North–South Across the Sahara by Bike: Into the Devil’s Garden (1988–89)

I left the last real houses behind only ten kilometers outside my friends’ town, wobbled into the heat, and pitched my tent in forty degrees. I’d celebrated too hard the night before in Ghardaïa—Belkacém had warned me to taste “a little bit of everything” at the feast because a dozen dishes would keep arriving. I didn’t listen. I ate like a man on his last meal and paid for it. That was my prologue to a much harsher chapter: the Sahara, unembroidered.

I had read enough to believe I knew what I would see. Then the desert outdid imagination. The world flattened into a horizonless plate of sand and silence. The road had no end, just as the mind invents. Then a smell—strange, insistent—reached me; voices seemed to form in the wind. I stopped, looked around, and saw nothing except what the odometer insisted should be there: the holy cities of the M’Zab. I was thinking about how many hours my water would last when the ground itself opened like a stage curtain. Below, spread through an enormous cleft, lay Ghardaïa—one of the Mozabite cities, blue and yellow and white, houses packed together on the hill with a mosque like a pin on the top. The Mozabites had made a functioning city in the middle of the desert that worked better than most of the country. Food, tools, services—everything was there. It was beautiful, and it was a crossroads.

It was also where I met a kind of traveler new to me: people who moved through the desert in vehicles. There were two distinct species. The first were in a hurry, measuring achievement in days and engines; they filled camps with exhaust and noise, treated the region like a stage for bravado, and rarely bothered to greet anyone. The second drove big four-wheel drives with expedition slogans painted on the doors. They stopped, filmed, handed me water, looked astonished—and then delivered the same speech.

“Are you crazy? Haven’t you heard of the Devil’s Garden? Eight hundred kilometers from Tamanrasset to Arlit. No oases. No water. People disappear there by the thousands—and they had cars. Turn back while there’s time.”

I knew the nickname and what it implied. Still, my next concrete goal wasn’t Arlit; it was Tamanrasset. I planned to ride Ghardaïa–Laghouat–Plateau du Tademaït–In Salah–Gorge d’Arak–Tamanrasset. Even the most pessimistic drivers thought I wouldn’t get that far. Their certainty strengthened my own doubts, and Belkacém’s. In Laghouat he had taken my hands and said, “The Plateau du Tademaït is terrible. The wind drives sand like knives. The cold creeps in. It’s life-threatening. It’s the only real obstacle on the way to Tamanrasset.”

He was right about the wind and the desolation, wrong about the direction. The harmattan came from behind. Tailwind. Unusual luck for a cyclist in the Sahara. I flew. The hammada—that endless plate of wind-polished stones—barely gave me time to understand what I was crossing. A broken ribbon of asphalt cut through gravel and sand and occasional bands of fist-sized rocks laid across the road to slow traffic. I zigzagged through, pushed only when absolutely necessary. By law the vehicles kept to parallel pistes a kilometer or more wide, and I often saw only smoke smears on the horizon to the east and west. No one lived on the plateau; rumors said theft would have been the rule otherwise. I needed neither company nor help. What I needed was a water plan.

The day I left Laghouat I also left a kind of loneliness. Work and wind don’t leave room for brooding. On the plateau I refined the math: I could carry 12 liters and, with heat rising toward fifty degrees, that generally meant a day’s worth. Reports said market water could vanish quickly, so I began stepping down my consumption—half a liter less each day—aiming to reach six liters per day by Tamanrasset. That would buy me an extra day in the Devil’s Garden, where I planned to carry 22 liters.

I wasn’t happy when the plateau ended abruptly and the road lurched downward into a landscape like a dry echo of the Grand Canyon. Beautiful, yes—but I would have preferred another day of tailwind. Then came In Salah. The harmattan died. A brutal headwind replaced it, and the heat climbed. Worse, I met Adam.

He found me on the sand outside my tent, tapping my finger in the dune to mimic a pattern of tracks I’d seen mornings. “I’m trying to call the female to that big beetle,” I told him. He shook his head. “Idiot. It’s a lizard’s mating signal.” He knelt and drew the tracks, and a black beetle rose from the sand as if conjured. That was Adam: always sure, always scornful, never short of a grievance.

