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Abandoned in the Sahara
Left to fend for herself in Mauritania, the author finds
she’s not as lonely as she’d expected to be
by Diane Rigda

Excerpts:

     I never intended to cross the Sahara alone. Patrick urged me to come to the African desert, knowing I was one of few potential travel partners – probably the only one – who might yield to such a temptation. My grand adventure, already planned, involved traveling through Turkey and the Middle East. “Why not stop in Senegal, and we’ll travel together to Morocco?”
     Pat was a college friend who’d been conducting forestry research in Senegal for his graduate degree. A former Peace Corps volunteer, he was quite accustomed to sleeping in huts and eating without utensils, and I presumed he’d be a compatible travel mate.   . . .

     At the bush taxi area, Pat and I were instructed to sit in the shade until the car to Atar filled – whether it took one hour or two days. The waiting passengers sipped tea, and the men smoked tobacco in long intricately etched metal pipes. Bargains were discussed and negotiated, car repairs tended to. Women swathed in bright colors moved about, selling vivid bundles of fabric that teetered atop their heads.
     As we waited, Pat disclosed that he had changed his mind about going all the way to Morocco. “I’ll go with you as far as Atar,” he told me. “Then I’m heading south, back to Senegal.” . . .

     An hour before sunset, we stopped to pray. The other passengers were all Muslim Bedouin and prayed five times a day, facing Mecca. These travel-savvy Muslims had prayer mats they’d pull out at a moment’s notice for prostrating in the sand. Giving thanks to Allah for a safe arrival in Atar proved premature, however.
     After piling back into the station wagon and zigzagging around a few more miles of sand dunes, we puttered to a stop. We were out of gas.
The driver estimated that we had 60 miles to go. We exited the car and scattered across the warm sand, making erratic and unnatural prints in the perfectly frozen waves of the dune. Half the people from our bush taxi started walking north, while the setting sun cast shadows that stretched farther east by the minute.
       I panicked. Running out of gas on a deserted road can be frightening, but here we didn’t even have a road. What were the chances that another vehicle would pass anywhere near us? I inventoried our water and calculated how long we could last – not very.   . . .
 


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