Categories
South America Suriname

The Stunning Suriname River

It took a lot of effort to get to Suriname, and the logistics didn’t stop once we arrived. From the airport, we drove for a couple hours until we got to a river, where we all loaded onto boats for about an hour’s ride to get to our ecolodge.

Getting on the boats was such a huge relief. I’m pretty sure the ecolodge would have been amazing regardless, but it was particularly nice after the failed ferry attempt and that extra night in Georgetown.

I loved the ecolodge. The way that it worked was as a sort of all-inclusive experience, where they served us breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was always coffee and tea available as well, although alcohol was extra. Then they arranged activities for us along the Suriname River. We still had plenty of free time to relax by the pool or play games as a group. It was really well-balanced, and it was a great way to experience this region.

Our first activity was a night boat ride down the river to look at animals. For obvious reasons, I don’t have any pictures beyond this blurry sunset, but we did see some alligators and birds and bats.

The next morning after breakfast we headed out to one of the Maroon villages for a tour. Huge shout out to our guide here, who was really engaging and good at explaining the local culture and way of life. The Maroons of Suriname are the descendants of the Africans who were brought across the Atlantic and enslaved by the Dutch, but managed to escape from the plantations and created their own communities in inland Suriname. They speak their own languages, practice their own religions (generally in addition to Christianity, which is taught in schools), run their own schools, and practice their own healthcare, making their culture quite distinct from the descendants of the Dutch colonizers.

A few interesting tidbits from my notes:
1. Trades, such as boat building or local medicine, are taught matrilineally. Our guide was saying he is not able to learn boat building but his cousin can, because he is born from a son of the family where that trade comes from and his cousin was born from a daughter (his aunt).
2. There is a huge emphasis in coming back and investing in the community. Often, young adults will go to Paramaribo for school or job opportunities, but they do come back and re-invest in the community once they are more established.
3. School is taught in Dutch, but children don’t speak Dutch amongst themselves. In this village, their local language comes from a mixture of West African dialect and Portuguese, which is what everyone speaks amongst themselves. This can cause problems with fluency. He spoke about the difficulty that he had once he went to Paramaribo, because he wasn’t comfortable speaking Dutch casually. It took him a while to feel fluent enough to socialize in Dutch.

We also had a jungle tour that was focused on how to live off the land. Our guide pointed out sources of food and water, as well as how to build enough of a shelter to sleep out there. There was even a plant that he called a candle tree that was able to burn as sustained fire, as shown above. These are the kinds of skills that I never want to need, but interesting to learn about!

We saw lots of monkeys on the tour, as well as a tarantula (which I did not feel the need to get close to).

The last outing we had before we left was a chance to swim in the Suriname River!

I was sad to leave our ecolodge utopia. This was such a cool experience, and I loved seeing a part of the Amazon rainforest here in Suriname. But it was time to head to our next stop: Paramaribo!

Categories
Guyana South America Suriname

The Journey from Guyana to Suriname

The next morning after our day trip to Kaieteur Falls, we got up bright and early to start the drive to the border with Suriname. We needed to get in line for the ferry, which we were planning to take out of Guyana. The operative word here is… planning.

Before I get into that, though, one other aside. This trip was the first time I’d ever heard of the Essequibo dispute. Apparently, Guyana and Venezuela have been in an ongoing debate about this since 1840! About 15% of Guyana’s population lives there, but it looks like it’s about two-thirds of the land that is currently considered Guyana. While the territory was originally mapped out in 1840, it became a point of contention when gold was discovered and Venezuela has been lobbying for it ever since. I love that Guyana has their own local billboards declaring it theirs – we saw these all over, but I finally got a nice clear picture while we sat around and waited for the ferry.

Have you ever seen a vulture sit like a chicken before? Because I certainly hadn’t

We got the car in line and went through passport control to formally exit Guyana before we had a few hours waiting in no man’s land. We were having a pretty good time playing games and chatting while we waited. It had been a pleasant morning, right up until the moment when our driver came over and told us that the ferry was cancelled. So we all filed back into the ferry terminal, listened to the official announcement, and then we had to go back through passport control to get our exit stamps officially cancelled.

