones, and invariably revolved around the desert.

If this reminiscing seems a long way from the Sahara, it both is and is not. Even unremembered, unremarkable incidents in one’s childhood can have a profound impact on the rest of his or her life.

There is no doubt that I have spent the past two decades in the Greater Middle East because of my father’s tales of a far away country he loved, even if, unsurprisingly, this love was not always equal on the part of the Egyptians.

When I started reading about the Sahara for myself, the first thing that struck me was its scale and its seeming emptiness. A part of the earth roughly the size as the entire United States of America, but with a population of approximately 3 million.

Once these figures had been absorbed, it was not the limited numbers of people that impressed me so much as the fact that the desert was not empty. It was, and always has been, home to a diverse number of peoples, both locals and foreigners.

I next understood that the Sahara had not always been a desert, but was once an ocean, and later variously forests and pastures; that “Sahara” simply means “desert” in Arabic; and that the human records of life in the Great Desert, its cultural history, are as many and varied as the flora and fauna one finds there.

Indeed, the landscapes of the imagination are far more numerous than the various physical landscapes one finds there.

The earliest extent records are those rock paintings and carvings found across today’s desert. These global treasures hold out the promise of great insight into our Saharan-dwelling forefathers, and yet they are frustratingly among the least understood human records, and most open to fantastical interpretations.

Hunting scenes are fairly easy to interpret. Recognisably male figures carrying spears and chasing four-legged animals with horns do not require the observer to have a degree in archaeology or art history. Other images are less straightforward. People swimming? Big cats dancing?

Did the “round-headed” figures come down from outer space? What do you think?

And while men apparently copulating with elephants and rhinoceros might just be examples of prehistoric lavatorial, schoolboy humour, they could easily have another, deeper meaning: we simply do not know.

Rushing forward thousands of years, the artistic records created by European artists who have been ‘discovering’ the Sahara since the late Eighteenth century were created in the same environment. In response to an encounter with their surroundings, the artists were impelled to create, to leave behind some record of a moment in time or a day in the life. They are all saying, “We were here, this is who we were, what we did and what we found.”

Fromentin declared that he only fully came alive in the Sahara, and that the intensity of these feelings grew the further south he travelled into it, while Paul Klee announced that it was the influence of being under North African skies, and the intensity of the light there, that he became an artist.

The paintings of David Roberts, who travelled through Egypt and the Levant in the 1830s, became the virtually canonical interpretation of the East for close to one hundred years.

Roberts’ time in the region was inspired in turn by a far less pacific visitor to Egypt. On Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, he was accompanied by two armies: one of soldiers, the other of scholars. These savants were responsible for exposing Europeans to a world they had more or less ignored for centuries. Perhaps this was no bad thing.

Napoleon’s short, inconclusive invasion marked the start of the last great scramble for the Sahara. By 1900, of the 11 modern nations that now make up the Sahara, only Libya remained independent. This too fell after the Italians invaded, snapping up the last slice of independent North Africa in 1911.

But these European invaders were just the last in a millennia-long line of like-motivated imperialists, which included the Greeks, Romans, and Vandals. Non-European invaders included the Phoenicians, Persians and, of course, the Arabs.

It was the invasions by this last group that most permanently changed the cultural face of the Sahara and its people. The eventual imposition, or adoption, of Arabic as the language of commerce, government and worship is the most obvious changes in local circumstances. The spread of Islam, which utterly replaced older, indigenous faith systems, was the most important reason for this.

Returning to the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, this was not just the era of European expansion and domination of the Sahara, it was also the period that saw the proliferation of portrayals of the Great Desert. The artists we mentioned above; these were soon followed by poets and writers of prose.

In the same way that Roberts dominated Nineteenth century painterly portrayals of the desert, so Beau Geste and the French Foreign Legion loom large on the early Twentieth century literary landscape. A kepi-clad bugler and a deserted fort was, for decades, all that most people knew about the Sahara, or cared to.

With the dawn of cinema, the literary visions were added to and exploited mercilessly by filmmakers who understood the instinctive attraction of a shot of sand dunes stretching as far as the eye could see.

One of the best-known writers on the Sahara, Paul Bowles of “The Sheltering Sky” fame, very publicly announced that he wished the film of his novel had never been made. Others were less chary.

And in spite of the critics, famous and anonymous, the Sahara continues to attract visitors; to awe strangers and residents; to prove most alluring when revealing itself to those who have the desire to know it, over time.

For my own part, the journey that began on my father’s knee reached fruition 20 years later, when I first entered the Sahara. And now, after nearly another two decades, I am delighted to have sanctified my love for the world’s greatest desert in my book.

The Sahara in which I roamed, first with the Bedu and later alone, but in the company of my camels – Osama, Ibn Kelb, and Baby – was physically demanding. The journeys were tough. They built character and left scars. Today, I look back on those sacred days and nights with love without compare.

Whilst resident of the oasis of Siwa, Egypt, recovering from amoebic dysentery after one of my more adventurous travails, I met my now wife. Such a priceless find, in the midst of the seeming wasteland, daily reminds me of the importance of the Sahara in my life. In this world, it pays to be alive to both one’s physical and imaginary landscapes.

Eamonn Gearon is an Arabist, analyst and author who has lived and worked in the Greater Middle East – from Kabul to Casablanca – for the past twenty years.

Eamonn’s life in the region started in the Sahara, where he lived and travelled with the Bedu, learning a vast amount of desert lore from them before engaging on a number of lengthy solo, camel-powered expeditions in the Great Desert.

His book “The Sahara: A Cultural History” came out in the UK in June 2011 (Signal Books), and is being published by Oxford University Press in the USA in October.

Eamonn is now writing a cultural history of Kabul, to which city he took his wife for their honeymoon, in 2008, during the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan.

Please visit my sponsors Termo who are making it possible for me to write 2 blog reports per week. Just click the logo to find the best underwear on earth.

Regardless of where we were born, mankind’s urge to explore transcends all differences of nationality and faith. It remains an emblem of universality deserving of a wider global study.

