Dreams of a Vanishing Africa: A 1970s Transcontinental Trek

By Craig S. Harrison

When Craig Harrison spent a year traveling on a shoestring within the fabric of African societies in 1971-1972, he avoided safe, well-trodden routes. Instead, he depended on decrepit trains, cargo trucks, rattletrap buses, jammed bush taxis, dugout canoes, and ferries. Arriving in Spanish Sahara on a cargo ship from the Canary Islands, he trekked through Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Upper Volta, and Ghana. From Accra, he took a freighter to the Congo to journey overland to Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. After five months in East Africa, he returned to Europe via Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt. During his journey, he dealt with delays and dismaying circumstances, enjoying colorful encounters with ordinary Africans and fellow adventurers. He also met obnoxious public officials and faced obstacles that would have sent most others home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483494586

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HARRISON

Copyright © 2019 Craig S. Harrison.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of nonfiction. Except where noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book. In some cases, names of people have been altered to protect their privacy.

Except where noted, the photographs in this book are by the author.

The maps were created by Christine Gralapp.

Phil Freshman did a masterful job of editing the manuscript.

Cover: All photographs by the author

Back cover: The author at Ngorongoro Crater. Photo by Marina Harrison

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9456-2 (sc)    ISBN: 978-1-4834-9749-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9996-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9458-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018914175

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

rev. date: 03/15/2019

Also by Craig S. Harrison

Seabirds of Hawaii:

Natural History and Conservation

Dedicated to David M. Graber, who persuaded

me to go to Africa the first time,

and to Marina Chang Harrison, who came

to Africa with me again and again

01AFRICAOverviewFINAL.jpg

INTRODUCTION

I never aspired to be a great traveller. I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we travelled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.

—Evelyn Waugh (1946)

Before 1971, I never thought much about going to Africa. But that year, Dave Graber, my best friend since age eight, persuaded me to join him on a trip overland to visit our longtime friend Merle Gering in Accra, Ghana, where he was teaching high school.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and don’t recall having any early interest in foreign travel. However, I was beguiled at age thirteen when my English teacher, Wilbur Hanson, remarked that working on an overseas freighter might provide as good an education as one at a university. No one in my family would have planted such an idea in my head.

As teenagers, Dave and I spent pleasant days hiking in the Santa Monica and Sierra Nevada mountains. As housemates at UC Berkeley, we shared not only the angst of the 1960s but also a love of the outdoors, biology, and wildlife. Yet my education in biochemistry didn’t take me much beyond the boundaries of the cell wall. I spent my junior year studying at the University of Sussex, England, visiting much of Western Europe, the USSR, and Scandinavia during academic breaks. Those experiences made me eager for more.

I returned to Berkeley in autumn 1969 and again roomed with Dave. In December, I drew a high number in the draft lottery, ensuring that I would not be sent to Vietnam and could control my future. My girlfriend Becky Newton moved into our rental house, and we all graduated in June. Becky and I decided to travel, planning to start in Europe and then head overland through Turkey, Iran, and India, winding up in Bali. From there, we would somehow return across the Pacific. For six months, I worked on water-pollution problems as an entry-level research chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, managing to save $3,000—enough, it turned out, for eighteen months on the road.

On January 2, 1971, in Norfolk, Virginia, Becky and I boarded the Mei Loli Ghetti, an Italian coal freighter bound for Genoa. Wilbur Hanson would have been proud. We went west from Italy to spend a few weeks in England and France. When we passed through Andorra, I bought a Pentax camera for a duty-free price. From there, we traveled south to Cadiz and took the ship Plus Ultra to the Canary Islands. We rented an abandoned farm cottage in the village of Mogán, Gran Canaria, during March and April. Dave joined us there, stopping over on his way to Accra. When Becky learned her mother was gravely ill, she flew home to upstate New York. I decided to accompany Dave to Ghana. Depending on how things went with her mother, Becky would meet up with us somewhere in Africa.