We were so close! You can see Suriname, right across the river

Side note, I love that the cancellation process is just a large “cancelled” stamp that gets added over the existing stamp. A truly unique part of my passport.

We considered all our options. There were no other ferry options or bridges or even private transport across the river. We looked at flights, but the problem was the 4.5 hour drive back through Georgetown to the airport. And that’s not including traffic. So we tried to get back to see if that was feasible, and the traffic kept adding travel time until we finally gave up and spent another night in Georgetown. It’s a good thing when your hotel is located above a pawn shop, right? Asking for a friend.

With that, all there was left to do was figure out dinner and book a flight to Paramaribo for the next morning. It seemed like the ferry issue wasn’t just a one-off thing, but an ongoing maintenance issue that led to the ferry being suspended indefinitely. And we know what that means (cancelled).

“safety begins here”

Georgetown is not my favorite city. I wouldn’t have chosen three nights here, ideally. The locals warned us around safety a lot while we were there, including this last night in the city. There were seven or eight of us who had gone out for dinner and drinks, and we had about a six minute walk back to our hotel. The other people at the bar were shocked we were going to walk, even with a fairly large group and a short walk, which did not fill me with confidence as we headed back to the hotel.

Thankfully, we made it to the airport the next day and our flight to Paramaribo was uneventful! After all that, it only took an hour by plane to get to Suriname.

Categories
Guyana South America

A Flight to Kaieteur Falls

Welcome to Guyana! This is my 88th country and only my second in South America, so I definitely need to step it up in this continent.

Fun fact, there are a lot of territories that have been known as Guyana / Guiana in northern South America over the years. The word originally comes from indigenous languages and means “land of many waters,” which certainly describes this region. There were at one time five different Guianas: (1) Spanish Guiana, now a territory within Venezuela; (2) British Guiana, now the independent country of Guyana; (3) Dutch Guiana, now the independent country of Suriname; (4) French Guiana, now an overseas region of France; and (5) Portuguese Guiana, now a territory within Brazil. I had originally thought the etymology was related to the four Guinea countries so it was interesting to find an unrelated place word that sounds so similar.

Our first night was fairly uneventful. The airport in Georgetown is quite far from the city, so most of the first night was simply a long car ride to get into Georgetown and then dinner.

Once we had a good night’s sleep in Georgetown, it was on to the main event, which was a chartered flight down to Kaieteur Falls! There are a ton of different ways to rank waterfalls. Wikipedia informs me that the notable statistic for Kaieteur is that it is the “highest flow single drop waterfall” in the world and the 123rd highest in the world. It is very far south within Guyana and requires either a flight or a multi-day trek through the jungle to get to.

The views as we left Georgetown were nice. Georgetown has fairly colorful buildings and it also sits at the mouth of the Demerara River. As we followed the river south, the landscape turned from urban to farmland to jungle.

The first view of the waterfall from the air! It was very impressive, both at a distance and up close. We landed right next to the visitor center and met up with a local guide who showed us around the national park.

There were three different viewpoints to go to and along the way our guide would point out native plants and animals. The walk itself was very easy but the guide was awesome. Our time in Kaieteur National Park was definitely a highlight across this whole trip for me.

This is not the best picture I’ve ever taken, but was a cool animal to spot in the wild! This is a golden rocket frog, endemic to Kaieteur National Park. It was hard to see in the plant – they’re absolutely tiny, I was amazed our guide was able to spot it.

While we were in Kaieteur National Park, we also did a little birdwatching! This was the most excited I’ve ever been to see a bird in person. I’ve definitely seen other cool birds, but in most cases I just recognize that they are cool and then find out more about them later. This is the rare instance where I knew of this bird beforehand. Meet the Guianan cock-of-the-rock. Yes, their name is crazy. I’ve always thought they were super interesting looking with their crests. We got to see several of them through the trees.

Here, you can see Kaieteur National Park visitor records. Most people come by plane, as you can see. I think if you were a very outdoorsy person, the multi-day Amazon trek to come by land could be a worthwhile experience, but I was quite happy with my choice to arrive by plane.

It was such a cool day. Guyana wasn’t my favorite country of this trip but this certainly was my favorite single experience that I had over the course of this week!