He wore a tie and suit in the furnace heat. His lips were cracked. He had a puncture. He needed glue and water and sympathy but mainly an audience. “War ich a famous chemist in Austria,” he said. “Made a Nobel-level discovery—aber mein boss stole the credit.” He’d tried to reach South Africa by plane and was denied a visa, then by Land Rover until it burned outside Ghardaïa and was stripped to the frame. Now he was going to cross the Sahara on a Puch moped. He hated almost everyone he mentioned and saved special contempt for the local people whose country he was crossing. I gave him food and some water because that is what you do in the desert, even for those you dislike. Then I left, only to meet him again at the mouth of the Gorge d’Arak. He was holed up in his tent, suit on, another puncture, full of curses for glue that didn’t stick. “You can have water,” I told him. “That’s all.” I kept moving.

After the plateau’s silence, entering the Gorge d’Arak felt like stepping from a monochrome room into a full orchestra. Birds echoed off rock. Flies buzzed. There were acacia trees and the Sodom apple plant. The gorge itself did not have water, but it showed how life survives without it: addax antelope that drink little or not at all; plants with long roots pulling moisture from the airless ground; seeds that can lie still for years and then, with a little damp, live an entire life—from sprout to bloom to death—in days. The gorge’s beauty ended where the headwinds resumed, and I pushed on to Tamanrasset.

Tamanrasset was the last place to rest, to eat properly after two weeks of sardines, bread, dates and tea, to buy what you might need and to say goodbye to houses. It was a market town and a meeting point: Tuareg with steel grace, black Africans, puritan Muslims, tourists from Paris in light clothes that would not stay light, travelers of all kinds, and people like me who planned to pass south. The bazaar sold everything but the legend was salt, carried from mines to the southeast; once a kilo had equaled a kilo of gold.

I was pitching the tent at the state campsite when a Land Rover rolled in with “Transafrical Australia” on the door. “Simon!” I shouted. “You haven’t been waiting for me this whole time? That’s decent!” He hadn’t. His engine had seized thirty kilometers north and he’d been stuck in town for two months waiting for a replacement. Life is slow work here.

Simon’s crew was reduced now: Major Jack had returned to the army in Germany. James remained. They trudged on together though they could hardly stand one another—an arrangement built on parental conditions, family expectations and stubbornness. That’s not unusual in Africa. Not everyone is ready for the waiting, the climate, the way small setbacks compound, the way friendships fracture and then fuse because you need one another.

“Look under that tree,” Simon said. “Three Brits. They’re cyclists too.” I walked over and asked, “Do you ride?” They hardly looked up. “Yes.” I told them I did too. “Who are you?” “The Swede,” I said. They had heard about a Swede: fifty-mile days, tall and blond, maybe with a triangle rear wheel. Stories travel faster than cyclists.

Of the three, Charlie would matter most to me. He was calm, philosophical, and as the days passed without a lift through the Devil’s Garden, he became more interested in riding it. Jeremy soon got a ride to the far side. Simon blasted away in his repaired Rover. That left Charlie and his partner Mick, who wanted nothing to do with the Garden. He was strong and loud and, under it, afraid—of dying, I think, and of leaving the woman he loved. He had reason: recent news at the campsite was grim. Two families, eight people in all, had bogged down not far from Tamanrasset and died of thirst. No one wanted responsibility for two cyclists and their gear through the dunes. In the end, Charlie decided to come with me. Mick—no room with us on bikes and no lift available—was forced by circumstance to ride as well.

Before we left, I rode into the Hoggar Mountains to the hermitage of the Little Brothers, a Catholic monastery at about 2,500 meters. The thin air brought a bright clarity, and the place carried the presence of Charles de Foucault, who had founded the community decades before. In a book there, I read his description of the region—how words fail in the face of those basalt cones and crater rims, how the mind meets its limits and, in the same breath, senses something larger. I left strengthened, not by miracles, just by a steadier compass.

We rolled south into the Devil’s Garden. I don’t have to dramatize what it is. It is an enormous, almost level region of sand and quartz crystals where, in our time, you could ride for days without water, food, or a marked line to follow. There were wheel tracks everywhere and the direction of none of them could be trusted. But there was also a quiet that felt complete. Either you found peace in it, or it pressed on your nerves until everything was unbearable.