Ironically, though the public has long yearned for fresh voices who could share their hard-won wisdom, in the corporate-dominated world, where finances always come first, meaningful dialogue with the world’s leading explorers has been passed over in preference to slick ads and predictable yearly awards.

That is why I am proud to announce the launching of this valuable new series.

The Voices of Exploration project is designed to be an ever-expanding data bank of interviews and wisdom. My friend, Basha O’Reilly, is one of the Founders of the Long Riders Guild, who has already launched the Voices of Authority equestrian educational program.

Camels in the Sahara when we crossed from Lake Chad to Tripoli

John Hare worked in Kenya for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). During this time he undertook a number of expeditions into remote parts of northern Kenya, travelling all the time with camels and frequently alone. This re-kindled a life-long passion for camels.

In 1993, he took advantage of a chance offer from a Russian scientific team to research the status of the wild Bactrian camel in Mongolia – the 8th most endangered large mammal in the world. The wild camel is a critically endangered species numbering no more than 1000, and only survives in four habitats in the Gobi desert in China and Mongolia.

In 1995 and 1996 John Hare became the first foreigner to cross the Gashun Gobi Desert in China from north to south and to reach the ancient city of Lou Lan from the east.

In 1997, John Hare founded the Wild Camel Protection Foundation (WCPF), www.wildcamels.com , a UK registered charity of which Dr. Jane Goodall DBE is the Life Patron. In 2002, the Chinese government agreed to the establishment of the Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve in Xinjiang Province in the former nuclear test site. Measuring 155,000 square kilometres and almost the size of Bulgaria or Texas, the WCPF became responsible for helping the Chinese to establish one of the largest nature reserves in the world, protecting not only the wild Bactrian camel but many other IUCN Red Book listed endangered fauna and flora. John Hare is the sole international consultant for the Reserve.

In 1999 John Hare discovered an unmapped fresh water desert spring, deep in the heart of the Chinese Gobi, which contained a naïve population of wildlife. Wildlife, which had never seen man.

In 2001/2002 Hare crossed the Sahara Desert from Lake Chad to Tripoli, a journey of 1500 miles to raise awareness for the wild Bactrian camel. This journey was undertaken to raise funding and awareness of the plight of the wild Bactrian camel and lasted for three and a half months.

In 2004 the WCPF established the Hunter Hall Captive Wild Bactrian Camel Breeding Centre at Zakhyn Us in Mongolia with twelve wild Bactrian camels, which had been captured by Mongolian herdsmen. This is the only place where the wild Bactrian camel is held in captivity apart from two zoos in China and in 2010 the population had increased to twenty-five. With advice from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), there is a plan to undertake the first release of the captive wild Bactrian camels back into the Gobi desert.

In 2007 John Hare was the first person to circumambulate Lake Turkana in northern Kenya with domestic dromedary camels to raise funding for the wild camel.

John has just returned from an expedition in China which Prince Albert of Monaco’s Foundation for endangered species and Ran Fiennes’s Transglobe Expedition Trust generously supported.   In an email to Basha O’Reilly he wrote: “We encountered extremely low temperatures and two sand storms of considerable intensity and our head Kazakh herdsman (one of four) had his right arm removed from its socket by a kick from a camel. The arm was manipulated by the other three herdsmen and went back into place with a resounding ‘plop’ amidst a grind of gristle.”

John is now safely back at his home in Kent, and kindly agreed to answer Basha’s questions.

Voices of Exploration – John Hare

John Hare and favourite domestic Bactrian camel - Kum Su

Who do you think was the most influential explorer in history and why?

Ibn Battuta, because his journeys in the fourteenth century spanned nearly thirty years and covered almost the entire known Islamic world, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, India, Central Asia and China He travelled more than 75,000 miles, a figure unlikely to have been surpassed by any traveller until some 450 years later with the arrival of the steam age.

Who inspired you to become an explorer and why?

Colonel Percy Fawcett, because as a young boy I was totally gripped by the story of his travels into the Brazilian jungle in a search for the Matto Grosso and Inca gold.

What is your favourite exploration book and why?

Exploration Fawcett (see above)

Lou Lan ancient city (we were the first expedition to reach it from the east in recorded history)

What is your favourite exploration film and why?

I do not have one.

If you were travelling to the South Pole in the “Heroic Age,” would you prefer to travel with Shackleton, Amundsen or Scott, and why?

Shackleton for his superior leadership qualities. I feel I could relate to Shackleton more so than to Scott or Amundsen

Wild camel and calf (the only photo ever taken of a wild calf under

What was the most dangerous situation you survived?

There are two:

(1)When our truck broke down on the brittle rock salt of Lop Nur in China. Our tyres were being shredded and we had to put cooking oil into the engine as we were burning oil faster than we were using petrol. I estimate we were at the time 250 miles from the nearest person in any direction.

Also (2), when 20 of our 22 camels ran off in a sand storm leaving us marooned on the dried-up lake of Lop Nur, shortly after the Chinese had exploded an underground nuclear device. We were separated from our vehicles by 280 miles of one of the most hostile sections of the Gobi desert during the season of extremely turbulent sand storms.

What is the single greatest change you have witnessed in the exploration world since you began?

The power of satellites and their ability to provide communication no matter where you are in the world

Crossing the dunes in the Desert of Lop China (former nuclear test site)

What modern technology or techniques do you find most helpful?

The Global Positioning System

What piece of equipment always goes with you?

A compass

Which book would you recommend to would-be explorers today?

Kim by Rudyard Kipling. I always carry it into the desert, not because it helps with exploration but because it is a very good read and provides great solace when times are tough.

What would you tell young explorers to be wary of?

Over confidence

Why is it important for humans to continue exploring?

If ‘exploration’ in the broadest sense ceases, then the human race will stagnate and eventually die out.

Which of your achievements do you think will be most remembered?

I hope it is the establishment of the Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve which protects the wild camel in China’s former nuclear test site.

