Michael Palin

SAHARA

Uitgever: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardcover with dustjacket, illustrated

Michael Palin's epic voyages have seen him circumnavigate the globe, travel from the North to the South Pole and circle the countries of the Pacific Ocean, but perhaps the greatest single challenge he has faced is his latest, a crossing of the vast and merciless Sahara Desert. There is no easy way to do it, and Palin's experiences are unlike anything he has encountered before.

As the journey unfolds, the Sahara reveals not the emptiness of endless sand dunes, but a huge and diverse range of cultures and landscapes and a long history of civilization, trade, commerce and conquest stretching from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the oil-rich Islamic republics of today.

Starting and finishing his adventure in the once stable, now uncertain colony of Gibraltar, Palin crosses the Strait to Morocco, and pauses in Fez and Marrakesh before traversing the mighty Atlas Mountains. In the stony, hostile wastes of Western Algeria he spends time in one of the refugee camps of the Saharawis, a population in exile. Recovering from an overdose of camel stew, he heads south to Mauritania, where he rides the longest train in the world, finds a holy city half-­engulfed by sand, and nearly gets run over by the Paris-­Dakar Rally. Arriving in Dakar a few days behind them, he samples the city's exhausting nightlife, then takes a train to the heart of Mali, home of great music, the largest mud building in the world and the great River Niger, on which Michael rides to the legendary city of Timbuktu. He walks with nomadic herders and rides with a Touareg camel caravan through Niger, scales the Hoggar Mountains and flies into the oilfields of Algeria, before investigating Colonel Gaddafi's Libya and the stunning classical remains of Tunisia, where Life of Brian was filmed and Palin crucified.
This is Michael Palin, explorer-adventurer, at his hard-pressed best.