Categories
North America Trinidad and Tobago

A Weekend in Trinidad

When I left DC to fly to Port of Spain, it was shortly after DC got a hideous snowstorm. I would not say DC handles snow well in the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times. There was a substantial amount of snow followed immediately by sleet, leading to an impenetrable ice crust over all the fallen snow. When I left for the airport three days later, the roads and sidewalks hadn’t really been cleared. My walk to the metro was a bit harrowing, and packing so that I didn’t have to lug around a huge coat and snow boots yet I didn’t freeze on my way to the airport was a careful balance. Once I got on my plane and started heading south, it was a huge relief!

I landed in Port of Spain shortly after midnight and met up with my friends. We had rented a car so that we could properly explore the island. Once we had a good night of sleep and had found some breakfast, we headed out.

Our first stop was the Asa Wright Nature Center! As it turns out, we should have made a reservation before we headed out, as that is apparently required. Instead, we had to park outside the gate, call their main office, and hope they would let us in, so…. my pro tip would be to plan better than us. Thankfully, they did have space.

The Asa Wright Nature Center was the one place from Trinidad and Tobago that was in my Lonely Planet 500 Ultimate Places book, which is why we started there. It’s a nature preserve that is particularly well-known for birdwatching. It has over 250 species of birds there and we certainly saw some cool ones during our visit. I’ve always particularly loved hummingbirds and we saw a lot of different species of those.

We also did a light hike out from the property. If the ground hadn’t been so muddy, we probably would’ve gone farther. It sounds like they also have guided walks and tours of the property, which would’ve been cool if we had been a little more strategic about our visit.

The fog was short lived but spooky while it lasted

I had a nice visit to the Asa Wright Nature Center, and I would recommend it as a half day trip out from Port of Spain, especially if you coordinate it in advance to go for one of the tours. I thought it was a good way to see another side of Trinidad besides the city – the drive out to Asa Wright was stunning, and I liked our time birdwatching.

We headed back into the city and went to a lookout point that unfortunately was mostly closed off, but we did find an angle where you could mostly see Port of Spain. Trinidad is very interesting relative to the rest of the Caribbean. It is substantially less touristy, and it’s one of the wealthiest countries in the Caribbean because it’s mostly focused on industry. The majority of that comes from natural gas and oil, and then there is a lot of shipping that goes through the Port of Port of Spain (which is so funny to see written, by the way). You can see that port in pretty much every picture I have of the city’s skyline.

From the viewpoint
From our Airbnb

We met up with a few friends for drinks at a rooftop bar, then we headed back into the city to go to Queen’s Park Savannah. It was time for Carnival!

Trinidad is known for its Carnival, and while we weren’t there for the main weekend of it, it actually has quite a few more events than just the two days before Ash Wednesday. The events go on for about a month! I know it wasn’t the full experience, but I was glad to get at least a taste of what Trinidad has to offer during Carnival. I’d love to go to the main event – I firmly believe that Trinidadians can throw some of the best parties in the entire world. I’m not sure I can keep up, but it does seem like it would be fun to try.

The next day, we headed to the beach! This is truly the point where I was so thankful that we weren’t in a particularly touristy part of the Caribbean, because it was such a chill, relaxing day.

We stayed until sunset and then headed back into the city. We met up with a friend of Matt’s for drinks. One brief aside. When Latifeh and I ordered cider or beer, they served it with a straw and carefully wrapped a napkin around it. Although I thought it was strange to serve beer with a straw, I assumed that was just how they served it. But then when the men also ordered beer and they came out normally, I realized this was just something they were doing for us as women! I found it rather charming.

The next day, it was time to head to the airport!

Truly one of the funniest business names I’ve ever seen in an airport. Yes, let me just go get my airport drugs.

I definitely enjoyed my time in Trinidad. Outside of coming back for the main part of Carnival, I have also heard great things about Tobago and would be interested in going there – that seems like more of the natural beauty side of the country, and has a little more tourist infrastructure from what I’ve heard. On that note, off to Guyana!

Categories
Africa Algeria

The City of Bridges

Constantine is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. It was built over a deep ravine, so there are bridges that cross over the ravine to connect the different areas of the city.

