Algeria – America's Finest Ambassador

Algiers

: Some old French architecture along the coast. We only had a couple nights in Algiers before flying south to Djanet for a hike in Tassili N’Ajjer National Park.

: The official exchange rate for the Algerian Dinar is like 130 to 1 USD. Before entering the country, I read that this is total bullshit and that you’d be a fool to not exchange money on the black market. As such, I reached out to our tour operator to get his opinion on what is a good rate and he sent me this screenshot of an app he has showing the “official” black market rates of the day. Using this info as a guide and with the help of our taxi driver, on our way from the airport to the hotel, we exchanged some cash on the street in the area shown in the previous photo.

: A clash of old world traditions and new – some kind of virtual reality advertisement as seen in one of the underground metro stations not too far from our lodgings at Hôtel Suisse

: Ambling along some winding passageways during a guided tour of the city’s casbah

: A traditional dish called rishta served at someone’s home in the casbah. It’s pretty good and I remember eating a similar dish with a similar name while in Libya and asked our guide about it, but she said it was a local dish and has nothing to do with Libya. I politely nodded but later went back to look at the photos and captions from my Libya visit to confirm my suspicions. Turns out I indeed had it in Libya, but it was a bit different from what you see in this photo. Like here, the rishta there included a piece of chicken over thin noodles, but instead of steamed veggies and a clear broth, the Libyan rishta was topped with chickpeas and some kind of reddish-looking sauce.

: At some museum we stopped into, when I saw this guy’s name I didn’t even bother reading his historical bio. With a nickname like “Bitchin” I knew right away that Ali Rais was Algeria’s first professional surfer.

: This old fig in Botanical Garden Hamma is known as the “Tarzan Tree” because it served as the setting for the opening scene of the 1932 film Tarzan: The Ape Man starring Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane

: As my buddy Darren pointed out, according to the middle image on this sign here, Michael Jackson style moonwalking is prohibited near the Tarzan tree

: Our main guide Garshi was in his early sixties and he seemed to know every nook and cranny of the desert inside and out. He didn’t speak any English, so all communication had to be done through another guy named Mustafa

: Mustafa was the only member of the local team that spoke English, so whatever we learned about the culture was filtered through him. He spoke pretty good English which he said he’d mastered from watching YouTube videos and bootleg movies online. He must’ve smoked at least two packs a day and was surprisingly knowledgeable about world geography and current events. Mustafa explained to us that while the outside world knows him and his people as Tuaregs, they refer to themselves as “Imohag.” I couldn’t find any information online to verify this, but Mustafa said that in their language, Tamasheq, “imo” means “god” and “hag” means “walking.” They are the “gods of walking” due to the nomadic lifestyle that they’d lived for centuries. One other thing he said was that the robes worn by Tuareg men are called “bazan” and the scarf is known as a “shash.”

: Tassili N’Ajjer National Park covers approximately 72,000 square kilometers. Of that massive expanse, we’d only be walking a distance of around 100km during our 6.5 days out there

: The picture does it no justice, but the amount of stars you could see out there was incredible. You could see every satellite floating around and could even see a shooting star or two every night

: …and that this rock formation looked like a woman embracing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

: This tree-shaped rock was an excellent provider of shade for one of our short water/smoke breaks

: These cave paintings are very, very old. A lot of them predate Islam by thousands of years. Mustafa and the guys were Muslim and prayed several times a day, but he explained that he and the Tuareg people in general are not fanatical in their beliefs. He said that the paintings shown here that are smudged out had previously depicted women with their legs open. He said that the Tuareg people wouldn’t do that, that they work to preserve their heritage. He said that the paintings were most likely smudged out by some of the Arabs that came to visit from the north who, due to their particularly restrictive brand of Islam, were offended by these ancient childlike drawings of the female form and had to do away with them.

: View of one of our overnight camps as seen from the top of an adjacent rock formation I’d climbed

: One morning the guys wanted to teach us how to load the camels. I can’t say that I learned enough to be able to do it by myself if need be, but I did learn a thing or two, particularly about which straps keep the load from falling towards the sides and which straps keep the load from sliding towards the front and back on declines and inclines.

: My travel buddies Darren and Martin taking a rest atop a sand dune alongside Mustafa

: The camels being led through a great big wide open space by Ahmed and Hamada

: Thankfully these flies didn’t bite, but it was pretty annoying to be covered by a cloud of them every day from sunrise to sunset

: A perfect circle in nature. Tiny little plants in the desert get blown in all different directions by the wind, meanwhile getting dragged through the sand and leaving marks all around them that look like this

: Fancy a swim? I didn’t. The water didn’t look all that appealing and it really wasn’t that hot while we were out there in the beginning of February. Daily highs were probably around 65-70F with lows at night around 40

: They say that a lot of these huge rock formations were carved out by water erosion over the course of millennia, but I don’t understand how the water could’ve been deep enough to cover these things. Tassili N’Ajjer National Park sits at an elevation between 1150 and 1800 meters above sea level and there’s nothing higher nearby from where the water could’ve flowed to carve out these rocks. I mean, I could definitely imagine this area being what the bottom of an ocean looks like, but yeah…with the elevation it’s not really clear to me how this theory works.