Books by John Hare:  Mysteries of the Gobi: Searching for Wild Camels and Lost Cities in the Heart of Asia

The Lost Camels of Tartary: a Quest into Forbidden China (foreword by Dr. Jane Goodall DBE)

Shadows Across the Sahara: Travels with Camels from Tripoli to Lake Chad

http://www.johnhare.org.uk/

http://www.wildcamels.com/

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Flying the flag of freedom: Even the young in Tobruk are swept up in the revolution

by

Justin Marozzi

(Photos Jabril Darwish)

Dr Rida ben Fayed, a Libyan orthopaedic surgeon back from Denver, Colorado, introduces his team like an announcer rallying the audience at a live Hendrix concert.

“We’ve got Ahmed on ground information, Walid on IT, Abdullah on medical supplies, Majdi on press, Ahmed on logistics, Colonel Farah on air defence, Colonel Sanusi on naval affairs…”

Midnight in Tobruk and the daily digital diwan is in full swing. Around 20 men, cross-legged on cushions, are gathered in a ground-floor sitting-room. There’s no one on drums tonight, but that doesn’t mean there’s no music. From a bedroom in Manchester a Libyan girl is singing live online about the Libyan fight for freedom. Smoke, laughter and revolution in the air. Tiny glasses of tea so sweet they remind you why diabetes is endemic in the Arab world. Surfing across satellite news channels.

These men are doctors, engineers, businessmen, human rights activists, military types, many from abroad, others entirely home-grown. Half have laptops. Facebook and Twitter to the fore. The familiar underwater jangle of an incoming Skype call regularly punctuates the hubbub. My neighbour is editing a video cartoon mocking a typical, fist-pumping Gaddafi harangue. Others upload and download photos, coordinate medical supplies, pass on information to colleagues across Libya. A former colonel is planning a dangerous 50-hour mission on a fishing boat to take weapons to opposition forces in the besieged city of Misrata.

“This is our digital operations room,” says Dr Rida with pride. “We’re all volunteers.” He thrusts a laptop and a pair of headphones into my hands. “Here, speak to Perdita in Benghazi. She can tell you what she thinks about all the reporting on al-Qaeda infiltrating the Libyan revolution. Her husband was killed three weeks ago by Gaddafi’s forces. She’s eight months pregnant.”

Perdita’s husband, Mohammed Nabbous, was the 28-year-old founder of Libya al Hurra (Free Libya) television station in Benghazi. He was shot in the head by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, barely a month after the channel was launched, after transmitting videos and pictures of regime forces suppressing the uprising with indiscriminate brutality.

A young voice cuts through the ether, dignified and precise. How many more women have lost their husbands to the widow-maker since Nabbous’s assassination? Perdita’s first experience of life after Gaddafi, what it could be like in the future, was intoxicating. “When Benghazi was liberated, we started rebuilding our city. We started to live, to be free for the first time in our lives. Women have taken up positions in the media and are looked up to. We are living in a totally different atmosphere. For us to go back to how it was before is impossible.” She says the first time Gaddafi mentioned the al-Qaeda threat in Libya during the uprising, everyone laughed. Libyans are used to the lies of “The Great Thinker”. They have had to listen to them for 41 years, seven months and counting.

There’s fierceness in Perdita’s new-found freedom. Like thousands of her fellow Libyans since February, she has already paid a savage price for this challenge to the regime. “It was my husband’s dream that our son would be born in a free Libya. Now I’m going to do everything in my power to support the revolution and make this dream come true.”

Foreign visitors in eastern Libya, especially those from the UK, US, France and Qatar, receive daily, often exuberant, expressions of gratitude for their countries’ support. Travelling to Libya for more than 20 years, I have always been humbled by the hospitality of its people. In the 19th century, British explorers and campaigners against the Saharan slave trade remarked upon the same trait. I was constantly struck by this self-denying generosity years later, during a 1,500-mile journey by camel across the Libyan Sahara. The only sour note came from Gaddafi’s security thugs, uneducated, intimidating cowards who arrested us for a week in the storied desert oasis of Kufra. My father, who used to do business in Libya in the Eighties and Nineties, died a decade ago after introducing me to this fabulous country. A great Libyan family friend, whose family’s whereabouts and security in Tripoli are unknown as Standpoint goes to press, still calls my mother regularly to ask after my family. This is what Libyans are like.

Dawn in Tobruk. Under a sliding sky we plunge south on the desert road that leads only to Jaghbub, the remote oasis town, once impenetrable to foreigners, that was the former seat of the Sanusi Order. The Sanusi story — compelling, romantic, ultimately tragic — began in the Arabian desert, where in 1837 Sheikh Mohammed ibn Ali as Sanusi, known as the Grand Sanusi, established an Islamic revivalist movement, a fiercely orthodox order of Sufis.

It quickly spread to North Africa and seeped as far west as Senegal, through a network of zawias or religious lodges. The first zawia in Libya was founded at Baida in 1844. In 1856, the Grand Sanusi founded one at Jaghbub. In time it grew into Africa’s second greatest university, after Cairo’s Al Azhar. The Sanusis derived strength, respect and affluence from their role mediating tribal and trade disputes in the Sahara in the days of the desert slave trade, and for providing education for the unschooled masses.

The sun rises, blazes overhead. The road runs across the desert like a pasted ribbon, blurring off in the distance into a pool of steaming mercury. After an hour, a black smudge drifts in and out of sight on this sun-bludgeoned plateau. The tall, triple- barbed-wire fence, a surreally disfiguring structure amid these wide horizons, was constructed in 1931 by General Rodolfo Graziani, despatched by Mussolini to bring Western civilisation to Italy’s “Fourth Shore”. Libyans called him Butcher Graziani. Rome preferred Pacificatore della Libia. This was, in the Italian’s words, “una guerra senza quartiere”. Graziani herded tribesmen into desert concentration camps behind barbed wire and machine guns, poisoned their wells, condemned men to excruciating deaths in roasting salt pans, and dropped canisters of poison gas on to desert oases. Between 40,000 and 70,000 were killed.

Sanusi fighters led the heroic, doomed resistance to the Fascist occupation under their charismatic chief Omar al Mukhtar. He was captured in 1931 and, after a 30-minute show trial, hanged in front of 20,000 tribesmen. Today his face appears on flags, street hoardings and car stickers throughout eastern Libya, a symbol of the post-Gaddafi order. His call to arms: “We will never surrender. Victory or death.” The picture of a handsome old man in profile, with white beard and white skullcap, was taken by Mukhtar’s Italian captors.