For example, this was the view from the balcony of my hotel room on the first morning when I woke up there! The hotel, by the way, was a former Marriott property that was no longer officially affiliated with the brand, but still had the branding everywhere. My phone automatically connected to the “Marriott Bonvoy” wifi.

The hotel also had a bar, so outside of one night in Algiers when we managed to find a bar to let us in, this was the only part of the trip where we could reliably order drinks with dinner. I was excited to get the chance to try Algerian wine! I enjoyed it, although it wasn’t up to the same standards as some more well-known wine regions. I imagine it’s challenging to get a lot of investment when it’s so difficult to actually sell it to your consumers relative to most other markets.

Here I am in an abaya that I borrowed from our guide’s wife

The first place we visited in the city was the Emir Adelkader Mosque, which is the second largest mosque in Algeria. It was beautiful inside!

It rained heavily off and on as we were touring the city. I, of course, hadn’t brought anything useful against the rain, so it was a cold and wet day for me. This was a hard trip to pack for. It had gotten pretty warm in the Sahara but the coastal parts of Algeria could get quite cold, especially at night.

This whole area was probably my favorite single place we went on the trip. We walked around both sides and even later, the bottom of the ravine, and everywhere you looked was stunning! Because of the dramatic landscape, the city of Constantine has a public transport system that you don’t see every day: gondola. To get back down to the rest of the city, we rode it down to the Kasbah. I loved the experience of the gondola here. It’s clear it isn’t in any way a novelty or a touristy thing – it is just a normal method of public transport for people to get around here.

From there, we made our way through the Kasbah. It was pouring rain on us, so we tried to huddle under the awnings of the shops as we navigated through the streets.

We also visited the Ahmad Bey Palace near here! It was beautiful, with nice gardens and elaborate mosaics. The palace was completed in 1835, which is only two years before the French began occupying Constantine. The ruler who built it did not get much of a chance to enjoy it before the French took it over, and then it became an Algerian military base after Algeria got their independence.

After our visit to the palace, we stopped for lunch, and by the time we had eaten the rain had finally cleared up. It was the perfect time to head down to the bottom of the ravine!

This whole area is just so cool. There’s a trail that you can go on alongside the ravine, and then if you turn into the mountain and go through a dark tunnel, you come out into this:

It is unbelievable that this is just part of a city. This is the kind of place where I am surprised that people were willing to settle here at this scale before we had the kind of technology we do now. When bridges were harder to build and gondolas didn’t exist, how difficult was it to cross this city?

Constantine was definitely a highlight of Algeria for me. This portion of the trip was an add-on and I am so glad I was able to make it work – it was a worthy addition of this itinerary!

And with that, that’s a wrap on Algeria! This was my first visit to Northern Africa (if you don’t count a night at an airport hotel in Cairo, which I certainly don’t). I loved Algeria. While the visa ended up being more challenging than I expected, once I got on that plane from Marseille, I had a great time. The diversity of landscapes and experiences that you can have in Algeria and the well-preserved historical sites makes for a really interesting visit. I would definitely recommend it.

Categories
Africa Algeria

All Roads Lead to the Roman Ruins of Algeria

Algeria has the most Roman ruins outside of Italy, and we spent the next couple days of the trip exploring some of them! I loved this part of the trip, because we got a bit of a road trip to explore areas that were clearly less on the tourist trail (insofar as that exists in Algeria).

Coastal Algeria is beautiful and mountainous and so much greener than I expected, especially coming off of the Sahara part of the trip. We headed to Djémila first. Djémila, originally called Cuicul, was built in the 1st century CE as a Roman military base due to its strategic location near two rivers. Like Tipaza, it felt like the landscape really added a lot to the experience of visiting the ruins.

Once again, it was incredible to see how well-preserved everything was. The carvings and inscriptions are still visible. And once again, we were the only people at these sites. Occasionally, we would see local Algerians as well, but I don’t remember seeing any other foreign tourists at any of the Roman sites we visited.

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at Roman history, but I always enjoy exploring one of these sites. I find it so incredible that these civilizations were able to build the kinds of structures that you can still see centuries later, well before we had the kinds of modern technology that we do now.