Dave and I departed for the continent from Gran Canaria on the ship León y Castillo in mid-April. Before reaching Accra, we slogged through Spanish Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and northern Ghana—all on a shoestring and facing our share of minor obstacles and not so minor maladies. There were no guidebooks for African travel at that time, and much of our information came by word of mouth from other wanderers. We stayed with Merle until his job ended, then headed as a trio through the Congo’s rainforest and parks before reaching Nairobi.

That’s where Becky returned to join me. Dave soon left for California, and Merle got a new teaching position in western Kenya. Becky and I pushed on to explore Kenya’s Swahili Coast and game reserves, followed by travels in Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia—at which point she went back home. I flew to Sudan, absorbed Khartoum and its environs, and took dilapidated trains up into Egypt, visiting sites that today are on many bucket lists. My African journey ended on March 25, 1972, almost a year after it had begun, when I boarded a ship in Alexandria for Greece.

I wrote the first draft of this travelogue that spring in Nice, toying with it occasionally during the next several decades. But I didn’t get around to turning that draft—plus various notes, letters, photographs, and memories—into something resembling a cohesive narrative until the past few years. In the pages that follow, I’ve reconstructed my African experiences, thoughts, and conversations as closely to the way they occurred as possible. The impressions and perceptions expressed here come from that time—including the kinds of misconceptions that can befall any foreign traveler. Except in a few cases, I’ve not interposed things that I’ve come to know and feel about Africa in the years since. Finally, I’ve changed some individuals’ names and have given names to people whose identities I didn’t learn.

We were eager to experience the land and people of Africa up close, rather than flying from capital to capital and staying in air-conditioned hotels. Barriers to travel were already rising in the early 1970s, and we knew we’d face dangers. Yet we were confident we could overcome obstacles and, besides, possessed the sense of invincibility common to twenty-two-year-olds. Africa has been in an enormous flux for decades, and much of what we saw has changed permanently—often not for the better. Today, many places on our journey are too dangerous for a rational person to visit. Also, many African governments put up travel barriers, such as requiring visitors to apply for visas in their home countries. This makes it impossible to shape itineraries on the fly as we did.

By any measure, that year in Africa was the grand adventure of my life—and in telling the tale, it has been a joy to relive it.

C.S.H.

Nice, France

Arlington, Virginia

Santa Rosa, California

PART I

NORTHWEST AFRICA

Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

—Ibn Battuta (1354)

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Great Mosque, Mopti, Mali.

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1

SPANISH SAHARA

Of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands.

—Richard Francis Burton (1856)

The cargo and passenger vessel León y Castillo squats low in the water. She is moored to her quay in Puerto de la Luz, the primary port of the Canary Islands, situated on a small peninsula near Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The ship has the sorriest lines of any I have ever seen, describing a sinking parabola from bow to stern. Diesel soot belches from her single ebony stack. In mid-April 1971, this 220-foot-long oversized oceangoing tug, built in 1912, prepares to make her biweekly run along the North African coast, calling first at Lanzarote, the easternmost of the seven Canaries, before embarking for Spanish Sahara and Mauritania—our first destination. The trip will take five days.

She is slow, explains Fernando, the middle-aged chief engineer, "but fuerte." He clenches his fists and flexes his arms for emphasis. He has a muscular physique and a leathery complexion. The crown of his head barely reaches my chin. His intensity and obvious affection for this vessel prompt me to feel that if anyone can keep it in good working condition, this fellow can.

Dave and I heave our backpacks off our shoulders onto the pier, waiting for permission to go aboard. We’re nervous because the Spanish police confiscated our passports when we purchased our tickets at the Compañía Trasmediterránea office the previous afternoon, claiming they would be given to the ship’s captain for safekeeping until we reach La Güera, near the Mauritanian border. It feels inauspicious to be setting off for the Dark Continent without our passports close at hand, but we have no choice in the matter.