Jaghbub is an unremarkable little cluster of concrete houses. Its heart is an extraordinary expanse of rubble laid bare beneath a pitiless sun. Shattered blocks of white stone, smashed slabs of marble, sections of date-palm trunks, ancient nails, rusting spikes of wire. This is all that remains of the great zawia, architectural jewel of the oasis, that Gaddafi razed in 1988. The local preacher, Sheikh Mohammed Sanusi, a follower rather than a family member, says it took bulldozers 11 days to destroy everything within a compound measuring 47,000 square metres. “Then they finished it off with 17 explosives.”

For Gaddafi, the Sanusi name was anathema, forever associated with the benign, if somewhat ineffectual, pro-Western monarchy of King Idris Sanusi, which he overthrew in the military coup of September 1, 1969. He had the body of the Grand Sanusi disinterred and removed to an unknown   location. The sheikh says the body was miraculously preserved.

The interview with Sheikh Mohammed, a trim, slightly stooped figure of 76, begins awkwardly. He reprimands Christians and Jews for their supposed scriptural inconsistency, invites me to read the Koran, convert to Islam and earn my place in paradise. Some traditions live on. When the Egyptian diplomat, explorer and writer Ahmed Hassanein Bey travelled across the Libyan desert during an epic, 2,200-mile journey by camel in 1923, he described the order as “an ascetic confraternity [...] intolerant of any intercourse with Jew, Christian or infidel”.

As Libyans ponder a future without Gaddafi, some wonder whether a constitutional monarchy might yet return, using the widely praised 1951 constitution as some sort of basis for a future settlement. This was the document, drawn up with the UN’s assistance, with which Libya declared independence as a democratic, federal and sovereign nation with a constitutional monarchy and bicameral parliament.

The sheikh shakes his head. “After King Idris, the Sanusi family involvement in politics is over. No more king.” The otherworldly veteran would rather relate famous miracles of the Grand Sanusi and the Prophet Muhammad than discuss the Libyan revolution. “I don’t care about Gaddafi or politics. I am only interested in God.” In Tobruk’s digital diwan, opinions range from an emphatic “No way” to “It’s up to the people to decide”, a line also taken by the exiled, London-based Crown Prince Mohammed Sanusi.

The next day we arrow fast down the coastal road towards Benghazi, headquarters of liberated Libya, along a shoreline that has seen a succession of foreign invaders come and go across the millennia. The Greeks were the first, Herodotus tells us in his swashbuckling masterpiece Histories, when a settlement was founded at Cyrene in 630 BC, following divine instruction from the oracle at Delphi. Berenice, the Benghazi of today, followed four centuries later, around 250 BC.

As Gaddafi has never tired of reminding his countrymen — one of the few things with which they would agree — the history of Libya is a relentless procession of colonial invasions and occupations. After the Greeks came the Romans and the foundation of provincia Tripolitania —province of the three cities of Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (as Romans knew Tripoli) — created by the Emperor Diocletian in 284 AD. Then there were the Arabs who surged across North Africa in the mid-seventh century, whose Islamising influence proved longest lasting of any invader. The firebrands of Islam were succeeded in turn by the stultifying embrace of the Ottomans (1551-1911) and the wretched, blood-filled interlude of the Italians (1911-1943). During the fighting in the Western Desert in the Second World War, the Germans, French and British joined the fray until independence was achieved at last in 1951. After 18 years of monarchy, during which time Libyans of a certain age will tell you there was just one execution, the Gaddafi occupation began.

Canine carcasses line the road at intervals. I count five between Tobruk and Benghazi. Dead dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Mad Dog and his puppies snarl 800 miles to the west. The road winds through the astonishingly beautiful, verdant landscape of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, and at once one understands the invaders’ age-old, land-grabbing appetite, from ancient Greeks to the Italians who saw in Cyrenaica’s fine red soil and fertile fields a Tuscany on African shores. With rolling slopes, slanting cypresses and enchanted orchards and citrus groves, it is hard to imagine that such a gentle environment, with shades of pastoral Italy or carefree Switzerland, could belong to a dictatorship.

Through the city of Derna, piled on to the shoreline like a shipwreck, and the outpouring of roadside graffiti, daubed in English, French and Arabic: “We are freedom addicts not drugs”; “No to extremism”; “Yes to pluralism”; “Libya is a unified country, Tripoli is our capital”; “Our struggle is for democracy”.

At the next town of Baida a banner hangs from a partially burned-out former regime building on the far side of the square: “Tout le monde doit savoir que les insurges Libyens n’appartiennent pas à Al Qaida. Nous nous sommes sacrifiés pour la liberté.” Opposite is an open-sided crimson tent whose sides are covered with photos and stories of the many victims of Gaddafi’s serial outrages, from this latest conflict and the wars he sent Libyans to fight across the continent in exercises in lunatic adventurism. Here are the dead from Chad, Egypt, Algeria, Uganda and the ongoing revolution. Cartoons of Gaddafi strapped to a rocket, as devil-horned, forked-tailed monster. This is the beginning of the long reckoning ahead.

A group of young men Bluetooth me photos of the recent protests in quickfire succession. One plays a mobile-phone video which he says shows Khamis Gaddafi, who runs his own brigade of killers, training African mercenaries. Hapless black recruits approach a table where they are cuffed over the head and forced to eat large chunks of dog flesh. One by one, they grimace, retch and vomit. Then they are shoved across to the back of a truck and made to French-kiss the dogs’ severed heads.

Night-time in Benghazi. City lights twinkle, doubled in the dark waters of Benghazi Lake. Until a few weeks ago it was known as July 23 Lake, in honour of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 military coup in Egypt. Soon Libyans may call it February 17 Lake.

Precise details of the post-Gaddafi government to come are yet to emerge, understandable amid the chaos and Twitterfog of war in the west. The quietly spoken Mohammed Fanoush, former director of the National Library in Benghazi, is the local director of communications. He says the National Transitional Council (NTC) is working on a proposal for a new constitution, to be drafted by an elected committee and then submitted to Libyans in a future referendum. No one envisages a five-year government of national unity or anything so protracted.