We also headed to the museum to see the mosaics, which were largely pulled out of the ruins to ensure that they would be protected. Across all the sites we went to in Algeria, I was blown away by how cool and intricate the mosaics were – the level of artwork that they produced in these sites was unreal.

We also stopped at Medracen, which is a royal mausoleum from the Berber Numidian Kingdom. It’s currently undergoing some repair work. I do wish that both this and the Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania had been through some of that repair work already – I think it would have been very cool to be able to go inside.

The last of the Roman sites we visited was Timgad! This is the most famous site in Algeria by far. In fact, when I was googling “Roman ruins in Algeria” to refresh my memories of the general background of this portion of the trip, it just pulled up the information about Timgad.

It’s known for being one of the best representations of city planning and the grid system in ancient Roman cities. It was founded in about 100 CE and ended up as a major center of Christian activity in the 3rd and 4th centuries before it was taken over by Byzantine North Africa in 539 CE.

One of my most vivid memories of this tour was how excited our guide was to show us the bathrooms! To be fair, they did seem extremely nice for that time period, and of course the most important one was a toilet that had dolphins carved into the armrests. The Romans knew what they were doing when they designed a city, that’s for sure.

And with that, I’m down to one more post on Algeria – next week, I’ll cover my visit to Constantine! But it’s been an amazing itinerary. I’ve been so impressed by the variety of experiences that you can get in one country. The Roman ruins that we saw in Algeria were really cool. If you’re willing to deal with the visa, these are definitely worth a visit.

Categories
Africa Algeria

From Sand to Sea in Tipaza

Another day, another hideous overnight domestic flight on Air Algérie. This one was even worse because it had a stop, so it was harder to nap. So we flew from Djanet to Tamanrasset from 2:30 am to 3:30 am, and then sat on the tarmac in Tamanrasset, and then left at 4:05 am and arrived in Algiers at 6:30. From there, we got straight on a bus and drove an hour and a half to Cherchell.

I barely remember any of this and I feel like I was in a fugue state for this section of travel. We arrived in Cherchell to absolutely pouring rain, which I was not prepared for, and after a quick stop in a café, we headed to the real destination of the day: Tipaza!

We started at the museum to get some context on what we were about to see (and wait out the rain a bit). Fun fact, Algeria has the second most Roman ruins in the world besides Italy. A lot of them are still incredibly well-preserved. I have never seen the kinds of mosaics as I saw in Algeria. And they aren’t just in the museums – a lot of the sites still have the mosaics embedded in the ground! It felt almost sacrilegious to walk on them. There were carvings that were still as clear as they must have been centuries ago when they were carved. But I’ll get to that later.

Tipaza was not the most impressive ruin site that we saw on that trip, but the landscape did elevate it a lot. The Romans built it right along the coast and the view was so beautiful. I wouldn’t want to live in the Roman era, but if I had to, I think being a merchant in Tipaza could be the way to go.

Here’s are some of the mosaics still on the ground! I truly cannot believe how well they’ve held up.

We had some very interesting conversations with our guide about Algeria’s relationships with its surrounding countries. What surprised me the most is that they have some tension with Morocco, because Algeria supports the independence of Western Sahara. I didn’t know that much about Western Sahara beyond the location of it and the fact that it is a disputed territory, so this did send me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

According to Wikipedia, it used to be colonized by Spain until 1976, which is when Spain tried to turn it over to Morocco and Mauritania even as the International Court of Justice told them they couldn’t. Obviously, the people of Western Sahara were not particularly excited about this and they started a war to try to gain their independence. Mauritania decided this wasn’t worth the effort but Morocco stuck around and occupied the territory, which has been in an uneasy ceasefire since the early 90s. I’m visiting Morocco next year and definitely intend to ask my future guide about their thoughts on the situation.

Anyway. Once we were done exploring the Tipaza ruins, we had one more stop: The Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania. This is one of those things where the historical context is interesting but the visit isn’t that exciting. It was built in 3 BC to bury King Juba II and Queen Cleopatra Selene II, and it is a pretty cool design of a mausoleum – I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it before. Unfortunately, it’s been damaged and you can’t go inside, so we basically walked around it as the wind howled around us. Nonetheless, worth a quick stop on the way from Cherchell and Tipaza back to Algiers!

