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While researching a potential future trip, I stumbled across this fascinating mini-documentary:
https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/5/10/230...ery-solved
Be sure to watch the full video (its about 27 minutes). Its a mystery in a remote corner of the Sahara desert. There's amazing desert scenery, sleuthing, explosives (seriously) and they do figure it all out in the end.
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That video is pure dynamite! Thanks for sharing this well produced video and good luck on your next adventure to Africa.
Life begins in Death Valley
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It is cool (I guess) to see the paved road down to the area. When I was there in '72. the pavement ended around El Golea and from there it was sand and gravel. I rode on top of the loads on trucks, ate stewed camel, drank sweet mint tea multiple times a say (cooking over wood, which the trucks carried) and helped dig out of sand traps. All they way down into Niger. And now... one just drives
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2022-05-12, 09:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 2022-05-12, 09:52 AM by netllama.)
(2022-05-12, 09:12 AM)MojaveGeek Wrote: It is cool (I guess) to see the paved road down to the area. When I was there in '72. the pavement ended around El Golea and from there it was sand and gravel. I rode on top of the loads on trucks, ate stewed camel, drank sweet mint tea multiple times a say (cooking over wood, which the trucks carried) and helped dig out of sand traps. All they way down into Niger. And now... one just drives
Those were simpler, and arguably better times. I couldn't even get a tourist visa for Algeria 5 months ago, and Niger is arguably quite unsafe now.
I am (thankfully) familiar with drinking huge volumes of mint (very sugary) hot tea though. That's still quite common throughout much of the Sahara, and it I drank a life time's worth of tea when I was in Mauritania back in 2018.
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Thanks for posting that video. It was a lot of fun to watch. Always interesting to trace back some evidence of humans to try to figure out what one is seeing. And from a satellite, no less.
To come back to DV, note how hard it was to find the circles on the ground. Once they saw them, it was obvious off course, but from a few hundred meters away, not visible. If you ever head out into the salt flats to look for the "borax haystacks", I strongly advise first looking at the satellite images, on which they are quite visible, and taking a few waypoints on your GPS. Similarly, most of them are pretty flat by now, and hard to see until you're real close to them.
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(2022-05-12, 09:51 AM)netllama Wrote: Those were simpler, and arguably better times. I couldn't even get a tourist visa for Algeria 5 months ago, and Niger is arguably quite unsafe now.
Interestingly, the only reason I was down in southern Algeria was because plan A did not happen - that plan being to travel the Mediterranean coast to Alexandria and follow the Nile to Lake Victoria. But once en route I learned that Americans were not even allowed into Libya, and not west of Alexandria.
And hitch hiking across Niger and then into northern Nigeria these days? Nope, don't even think about it!
To this day, I drink my mint tea very sweet
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(2022-05-12, 12:18 PM)MojaveGeek Wrote: To this day, I drink my mint tea very sweet
The tea is often more sugar than tea. Its a miracle that everyone in the region doesn't have diabetes.
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(2022-05-12, 12:14 PM)MojaveGeek Wrote: Thanks for posting that video. It was a lot of fun to watch. Always interesting to trace back some evidence of humans to try to figure out what one is seeing. And from a satellite, no less.
To come back to DV, note how hard it was to find the circles on the ground. Once they saw them, it was obvious off course, but from a few hundred meters away, not visible. If you ever head out into the salt flats to look for the "borax haystacks", I strongly advise first looking at the satellite images, on which they are quite visible, and taking a few waypoints on your GPS. Similarly, most of them are pretty flat by now, and hard to see until you're real close to them.
Indeed that's an excellent point. Also reinforces how long it takes for the desert to recover from man made changes. Those circles were created over 60 years ago, yet were still visible from space.