There are nine passengers, including the two of us. Several hirsute young voyagers linger on the dock with us, including a Dutchman and a German who say their passports have been confiscated, too. Most of the travelers have stuffed their sparse possessions into backpacks and, like me, have large Spanish bota bags for drinking water. A pair of twentyish Frenchmen, heads shaved virtually bald, tote only light shoulder bags. How can they scrape by with little more than a single change of clothes? Dave whispers to me. One of them mentions that they don’t travel with cameras because it calls attention to them as tourists and so creates a social barrier. Dave and I trade glances. They may have a point, but we want to memorialize our adventure.

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The León y Castillo, Puerto de la Luz, Canary Islands.

We clamber up the gangway in the warming late-morning air under a cloudless sapphire-blue sky. Alfredo, the second-class steward, ushers us to our cabin. He shuffles with slow, almost pained movements and wears what looks like a permanent frown beneath his pencil-thin mustache. Perhaps he suffers from arthritis, although he’s a tad young for that. It can’t be too interesting, having a career as a second-class steward on this run up and down this bleak stretch of the West African coast. Our cabin is cramped, with four berths stacked in two bunk beds, but it is clean, and we’re pleased to learn that our five-hundred-peseta (eight-dollar) fare includes mattresses. We could have gotten a private cabin in first class for quite a bit more, but for now we have this one to ourselves. I soon learn that our communal toilet, shared by four cabins, flushes directly into the sea from an open pipe in the hull.

The León y Castillo limps out of the harbor in late afternoon, en route for Lanzarote, a desolate desert isle situated in the rain shadow of the other Canaries. As we pass the fancy-looking French tourist ship that goes directly to Dakar, Senegal, I wonder whether we should have paid the equivalent of forty-five dollars and chosen an easier route to Africa’s hump. Our way point for this leg of the journey is Accra, Ghana, and the overland journey from Dakar to Accra alone should give us ample exposure to West African life. But we are also extremely budget-conscious. Unless we find employment somewhere along the way, we’ll have to return home when we’ve exhausted our funds. The French tourist ship would cost five times as much as our fare to Mauritania. And we’re seeking an on-the-ground traveler’s experience, not a carefree sightseer’s vacation.

Apart from wanting to reach East Africa to see its fabled wildlife parks, our overall travel objectives are somewhat vague. Dave and I have just spent six weeks in the small town of Mogán on Gran Canaria, where the two of us and my girlfriend, Becky, rented an abandoned stone cottage for nine hundred pesetas (fourteen dollars) a month. There we met a rather short, balding British adventurer in his fifties named Ian, who seemed to know the practical aspects of African travel. He suggested that the four-thousand-mile overland trip from Dakar to Nairobi, while rough in places, was doable. He spoke of welcoming missionaries and rest houses. Because the rainy season would soon begin, Ian suggested taking a route south of the Sahara and north of the Congo rainforest—including Mali, Upper Volta [today Burkina Faso], Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, and Sudan—to reach Uganda and Kenya. Since no travel books cover this route, we couldn’t verify the accuracy of his advice.

Ian spoke wistfully of Nairobi as the location, many years earlier, of his youthful excesses. He suggested that his reputation as a mercenary soldier had made him unwelcome in certain nations. Ian also claimed to have organized many safaris and to have befriended Ernest Hemingway, Albert Schweitzer, and Moïse Tshombe. An interesting man, though we had no idea whether any of that was true.

Once aboard, all passengers immediately cluster on deck around a loquacious German in striped pantaloons who is scrutinizing Michelin map number 153 (North and West Africa), which he produces from his camel-skin shoulder bag. We possess the identical map, together with Michelin map numbers 154 (Africa North East) and 155 (Africa Central and South) that, collectively, encompass the entire continent. Michelin maps are useful beyond description, depicting not only roads and their conditions but also accommodations in remote areas and providing a virtual almanac of travelers’ information, such as monthly rainfall and temperatures for scores of places. The two head-shaven Frenchmen, Jean Luc and Claude, point to Mali and Upper Volta and voice vague plans for landing jobs in either of them. They have purchased third-class passage for six dollars. Their dormitory bunks are located in the hold, but they prefer the deck’s open air and will end up sleeping there for the next five nights. The crew doesn’t object to this arrangement.