We had a lot more Roman ruins left to see on the trip, but Tipaza was a great transition from the Sahara back into the coastal area. I thought the walk through the ruins was gorgeous and I was excited for our next destination!

Categories
Africa Algeria

Into The Sahara

One of the challenges with traveling within Algeria is the internal flight schedules. Air Algérie has a fairly small fleet, so the way they solve this is by having their international flights running at normal times of the day and then having many of their domestic flights in the middle of the night. So we left Ghardaïa at 12:45 am and landed in Djanet at 2:20 am.

This airport photo is one of my favorites from this leg of the trip, because it really captures the vibe. You can see the time stamp with the clock, and you can also see where the arrival screen above the baggage claim wants an update to Firefox. Anyway, it took us ages to leave the airport because the local police had to check all our passports, but we did finally get to a hotel in Djanet to sleep for a few hours before we headed off into the desert.

Djanet is all the way south, at the corner where Algeria meets Libya and Niger. It is solidly in the Sahara. We were there because it’s the best gateway to Tassili n’Ajjer National Park!

The biggest surprise for me in this region is that it was not just sand dunes. Maybe that sounds dumb, but I feel like every mental image I have of the Sahara is these beautiful undulating sand dunes that go as far as the eye can see. And we did see dunes! But most of what we saw and visited were cool rock formations. From some angles, I could be somewhere like Arizona or southern Utah.

One of the coolest parts of Tassili n’Ajjer is the prehistoric cave art! The oldest art is estimated to be 12,000 years old, which is an unfathomable amount of time. There’s something so amazing about standing where humans have been standing for millennia, looking at the etchings and drawings that they made that have somehow still lasted this long in the Sahara Desert.

Another favorite part: Elephant Rock! Definitely my favorite rock formation from Tassili n’Ajjer.

We camped out in the desert while we were there. I haven’t done a lot of camping in my life, but it was a good way to experience the Sahara. It was a little chilly, but not too bad once I put on an extra layer, and I ended up sleeping pretty well to catch up after our overnight flight!

One of the other peak experiences of this portion of the trip was when I finally saw the proper Sahara sand dunes! We climbed to the top and watched the sun set, which was beautiful.

In case you’re interested in what the city of Djanet looks like, we also visited that. It wasn’t a huge “main street.” Wikipedia informs me that their most recent census put them at a population of 14,655. The town itself might not have seemed huge, but it did have some very nice, brand new looking highways that ran from the airport to the city and around the area. Most of our trip was out in the desert, driving through the sand, but when we did get on the highways I was impressed.

By the way, this is the region where the visa on arrival is intended to incentivize tourism! Our guides did tell us that tourism provides the bulk of their economy, which was interesting. They still get a tiny fraction of the tourists visiting Northern Africa – obviously, Morocco and Egypt have tons, but Tunisia has rebounded after the Arab Spring and even Libya has more tourism than Algeria despite being less stable in recent years.

It didn’t seem like there were lots of tourists in Djanet. That said, we did actually see other tourists there. They were on some sort of multi-day trek through the desert, which sounded personally hell-ish to me but hopefully they were having a good time. I loved seeing the North Face and Cotopaxi bags on the camel.

Most of the time the weather was good, but we did have a random wind storm and it even rained on us. Just a little, but it was pretty surprising to get rained on in the Sahara!

Also, big shout out to our guides for showing us how to tie the scarves in the traditional way. These were clutch when the wind picked up and the sand was whipping against our faces – I can see why this is the style that developed in this region!

I had a great time in Djanet and Tassili n’Ajjer. I had not been to Northern Africa before this trip, and so I was so excited to go and do a proper visit to the Sahara, which is one of those places that you grow up hearing about. I would definitely recommend visiting this area if you’re going to Algeria!

Categories
Africa Algeria

South to Ghardaïa

From Algiers, we headed to Ghardaïa! We flew down in the evening and spent our first night in a very nice hotel that had hallways that reminded me of The Shining. The next morning, we did some exploring.