 

Mick woke on the sixth morning staring at the tent roof. “It feels heavy,” he said. “I don’t feel motivated to push a bike through deep sand in fifty-degree heat without even knowing where we are.” He had a point. We moved anyway. A sudden gust shoved my tent five meters. Minutes later a sandstorm hit with a force that flattened the tent canvas against us. Sand found every seam and corner. We lay still on the ground and breathed as best we could. After five hours the storm took a breath. We pushed the bikes a kilometer before the storm returned. In the heat we didn’t dare drink much. “Where the hell are we going to get water?” Mick shouted against the wind. “If this doesn’t stop, we’ll die.”

The past days we’d managed to attract the attention of the few desert travelers and refill. Now we were hidden in a world of moving sand. Mick’s strength turned to despair. “We’re going to die. Better to give up.” I stepped outside into the grit and pain and crawled to a stone post that said Tamanrasset was 270 kilometers behind. Through binoculars I thought I saw something. “Mick!” I yelled. “A car!”

We found a Peugeot stuck deep in a sand pit. The driver hadn’t seen us. He stared out into the storm waiting for death. I knocked. He screamed, a raw sound, tried to flee out the far door, found it jammed by the wind, and finally, after staring at us as if we were hallucinations, rolled the window down. “Who are you? What do you want?” “Water,” I said, and handed him a can. He calmed. He had room for an extra pair of arms when he got moving again, and he had two spare engines in the back seat that guaranteed he would get stuck again. Mick climbed in.

Charlie and I watched the Peugeot vanish into the sand. We felt relief for our friend and the relief left an emptiness. Out here you must save strength for the practical: surviving, choosing a line, understanding the logic of a place that looks like it has none. The melancholy caught Charlie. He worried, often aloud, whether we would ever see Mick again. I told him we would. I can’t prove optimism helps in the desert but it doesn’t hurt.

The next day we reached Gara Eckar. On the map it is a name; on the ground it is a set of sedimentary towers, some more than five hundred meters high. We climbed one without rope, just scrambling, and stood on a ledge like a balcony above an ocean of sand. The view didn’t make the journey easier, but it confirmed the route: thousands of tracks converged there, as if the desert itself were pointing a finger. It was also a reminder that people leave their marks in two kinds: the lines that help and the scars that don’t. Very near beauty we saw carvings, trash, human waste. I’m not adding drama there. That’s what was there.

From Gara Eckar the deep sand and short dunes continued, but the line grew clearer. We pushed through to In Guezzam, where the border to Niger was, in those days, crudely defined by the presence of thousands of West African refugees. South of the formal post at Assamaka we were told there would be meter-high balises every five kilometers on the way to Arlit. The distance left was around 250 easier kilometers. That was what drivers said. By then I had learned not to believe everything drivers said, but I believed enough to keep pedaling.

I won’t wrap this with wisdom it doesn’t have. The route through Ghardaïa, Laghouat, Plateau du Tademaït, In Salah, the Gorge d’Arak, Tamanrasset, Gara Eckar, In Guezzam, Assamaka and on toward Arlit is a line on the map and a set of days in the body. I met people I would not have chosen and needed them anyway. I saw a monastery balanced on stone and read words by a man who tried to live them. I learned that tailwinds exist in places you don’t expect and that a desert can be quieter than any room. That’s enough truth for one crossing.

“Who was first?” — short history box (factual, tight)

Early north–south Sahara crossings by bicycle (selected)

• Ian Hibell (UK), 1977: Rode Tamanrasset → Agadez—one of the earliest well-documented solo passages on this axis.
• Heinz Stücke (DE), late 1970s: Reported a Sahara traverse during his round-the-world ride (documentation scattered, but frequently cited by overlanders).
• Jean Naud (FR), 1986: Custom 3-wheeled, 2-wheel-drive desert bicycle; route included Algiers → Timbuktu section.
• Mikael Strandberg, Charlie Cook 1988–89: Ghardaïa → Laghouat → Plateau du Tademaït → In Salah → Gorge d’Arak → Tamanrasset → Gara Eckar → In Guezzam → Assamaka → Arlit.

Records are incomplete and dispersed across books, magazines, and personal logs; the names above are among the earliest documented north–south crossings on this line.

The Patagonian Ride will be back next week! If you haven´t read it, start with the first episode.