Hendrik, a Dutchman, and Peter, an American, intend to travel to Dakar on what seems a poorly conceived and low-end business venture. They have bought a Citroën 2CV (commonly called the Deux Chevaux) and are shipping it to Dakar, where they hope to sell the car for three times what they paid in France. These rookie entrepreneurs may have invested much of their combined net worth into this scheme. Hendrik, an affable fellow in his mid-twenties, is so nervous about the venture that he becomes unable to eat and will sleep only fitfully during the voyage.

Hendrik points to the North and West Africa map and expresses concern that they might have difficulty loading the Citroën onto the free train out of Port-Étienne, Mauritania. We press him for details about the train. What little we know of the overland route to Senegal comes from secondhand travelers’ tales we picked up on Gran Canaria. The free train’s existence was confirmed by the portly, aging female French vice-consul in Las Palmas from whom we obtained our Mauritanian visas. But she was skimpy on the details of the route through Mauritania, preferring instead to regale us with seemingly fanciful accounts of her sexual adventures with Spaniards. Hendrik traces a black-lined train route that runs due east from Port-Étienne and stops in the Sahara Desert. I correct him, pointing to another black line due south toward Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. It would be stupid for the train to go into the desert instead of to the capital, I contend.

An English couple lurk quietly nearby, listening. Their plans are vague, too. Doug and Ellen are recent graduates of Cambridge University and, after my experiences of real life in India last year, Ellen says, I can’t stand Europe. She is four months pregnant, presumably with Doug’s child, and wants to give birth in Africa, not England.

I casually mention that Dave and I have several months’ supply of halazone tablets to purify suspect drinking water, Tetracycline to treat bacterial infections, and chloroquine phosphate drug tablets (Aralen) to fend off malaria. We don’t believe in taking pills, Doug responds. Natural is best. We suspect that this pair of travelers will soon learn why mosquitoes and tsetse flies have been called the saviors of Africa for subduing European explorers and adventurers before such medicines were invented.

The sociable German, who teamed up with Doug and Ellen on Gran Canaria, is called Wolf, which he pronounces Volf. He claims to be of gypsy origin. My parents fled to western Germany just ahead of the Russian tanks in 1945, he says. He wears a gold hoop on one ear, his facial skin is wizened from sun, and he’s missing several front teeth. Wolf says he has spent the past six months prowling the medina in Marrakech, smoking hashish, and sipping sweet mint tea with Moroccans. Now seeking new adventures, he points to Madagascar on the Michelin Africa Central and South map, five thousand miles to the southeast, as his ultimate destination. I’d like to get that far myself, I murmur, although I know little about the island.

The ship rocks gently through the night, the seas are calm, and the spring air is warm. At sunrise, we dock in Arrecife, where posters advertise camel rides in Lanzarote’s sand dunes. Dave and I pass a few uneventful hours ashore, exploring the port area and purchasing additional supplies of food and bread from a panedería. We save a few dollars by not buying lunches on the León y Castillo, cheap though they may be. A dozen new passengers board the ship, none of them extranjeros (non-Spaniards). Spanish farmer-merchants, they are bound for the Spanish Saharan ports of Villa Cisneros or La Güera to sell the sacks of produce they’ve lugged aboard. They stare at us Westerners briefly, then retire to the cramped galley to pass the time by playing cards and drinking cheap red wine.

A new passenger moves into our small cabin—a thirty-year-old Spanish soldier named Francisco—who will spend the day lying listlessly on his bunk, staring at the bulkhead. I’m a radio operator, he says, and the army is transferring me from Lanzarote to La Güera. He thinks it’s a sentence of virtual solitary confinement, and worse than El Aaiún, the territory’s capital near the Moroccan border. For the next two years, my wife and young children will live in the Canaries without me, except for the rare furlough. This voyage holds no interest for him.