“I used to be optimistic, even in the darkest days,” Fanoush says. “My brother was hanged in the streets. We were always determined to get rid of Gaddafi but we worried it would take 20 years or more.   Now things are changing immensely, and quickly.”

Underpinning his confidence in the future is a demographic quirk, an unexpected consequence of dictatorship. “Unintentionally, Gaddafi did us a great favour by emptying the country of its people. We have 100,000 intellectuals, professionals and young people who left Libya to live and work all over the world. They have expertise in so many areas and now they’re coming back.” I recall a cigarette break on the road to Benghazi when a Libyan stranger offered to translate for an impromptu conversation with a rebel soldier manning a checkpoint. He was a PhD student studying biology from Sheffield.

To tread the corridors of provisional power in Benghazi is to encounter an inspiring corps of Western-educated doctors and lawyers, engineers, human rights activists, businessmen, former political prisoners. Unlike in Iraq, where fears of the returning diaspora’s venality were all too often justified in displays of brazen klepto-cracy, so far the attitude towards the stream of exiles appears overwhelmingly positive. If revolutions could be won on goodwill alone, this one would have triumphed already.

Dr Abdulkadr al Gnein, a hyperactive Danny DeVito lookalike, returned from Ottawa a year ago, sensing the end of the Gaddafi regime. Nowadays he’s busy helping fund the opposition, setting up a humanitarian NGO, arranging medical supplies and assisting the media.

He says Gaddafi crossed a “red line” with Iman al Obeidi, the law student who burst into the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli and publicly declared she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi’s men. “Women and children are sacred here. This united everyone in Libya against Gaddafi. Every free city in the west accepts the Council is the legitimate government of Libya. We won’t be split.”

The unquestioned chief of the political prisoners, a godfather of the Libyan revolution, is Haj Ahmed Zubair Sanusi, the world’s longest-serving political prisoner. Now 77, he spent 31 years in prison from 1970-2001. His greatest crime was his surname. Libyans may not want another constitutional monarchy, but their respect for the family’s distinguished reputation endures.

We meet in a VIP suite in Al Fadhil Palace, where members of the NTC gather daily. Acres of white sheets on a kingsize bed. A tasselfest of sumptuous soft furnishings. Every bit of furniture in sight is covered in the sparkling decoration so beloved of Arab furniture designers. It is as far removed from his prison cell as possible.

Ahmed Zubair says his death sentence was never commuted during this unfathomable captivity. “Every time a door opened, I never knew if it was going to be someone taking me to my execution,” he says, unbowed in pinstripe suit and tie. The work ahead is immense. “Now we are trying to build a new country under the rule of law. We are united. Tripoli is our capital, Benghazi is our city. It will be difficult after 42 years of Gaddafi. It will take a long time. But the Libyan spirit is there. The people understand. They can wait.” A friend suggests that with his uniquely painful backstory, Haj Ahmed would be the perfect successor to Gaddafi. A Mandela moment in the offing?

Benghazis still smart from the violence meted out by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, the final catalyst for Nato’s more muscular intervention. Adel Ibrahim, a Benghazi hotelier who owns the Al Fadhil Palace, has a ringside seat at the revolution.

“You know what Gaddafi told the soldiers before they attacked? ‘Kill every man under 50 and the women are yours. Do whatever you want with them’.” He describes a confrontation he witnessed on the streets. “Three men walked up to a machine-gunner with their arms outstretched. The first man said, ‘Shoot me’. The soldier shot him dead. Then the second went up and said the same thing. The soldier shot him in the knees, then the chest. Dead. Then the third man came up, arms open wide. The soldier dropped his gun, turned round and fled.”

At this stage, the al-Qaeda threat appears negligible. Gaddafi poses a far greater menace, both to his people and to the West, whose credibility diminishes with every day he is allowed to remain in power. Noman Benotman, a former senior member of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, says al-Qaeda has no “real presence” and “few, if any, active operatives” in Libya.  Dr George Joffé, Middle East and North Africa expert at Cambridge University, argues that fears of a significant al-Qaeda presence in Libya are “totally” overblown. “I think al-Qaeda has been completely marginalised by the recent upheavals in the region,” says the terrorism expert Peter Bergen, a programme director at the New America Foundation. “No one’s burning American or Israeli flags or carrying placards of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is losing the battle of ideas in the Muslim world.”

When Gaddafi is gone, it is only a matter of time before the enormity of the crimes his regime committed over four decades is revealed. History’s verdict will not set much store by former Labour Party MP Tam Dalyell’s 1993 prediction: “I believe that in the 21st century, Colonel Gaddafi’s government will come to be seen as one of the most effective ‘ecologically imaginative governments’ of the 20th century.” Nor will it agree with Gaddafi’s delusional braggadocio of 1987: “History should show that if there was any mould, I have contributed towards its destruction. If there has been any shackle binding the Libyan people, I have participated in its demolition until the Libyan people have become free.”

Instead, future historians, less distracted by his eccentricity and sartorial pomp, less seduced by Libya’s black gold, will elevate Gaddafi to the top tier of 20th-century tyrants. His regime vies with Saddam Hussein’s for murderous supremacy.

A new and very different Libya will emerge after Gaddafi. However great the uncertainty, whatever the risks of an east-west split, however vicious the predictable tribal disputes that will follow his departure, the prospect of any future government — or even governments if Libya became two Libyas — being worse than this regime is unthinkable.

The country has the potential to become a model for North Africa and the Middle East, open to the world after its traumatic removal from the community of nations. The foundations for success, which will be a tumultuous test of will, can quickly be discerned. Rich in oil, with a tiny population of seven million, Libya has been blessed by nature with favourable resources, demographics and geography, yet under Gaddafi a third of the population lives at or below the national poverty line. Libyans do not have the devastating Sunni-Shia divide, with the resulting bursts of bloodshed that have plagued Baghdad, City of Peace, ever since it was founded by the Abbasid caliph Mansur in 762. The flow of talented, highly educated Libyans returning from exile could become a stampede.

