(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.