The León y Castillo chugs southward, passing through the channel between Africa and the volcanic islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Like the western Sahara, the easternmost Canaries are virtual deserts with little rainfall. The vessel’s movements frighten schools of flying fish to the surface. They make powerful leaps from the water, using their long, wing-like fins to glide for considerable distances just above the surface before disappearing back into the warm waters. Occasionally, dolphins ride the bow, breaking the surface with magnificent playful leaps. Shearwaters glide over the waves, and gulls trail the ship to scoop up scraps the cook throws overboard following each meal.

The distance between Puerto de la Luz and La Güera is 550 nautical miles, and we’re making only six to eight knots per hour. The days are slow, punctuated by meals. In the mornings, our steward Alfredo’s sad eyes seem to plead that we order nothing more complicated than café con leche and bread for breakfast. We usually comply. At night, he sits up drinking red wine, exchanging only a few words with the farmer-merchants while staring into the distance and getting drunk. Even at his best, he’s barely able to function.

Dave and I eat our lunches on deck. Sandwiches of canned tuna or squid with dried figs, washed down with a few swigs of Valdepeña wine, make an excellent repast. We bask in the hot sun, conversing with our fellow extranjeros, especially the two Frenchmen. The Spaniards and the Western travelers mostly avoid one another. Occasionally, I try to strike up a conversation with one of them in my marginally adequate Spanish, but we have little basis for understanding. The farmer-merchants, who struggle to make ends meet, can barely fathom the interests of Americans and Europeans who are willing to endure the uncertainties and dangers of African travel without an economic motivation. By contrast, a camaraderie is born among us itinerant travelers, one based on a sharing of experiences and valuable information.

We eat evening meals in the galley. The cook inevitably produces a murky soup, bread, a Spanish omelet or a dry, overcooked pork chop, and a banana. The time after dinner is a letdown, nothing but the inky darkness on deck and an unoccupied mind to dream up new fears about problems we might encounter during our travels. Dave and I rehash our anxieties about the overland journey through Mauritania to Dakar, aware that we barely understand the most fundamental aspects of the route and wonder what obstacles will soon confront us. But we’ve been best friends since we were eight years old, and there’s no one I’d rather share this adventure with.

In the cool nighttime air after departing Lanzarote, we see a glittering necklace of lights moving toward us from the western horizon. It’s a Spanish fishing flotilla, returning to the canneries of the Canary Islands, loaded with either hauls of shrimp from the cool Benguela upwelling off the coast of Southwest Africa or tuna from waters nearer the equator. The land may be desolated in these latitudes, but the ocean has patches of intense fecundity.

The following morning, the sun rises from an orange-crayon sky. At midmorning, Dave shouts Look! pointing to the hazy eastern horizon. The African coastline emerges, faintly, for the first time. I cheer, even though all we can see is a wisp of yellow-brown pigment at the water’s edge. And as we navigate closer, it becomes obvious that there is little definition to this coastline. Neither a house nor a tree pierces its flat contour. Even now, in springtime, the Atlantic littoral of this vast desert is blanketed by wind-blown dust, suspended in the heat.

If we could look far enough across the Sahara, we’d see Algeria, Libya, and Egypt, I say.

I puzzle over why the Spanish are so interested in the hundred thousand square miles of desert they call Sahara Español. The territory is a major source of turmoil. The Moroccans to the north, the Mauritanians to the south and east, and the Algerians to the northeast also lay claim to parts of it. And, among other obligations, Spain must send the León y Castillo down the coast every two weeks to keep the military outposts supplied with food and beer. Chief engineer Fernando explains, Within its boundaries are the world’s largest phosphate deposits. With only fifty thousand desert nomads living in this area, little organized internal support exists for political independence, and Spain makes elaborate rationalizations as to why only Spain should benefit from the mines.