If the words of politicians in the liberated east of Libya are anything to go by as harbingers of a settlement emerging from the wreckage of Gaddafi’s Libya, the desire for national unity is formidable and the aspiration to build a modern nation sincere. That said, expectations, will be unrealistic and major disappointment is inevitable. Many Libyans isolated from the world since 1969 will equate more democratic governance with full employment and a short path to riches generated from the lake of oil on which the country sits.

At present it produces around 1.6 million barrels a day, though after Gaddafi’s attacks on eastern oil installations and the mass exodus of expatriate workers this has slowed to a trickle. Failure to see quick benefits will destabilise the fledgling state. Any new government will therefore need to communicate to its people a realistic assessment of the many challenges ahead. You do not quickly recover from the scorched-earth abuse that has been the hallmark of the Gaddafi regime. “As for the future, with no formal mechanism in place to ensure a smooth transition of power, the post-Gaddafi era, whenever it occurs, can be expected to be a time of considerable tension and uncertainty, with numerous socio-economic and political groups vying for power,” writes Ronald Bruce St John in his 2008 history, Libya: From Colony to Independence. It is difficult to counter such an argument. Ultimately what will be needed, both to remove Gaddafi in the short term and rebuild the country in the long term, is something Libyans have had to demonstrate for far too long already. A senior army officer taken prisoner in Benghazi, terrified for the lives of his family in Tripoli, puts it in one word: “Patience.”

By complete coincidence, my father bumped into Gaddafi on the day of the military coup in which he dethroned King Idris and seized power. It was a year before I was born. The then 27-year-old army captain eyeballed him and gave a brusque warning to get out of town. “You better leave Tripoli before you get killed,” he shouted. “This is a revolution!”

More than 41 years later, it is immensely moving to see — and share — the delight of the countless brave Libyans whose revolution is bringing this unspeakable regime to an end.

Justin Marozzi is a travel writer, historian, journalist and political risk and security consultant. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and Muslim world and in recent years has worked in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. Justin is a regular contributor to a wide range of national and international publications, including the Financial Times, Spectator, Times, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard, Standpoint and Prospect, where he writes on international affairs, the Muslim world and defence and security issues, and has broadcast for the BBC World Service and Radio Four.

This article have been published in Standpoint Magazine.

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Mohamed Bouazizi shakes the Arab World

by

Christian Bodegren

Who would have thought that a 26 year old fruit and vegetable salesman named Mohamed Bouazizi, would get an entire Arab world to shake? And who could have known that he would be the one that triggered people in Tunisia to rise up in anger against a tyrant who’s dominated their country for 24 years, and chase him out of the country?

I would not have thought it, that day I stood before the court in Tunisia in 2010 on charges of an illegal sale of my dromedaries, with my Sahara expedition fresh in my memory. My female lawyer told me:

“I’m sorry for everything, but it’s probably best that you do not come back to Libya for at least five years.”

I managed to leave the country after my second attempt, sure that I wouldn´t be able to return for a long time. Maybe never. That was also the end of my Saharan dream. Two days later I walked into a church in Sweden where my big brother was getting married, who knows, maybe everything has a purpose. Several months later Ben Ali fled, and the people of Tunisia were raising their hands to the sky, and they could take their first deep breath of freedom. After days, months and years of dictatorship where television, radio, press and regular access to the internet which was completely in the hands of the regime. This has been a revolution like a glass of water under a dripping tap, which slowly fills up and overflows. And that last drop in this case was the young man named Mohamed Bouazizi.

Somehow the Tunisians wrote a manual on how a modern revolution of today can be made and they even exported it to Egypt. In my mind, it is not difficult to understand that the Libyans took the courage after 40 years of oppression and began their revolutionary journey after the Egyptian people succeed. Mubarak was backed by a strong police and security apparatus, which had a very good track of people who actively worked against the regime. And Egypt was also an indispensable ally for the United States in the Arab world. If the Egyptians managed to overthrow Mubarak, I thought it wouldn´t be impossible for the Libyans to overthrow Gaddafi.

I remember my friend Mohammed shouted to me, as he left me on the shores of the Red sea to start my journey with three young camels in October 2009:

“There are as many police officers in Egypt as grains of sand in the Sahara!”

And I spent a major part of my Expedition money on bribing the police. I have had a few thoughts about Kaddafi and Libya:

Muammar Kaddafi has almost written a manual how to succeed as a dictator in a country. A man with a best before date, I hope. He has been in control since 1969 and has made Libya to North Africa’s now most closed, controlled country. Because he sits on the North Africa’s largest oil reserves. Which means the uprising in Libya will push up the oil prices. This is going to make the global recovery of the economy to slow down. And that is going to make the USA and Europe to handle this situation completely different compare to what we have seeing before whit Tunisia and Egypt. Everything is linked, and when it comes to supporting various regimes with export and import, most countries are guilty, and all should take responsibility for that too. As long it iss not making any fuss which can have a effect on the economy we have no reason to interfere. It is all about the money.

Khadafy’s eccentric approach to running the country in his personal day to day mood, have repeatedly destroyed the lives of the people in Libya. I did also became involved in his family’s problems during my time in Libya. It happened during my time in southern Libya, along with my four dromedaries, when I was trying to get the necessary permits so I could cross into southern Algeria, and whilst I was trying to get an extension of my visa. I didn´t get any of them. And it was all due to Mr. Gaddafi’s youngest son, Hannibal and his heavily pregnant wife in 2008, who had an incident when they had poured boiling water on two house maids in the suite at a luxury hotel in Geneva, and got arrested for it. That made the mad Gaddafi call out for jihad against Switzerland. It killed my chances to get needed permits. Isn´t this politics at its best or what?

My journey ended in the same country this great Arab revolution started. Tunisia. This is where I fled. A country where a 26 year old fruit and vegetable salesman named Mohamed Bouazizi was working.

One person can make a difference.

Christian Bodegren is now preparing for a new Expedition.