Ghardaïa is culturally unique. They practice a specific form of Islam, separate from Sunni or Shi’a, with a different architectural design of their mosques and different beliefs. There’s also some interesting community aspects built into their culture. If you look up Ghardaïa on a map, you’ll see that it looks like it’s in the top fourth of the country. In the relative scheme of Algeria, it looks pretty far north.

In fact, looking at it, you think, “oh, it’s not that far from Algiers,” especially when you think about how big the country is. Fun fact, Algeria is the largest country in Africa by land, which I did not know before I started planning for my trip. I have lived my whole life thinking that honor fell to the DRC. But it is actually 7 and a half hours drive from Algiers to Ghardaïa. It’s quite a bit outside the populous coastal band near the Mediterranean, and while it isn’t deep into the Sahara, there is this sense that they have to band together as a strong community to survive.

One of the other traditions that is unique to Ghardaïa is the one-eyed women. The M’Zab women wear these white abayas, and once they’re married, they only show one eye to the world. They’re very sensitive to photographs – the one below was not taken by me, as we were asked not to take photos of them on our tour.

Because they didn’t want us to take pictures of people in almost any of the areas where we were, most of my photos of Ghardaïa feel a bit like a movie set. There’s something sort of haunting about the amount of photos I took trying to set motorcycles against the buildings to give my pictures some kind of focal point or interest.

Thankfully, we did get to go somewhere livelier – the local market! I loved the market. As Algeria is ambivalent (at best) to tourists, it is not catered to foreigners at all. No stalls are trying to solicit your business, which is so pleasant as a tourist there. Instead, we just got to go through and buy nuts and vegetables and get a better sense of what day-to-day life looks like there.

This butcher stall was a real trip, I was so startled to see that cow’s head hanging from the top.

While I’m on the subject of food, it’s so funny to see which parts of French culture ended up sticking once Algeria kicked the French out. One of the main ones I noticed was French bread. Bread was served at almost every meal and it was good bread. This is one of my favorite photos I took in Ghardaïa:

Ghardaïa also had some great viewpoints from the tops of the hills. The architecture was so interesting. Technically, it’s only one town in a collection of five, although the whole area often gets called Ghardaïa from a tourism perspective (not unlike Amalfi or Cappadocia), so the buildings sprawl over the nearby hills and create a very cool skyline.

As far as visiting Ghardaïa as a tourist, I do have mixed feelings. On one hand, it is one of the more interesting and unique cultures I’ve had the chance to learn about. The market was great and the landscape and architecture were beautiful. On the other, with the strict restrictions around photos and some of the comments from our guide, it didn’t feel like that was really a place that wanted us to visit.

I touched on this a bit with the visa process, but Algeria is not particularly interested in tourists on the whole. Still, in most places, even if structurally it didn’t seem like they wanted foreigners there, most individual people were friendly. Ghardaïa seemed to be the exception, where even on an individual level, the locals weren’t thrilled that we were there. Which is fine, not everywhere has to welcome in foreigners, but it did come as a surprise compared to the other places where we went in Algeria.

And with that, it’s off to a place much farther south!

Categories
Africa Algeria

Welcome to Algiers

I have never been so close to being denied boarding on a flight until I tried to go to Algeria.

Algeria is considered one of the more difficult visas to get, historically, although they have been loosening the restrictions a bit recently. Part of that is introducing a visa on arrival that can be used as long as a portion of your trip is going to the southern part of Algeria. That was my method, and it basically required filling out a form, getting a pre-approval notice, and then when I arrived in Algiers airport, the plan was to get the visa at the counter. But first, I had to board my flight in Marseille.

I arrived at the airport early, because I was worried about getting my boarding pass. And it turned out I should be. Basically, when the employees for Air Algérie arrived and opened up check in, they told me that they didn’t believe that the visa on arrival would allow me to stay in Algiers at all, and that they were only familiar with people using it to transit through Algiers directly to the relevant regions. This was complicated by the fact that I didn’t have my domestic Algerian flight information because the tour company was booking them on my behalf. I tracked those down while the Air Algérie employees checked everyone else in, then they circled back to me and told me they would need to get someone in Algeria on the phone to confirm what I was telling them. This proved difficult because it was early in the morning, but after 4 or 5 phone calls, finally, someone picked up. And thankfully, they said that my pre-approval for my visa on arrival was sufficient to let me board.