Soon after breakfast on our fourth day at sea, we approach the little port town of Villa Cisneros [today Dakhla], situated on a sandy peninsula. We see a small cluster of whitewashed buildings that contrasts with the expanse of barrenness north and south along the coast. The ship approaches a small harbor in a protected bay where Berber stevedores in djellabas (loose, ankle-length woolen cloaks) scurry around the quay to secure the ship. Their swarthy faces are wrapped in black head cloths, and they peer at us blankly as we observe their activities from the railing of the deck. Several of them unload heavy burlap sacks of onions and potatoes that the farmer-merchants have brought, but most stand idle and watch as the crew offloads a Simca automobile with the ship’s boom. Once the gangway is in place, we can step onto African soil for the first time.

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Berber stevedore, Villa Cisneros.

One day three months ago, I arose at daybreak to stand on the bridge of the Italian coal freighter Mei Lolli-Ghetti as it entered the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, en route from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to Genoa. That was my first glimpse of Africa—the foothills of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains bathed in the early morning light—and I exulted, despite the brisk January air.

Today feels less momentous. The port town is similar to villages I’ve visited throughout Mediterranean Spain and the Canary Islands. Dave and I walk into central Villa Cisneros, where new vehicles drive on paved streets and the white, modern buildings have Moorish architectural motifs. There’s even a new Catholic church.

The locals bear a spectrum of physical features ranging from Caucasian to Negroid. Most appear to be Arabized Berbers or Bantus, contrasting with the Spanish soldiers, all of whom are white. We see few women. Dressed in flowing white-and-powder-blue djellabas, the men sit on benches in the shade or walk aimlessly—nowhere to go and all day to get there. Some walk hand in hand or embrace by putting their arms around each other’s necks in conversation. Homosexuality is strongly forbidden in most African cultures, and these gestures are signs of a strong friendship that’s free of sexual implications. The men deftly place a hand to cover their faces whenever I raise my camera to take a photograph; they’re probably traditional followers of Islam who don’t want their images captured. Some believe that a photo can steal their soul.

One man approaches Dave and me, trying to sell a djellaba. He asks far more than I am willing to pay and refuses to bargain. In any event, living out of a backpack makes acquiring nonessential gear unthinkable. I’m unwilling to discard my blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts for local garb.

We find a bakery to buy a fresh loaf of bread and a dry goods store whose selection of canned goods is much smaller than in Lanzarote. It takes only a few minutes to reach the edge of the small town. Why would anyone need a car here, unless riding into the desert wastes is a form of entertainment? The rusting and decaying detritus of Villa Cisneros is strewn along the fringe of town. I wonder if shards of broken glass, weathered bits of rubber, and sardine cans will eventually outlast human habitation here.

A gust of wind blows sand in my face as I stare into the flat, bleak landscape. Heat waves shimmer over the cloudless vista. Other than in its extreme southeastern corner, Sahara Español has none of the enormous dune seas of sand that have come to symbolize this vast desert. A few camels meander in the distance, but we see no palm trees nor any plants. Rainfall in this region is negligible, and apparently the coastal fog that provides some condensed dew to coastal shrubs along the Maghreb, as the North African region bordering the ocean is called, does not extend this far south. Some parts of the Sahara receive almost four thousand hours of direct sun each year out of a possible forty-four hundred.

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Dave Graber, periphery of Villa Cisneros.

By 11 a.m., heat radiates off the whitewashed buildings. Strolling the streets is becoming uncomfortable. We discover a pleasantly cool bar to escape the midday sun, and I write my first missive home, announcing our arrival in Africa on a postcard depicting palm trees at El Aaiún. Khaki-clad Spanish soldiers cluster along the counter. What do you do in Villa Cisneros? I ask. A teenaged soldier chortles and hoists his bottle of Alhambra cerveza as if to make a toast. No Berbers are enjoying the saloon, but the inscription on a colorful hand-painted wall mural above the bar reads, "En esta casa, todos son hermanos." (In this house, all are brothers.) A man in a French Foreign Legion officer’s uniform approaches to introduce himself. We don’t grasp why a legionnaire is in a Spanish garrison town, and, speaking in broken Spanish, he offers no clear explanation. Rather, he complains about the intense heat and absence of women. He then mentions his past exploits in two colony-ending defeats, at Dien Bien Phu and in Algeria.