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Guest writer number 7 is another impressive explorer whom I have gotten to know through my Expedition planning to come in the future, Paula Constant, from Australia. She is quite a powerful personality as well with strong views and a big heart. And she has been great help in pretty much everything, especially the emotional aspect of failing to do what you planned to do. And we have talked quite a lot about the differences between the sexes when it comes to exploring, so I asked her to write a piece about that. She has an impressive record and back in 2004, with no previous expedition experience, Paula began walking from Trafalgar Square with a backpack.  Since then, she has walked over 12000 km through eight countries, including nearly 8000km through the Sahara with her own camel train.  Married when she left Trafalgar Square, Paula’s husband left the expedition a year later, when the couple were just 1000km into their desert trek.  Paula carried on with two Arabic, nomadic guides, and went on to gain sponsorship and go over halfway across the Sahara in a bid to make a West to East crossing of the desert when she was stopped by civil war in Niger in 2007.  She is the author of two books – Slow Journey South, recounting her European walk; and Sahara, detailing the desert journey.  No female adventurer has walked so far through the Sahara alone but for local guides.

I never set out to become a ‘female adventurer’.  Actually, 5 years ago, if you had asked me exactly what a ‘female adventurer’ was, I’d have been relatively unable to answer.  I could probably name a few mountaineers who happened to be women; because I planned on walking, Ffyona Campbell also sprang to mind.  But I would have wondered why anyone actually needed to state that the adventurer was female.  What on earth does gender have to do with anything? I would have thought.

Perhaps this has its roots in my own background – growing up in rural Australia, jumping on horses and skis with as much energy as the next bloke, and always in competition and company with men, it had never really occurred to me that as a woman, my experience should or could be any different to them.  When I read the tales of adventurers of old, the only reason I saw for there being no women on the honour rolls was simply that most great exploration occurred before the Women’s Liberation movement really happened, and so it was just not feasible.  But to be honest – I never really thought about it.  Occasionally I would hear about women who were pioneers in one way or another, and I always knew we were absolutely capable of anything; I simply saw that now, the opportunities were open for us to pursue them, where before, they were not.

When I set out walking from Trafalgar Square in 2004, however, I wasn’t planning on doing anything solo.  I was married, so despite planning on heading into Muslim Northern Africa and through the Sahara with camels, it never occurred to me that I would be doing any of it solo.  It was something of a shock to find myself alone.  My marriage broke up after 6000km, and only several weeks into a 7000km desert trek.  Suddenly I was running a camp of two Arabic men and four camels, with no man beside me.

But apart from the emotional distress of a marriage breakdown, the reality was in many ways a relief.  To finally be in control of my own walk, and team, was wonderful – what I felt born to do. It was I who had spent years reading and dreaming about the region, and who felt a real connection to the place and cultures within it; this walk had always been particularly my dream.

But it most definitely was a world of men.  Week upon week of living not only immersed in another culture, but confined to the company of two men I barely knew, and neither of whom spoke my own language, was exhausting – both in those first 6 months, then when I returned for a further 8.  Was it harder than if I were a man?

"When I set out walking from Trafalgar Square in 2004, however, I wasn’t planning on doing anything solo. I was married, so despite planning on heading into Muslim Northern Africa and through the Sahara with camels, it never occurred to me that I would be doing any of it solo. It was something of a shock to find myself alone. My marriage broke up after 6000km, and only several weeks into a 7000km desert trek. Suddenly I was running a camp of two Arabic men and four camels, with no man beside me."

No.  I don’t actually think so.  Travel – and especially the kind of travel expeditioners’ and adventurers do – relies chiefly on the ability of the individual to work with others.  Whilst we must lead, we must do so with empathy, humour, humility, and determination.  I had to run an expedition whilst also learning on the job; despite being the centre of attention at every nomadic tent, I must always be patient, friendly, and conversational with the women – even though all I may have wanted to do  was throw myself down by the men and talk camels and grazing.

But what an opportunity!  How many men are invited into the women’s’ tent?  An entire world virtually hidden from men was immediately open to me – but as a white woman, I had the privilege of being welcomed by the men also, mainly out of curiosity.  Perhaps even better, when it came to choosing guides, men of a certain caliber would see me in the same light as a member of their family – which meant they would lay down their life rather than see me hurt or insulted in any way.  I felt a profound gratitude and respect for such men, and found that if I conducted myself with honour, that I would meet with exactly that in return.  Only very rarely did I find behavior to the contrary.

When those situations arose, they were tiresome, and sometimes depressing.  One of the things I dealt with as a woman in a desert, Muslim environment, was being offered marriage almost daily – from pretty much every nomad I met, if they were single.  There is no offense taken in these situations – one simply declines politely, and with respect.  But I made it very clear to the men I hired that once in camp, we were family, and I was not remotely interested in marriage or any other liaison.  On a couple of occasions the guides, through ignorance or malice, made the mistake of pushing the issue, or treating me as a slave rather than an employer.  This is where it is tough as a woman; and where one treads very carefully.  Polite but firm is the starting point; sack the guide and get another if they don’t get the message; and if that is non-viable (for example when you are very isolated) be tough if you need to be.  But what I learned as the most important thing was never to lose my cool, never to show vulnerability, and to treat most scenarios with a great deal of humour.

I suspect this is the simple rule for women.  It just isn’t ok to plead weakness, to throw up your hands in despair and ask someone else to solve a problem for you.  If you have chosen to get out there in a man’s world – then you have to play by the same rules, even if you think at times it is twice as hard.  Remember, you have many advantages – women, I believe, have a natural ability to empathise and comprehend subtleties in behavior.  Where we struggle is to communicate calmly, assertively, and with authority, when things get tough and we feel boxed in. Flying off the handle, or behaving irrationally or tearfully because we feel misunderstood and bullied, helps not a jot.  Lifting out of that is what leadership is about; no less for a man than a woman.

The most common question I field from journalists is how I felt out in the desert ‘as a woman’.  The answer is fairly simple – I was out there as an adventurer, and team leader.  I felt as any leader would have done in a situation where I had to react to changing circumstances daily, often under duress.  It was hard and lonely, and at times I felt I got it wrong.  But being a woman was not something that stuck in my head as a hardship.  We all fight personal demons out in the field, no matter what our background or gender.  We all struggle with being the leader we know we should be, and performing in an honourable, courageous way in tough conditions.  At times being a woman was an advantage – and at times very tiresome.  But I suspect the same could be said of any man.