Other people on my trip did report some friction at the airport, but none of them had quite the same experience as me of being pulled aside. It sounds like at the other airports that people were flying through, like Istanbul, Cairo, and Barcelona, the airline employees were skeptical but let them through without more than a cheeky “good luck.” For me, though, it was a stressful morning. I was very thankful to be let on my flight.

Once I landed in Algiers, I went to the immigration counter and they brought me to a room and took my passport to handle the visa paperwork. I paid my fee and got my stamp, and with that, I was all set!

I started with about a day and a half in Algiers, and then there were a couple more times where I was there passing through, so I’ve combined all my photos and thoughts into the one post. To start, Algiers is beautiful. A lot of the architecture is very French, which is not surprising given they spent 130 years under French rule. It’s right along the coast and there were some really nice cafés near the water where we had coffee. The first day we were there, it was some sort of holiday or a festival or something, and there were tons of families out in the streets enjoying themselves.

In preparation for this trip, I had watched The Battle of Algiers, which is definitely worth a watch if you’re interested in the history of the region. It is a fairly accurate reenactment of the guerrilla warfare that took place in Algiers during the Algerian War, where the local Algerians were fighting French colonization and ultimately gained their independence. There were a few areas highlighted in the movie that we saw on the tour, including the Milk Bar Café. The Milk Bar Café was once the site of a bombing. It was particularly popular with the French, and so the rebels picked that site to target and ended up killing several people.

The movie also largely takes place in the Casbah, which is the old town and medina of Algiers. During the Algerian War, it was primarily where the local Algerians lived and it was often targeted as the French tried to strip away their rights, so it is where the rebels organized during their war for independence. We spent a large portion of our tour in the Casbah, which is a very interesting part of the city. It has a higher concentration of Islamic architecture compared to the rest of the city.

One thing about walking around the Casbah – it has so many stairs! Thankfully, it did reward us with a very cool view of the city.

It’s hard to even pin down everywhere that we saw in Algiers, because we spent so much time walking through the city!

One of the parts I was very excited about was taking the metro! It’s something I love to do in new cities. Our guide was not very complimentary about their metro, but I found it clean and nice and easy to navigate. I don’t think they have a ton of lines but it’s certainly better than a lot of American cities have in the way of transit.

Another fun part of Algeria was the coffee culture. There were tons of cafés everywhere we were, and it seemed like a lot of them were great gathering places. It’s also the only place I’ve ever ordered coffee with milk and been handed a coffee in one hand and a cup of warm milk in the other, so that was kind of fun.

On the other hand, another interesting aspect of Algeria was the lack of drinking culture. It’s not shocking that it doesn’t have much drinking, to be clear. It is a predominately Muslim society. What did surprise me was that some places sold alcohol but it was treated almost more like speakeasies during American Prohibition. When I’ve been to Muslim countries before, they either sell alcohol or don’t. Some, like Yemen, are fully dry; others, like Saudi Arabia, just don’t sell much and the few places that do are hard to find and expensive. Or most just sell it normally, even if there’s slightly less availability than non-Muslim countries.

Algiers had places that sold alcohol but they wouldn’t let us in, or they would tell us they were full even when they clearly weren’t, or they would open the door a tiny crack and tell us we should try going around the corner, to another bar that opened their door a tiny crack, determined we were okay, and then welcomed us in. Big shout out to the one bar that did let us in while we were in Algiers, it was such a fun vibe. I am obsessed with the license plates they chose to put on their walls.

Algiers also felt pretty distinct out of everywhere we went in Algeria. I was in Algeria for about ten days, and got to explore a huge variety of different areas of the country during that time. Given how much trouble I had with the visa, I was glad that I could go to everywhere that interested me on this trip, because I’m not sure I could get back in!

I also found Algeria, across the board, to be a pretty easy place to eat as a vegetarian. They had lots of couscous with vegetables, and while I’ve had couscous before, I’ve never had it as good as I did here!

From there, it was time to head south! There’s a lot more to come in my trip to Algeria – we’re just getting started.