Ensconced back aboard the ship that afternoon, Dave and I ascertain that most of the Spanish farmer-merchants have debarked and that our miserable soldier roommate has been moved to a cabin of his own, leaving ours to ourselves. Jean Luc and Claude boast about stealing some food from a shop—a depressing revelation. Americans or Europeans from middle-class or wealthy families stealing from shopkeepers in Spain is unscrupulous enough, but in Africa such behavior is obscene. Still, we don’t castigate the Frenchmen because we might need them as allies during the upcoming hard travel in Mauritania. But we will avoid going into shops with them so as to make sure we won’t be taken for accomplices if they get caught in another theft. We will also be extra careful about protecting our own belongings.

Soon after departing Villa Cisneros, the León y Castillo crosses the Tropic of Cancer. Dave and I have entered the tropics for the first time in our lives. The vessel tacks to the southwest all night under moonless heavens illuminated by dazzling star shine. On deck, we drink cheap but palatable Spanish wine and watch phosphorescent dinoflagellates illuminate the sea surface as the bow plows through the waves. The next morning is pleasant and cool. Gulls continue to follow in our wake but fewer than on our first day out. By late morning it’s becoming uncomfortably hot, but we’re entertained watching the coastline disappear and then reappear as the captain keeps a safe distance from shore. Does this aging ship possess modern electronic equipment, or must the captain navigate by sight of land—in the tradition of the Phoenicians who first explored this coast two thousand years ago?

In late afternoon, La Güera materializes on the shoreline, appearing to be smaller and even more desolate than Villa Cisneros. It is situated on the open ocean side of the southern tip of Cap Blanc Peninsula, which is bisected north-south by the frontier between Spanish Sahara and Mauritania. Just counterclockwise around the peninsula, within the protected waters of Levrier Bay, is Port-Étienne, Mauritania. Because La Güera has no proper harbor, the ship has to drop anchor—with a resounding clank—a mile offshore. A few mid-sized fishing vessels are also anchored here.

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La Güera, Spanish Sahara.

In the distance, a tiny motorized launch plies through the choppy waters toward the León y Castillo, towing a rusting barge. The seas are choppy and the launch makes slow progress, periodically disappearing beneath swells. After half an hour, it pulls aside, alternately smacking into the ship’s hull and drifting away, surging and crashing with each powerful rolling wave. Aboard the motorboat are three young African crewmen with ebony Wolof features, dressed in tattered brown djellabas and white head scarves. The ship’s crew opens the hold in the foredeck and begins working the cranes to lower crates into the barge, skillfully guiding them into place so that no cargo goes overboard. They may not have modern equipment, but their daring and seamanship are impressive. Jean Luc and Claude leap aboard the fully loaded barge, anxious to be first ashore. Given the stomach-churning navigation we’ve just witnessed, Dave declares, I’m not interested in making landfall just yet.

The launch beats its way back to the small pier with a full load in tow; we won’t see it again until morning. Our understanding of the ship’s schedule, which neither the captain nor the crew is willing to explain specifically to us passengers, is that the León y Castillo will wait here, unloading at La Güera for two days. Later it will circumnavigate Cap Blanc Peninsula to reach Port-Étienne. This seems a long journey to reach that town, considering that a car ride across the peninsula would accomplish the same task quite quickly.

We remain aboard the León y Castillo until morning. I’m grateful to have one additional night in comfortably familiar surroundings, sleeping on a mattress. After breakfast, the captain returns our passports, relieving a gnawing fear that they were still in a police station in Las Palmas. The crew hoists Henrik’s and Peter’s Deux Chevaux over the gunwales, slowly lowering it into the barge. The sea is every bit as rough as yesterday, the barge slapping loudly against the hull with each swell and the vehicle whacking against the barge before being settled safely within it.

One by one, the backpacks are handed down as we extranjeros prepare to go over the side. With great relief, I watch my own gear tucked securely inside the barge without hitting the turquoise water. After Dave descends unscathed,