I have met men and women who journey as much for the personal journey as the external one.  I have read quite a few times recently that women do this more than men, but I would dispute that.  I think women can be just as goal oriented – in fact, sometimes, even more so – than a man.  I just think that women are happy to describe their personal journey in more detail than many men, partly because their emotional life is ever present – well, it is for me, anyway.  What intrigues me is that most men are as aware of the emotional as women – they just don’t tend to write about it in the same detail.  Yet, in my discussions with men who may appear on the surface to be the archetypal hairy adventurer, scratch the surface and there is an overwhelming need and desire to talk about how they felt out there.  It is no coincidence that throughout the history of exploration, personal feelings, group dynamics and emotional turbulence have dominated the diaries, successes, and failures of explorers both male and female.  Being in such tough circumstances brings out the best and worst in us all.   Knowing ourselves is perhaps the greatest challenge in adventure, and the only way we truly begin to succeed.

Some of the hardest times on my walk were moments when all I wanted was to sit down with a group of girlfriends and talk about how I felt, something that is rather difficult at times for nomads.  On one such occasion I was resting and watching the sunfall, at the end of a particularly tough day on a very tough stretch.  I’d been out for twenty days, supplies were running low, the heat was intense during the day, and we we’d had to walk over thirty km each day to make wells.  As I watched, the sun dropped, and the sweet cool desert breeze washed over me like a miracle, just as the first stars shone through the gloaming.

My guide – a wonderful old man who had never gone even beyond the regional boundaries of his grazing area, and prior to me had never met a white woman – smiled softly, and said in Arabic:  “the desert night is the nomad’s reward for surviving another day.”

He tapped straight into how I was feeling, and we sat in silence and watched the night grow.  Finally we ate together, and tumbled into our beds.  I never forgot those words – because in what he said I knew that he had done it tough too, and put my experience on the same level as his own.  As a person, a leader, and a woman, I could have asked no greater compliment, and the simple line conveyed a beautiful truth: whether man, woman, Christian, Muslim, Arab or Australian, on expeditions we are made equals by our ability to conduct ourselves with strength humility and patience under the toughest of conditions.  Do so, and you render questions of gender irrelevant.

Fail to do so, and it matters not what you are.

Read more about Paula here!

I wrote an article about the issue here and another female explorer added her views to it!

Paula began walking from Trafalgar Square with a backpack. Since then, she has walked over 12000 km through eight countries, including nearly 8000km through the Sahara with her own camel train. Married when she left Trafalgar Square, Paula's husband left the expedition a year later, when the couple were just 1000km into their desert trek. Paula carried on with two Arabic, nomadic guides, and went on to gain sponsorship and go over halfway across the Sahara in a bid to make a West to East crossing of the desert when she was stopped by civil war in Niger in 2007. She is the author of two books - Slow Journey South, recounting her European walk; and Sahara, detailing the desert journey. No female adventurer has walked so far through the Sahara alone but for local guides.

Just after arriving in Parsons Green, this sunny and warm day, I turned on the computer and saw these great news :

Dear Mikael,

We made you a honorary member in La Rahla so that if you need to consult any of our members we can put you in touch with them for information on the regions of the Sahara you intend to cross. We can also facilitate you buying photocopies of maps of the Sahara as we have practically full coverage of this part of the world. We can also help you on historical events which took place in the areas you will be crossing. It will add interest for you and the people you will be describing your expedition to.

We also feel that you are intending to do something particularly difficult physically and near impossible in this day and age with all the red tape problems in crossing borders that we can but admire your optimism on being able to conclude this venture. You are going to cross a part of the world we enjoy so much visiting and reading about. It will be a pleasure for us also to follow your itinerary and telling our members how it is progressing.

Mikael, “La Rahla, Amicale des Sahariens” 116 rue Damrémont 75018 PARIS FRANCE, is an association created over 80 years ago with over 1000 members across the world. Publishing every quarter in french a review of 80 pages on the Sahara excusively, and that this month it has just published as well a booklet of over 128 pages on an epic crossing of the Tenere desert done in 1927- 1928 when this part of the world was just a blank on the map with the title “EXPLORATION DU TENERE à la recherche du Tafassasset avec Ch. Toubeau de Maisonnneuve”. To see more about this Association visit their internet site :

http://www.larahla.com

It is an odd feeling planning an Expedition, sitting in a comfortable environment, not realizing all the immense hardships waiting, until suddenly, most likely in the middle of the night, you wake up and feel terrified. This happened to me at four a clock this morning. I suddenly realized, soon I will suffer from the discomfort of immense heat, millions of flies, gut rot, incredible pain all over, acute tiredness, lack of hope, worries of surviving and tons of misunderstandings with people I come across or travel with. Easily forgetting to overwhelming positive experiences waiting. What I look forward to the most is getting away from the Duckpond I live in called the West, away from all gadgets and time limits. But, the book scared me, it showed everything that can go wrong. This git called Moorhouse, writes lovely, but he lacks most things an explorer should have, because everything possible, and then I mean everything, goes wrong. He sets out to become the first person ever to cross the Sahara by foot and camel, makes it half way, ending up in Tamanrasset , which I passed on a push bike and liked 1989, but the story is full of terrible mistakes and he is complaining about everything. Most of all the people, locals, he travels together with. They try to cheat him all te time. He almost perishes but still doesn´t forget what painting he has seen at Le Louvre or chapels visited. Themes he comes back to regularly. It is written in 1973. He does so many errors, because he wasn´t properly prepared and doesn´t just have what it takes.

But the book should be read by anyone attempting to cross the Sahara or doing a major Expedition. Because it shows what one should not do. And it is a good read. He reminds me a lot of Lucky Ed, who is, together with Geoffrey Moorhouse, the unluckiest guy on earth. But Ed never complained about other people. I will dive into Thesigers book Arabian Sands for awhile, to set my heart right.