The authorities marked my last trip with a plague of escorts, "guides," new regulations, convoys, green gendarmerie, and battered khaki army vehicles. Though, after the kidnappings and extremist throat-cutting activity in the hills in recent years, misplacing any more foreigners would have been, as they say, bad P.R. Despite the nature of their jobs, the soldiers I met were unfailingly polite. There was invariably one in the group who could summon the English for "Welcome in my country!"
Finding My Way
It was typical of just about all the Algerians I met. In one remote town, I went to buy some minor supplies but didn't have the right money. The shopkeeper pondered no more than a couple of seconds, then said, "We'll take it anyway!" Unfortunately, I also encountered one of the other sorts, and being robbed of passport, money, credit cards, and return boat ticket tends to spoil your afternoon.
Careful to never directly disobey any instructions given to me, I was nonetheless able to escape from the authorities' overprotective clutches on the most recent trip long enough to achieve the OTP route legs, exploring the desert or trying to find the remnants of the old French pistes of 50 to 60 years gone by. As brilliant as the French cartographers were, their 1950s maps often were difficult to interpret. Satellite images, however, were a different ballgame, but had to be geo-referenced--they had no lines of latitude or longitude. Just as GPS is only as good as the map it's used with, it's the same with satpix. I had to spend long hours studying the old French maps and then transferring the lat/long lines and making scales of intermediate values and miles or kilometers. Even after all that and with a good set of geo-referenced satellite images, you couldn't be certain about the going on the ground. Was the sand too soft, was there impassable vegetation in the wadi, was there a way through the low hills?
The old French route east toward Amguid over high rock hills brings equal praise for the mapmakers and road engineers. Fifty-five years of erosion and rock falls call for careful low-range work in many places, but heavy rain (which also blocked my line of retreat) threw a two-mile-wide flooded wadi across my path at one point. Desperation and a mother-of-invention 30-mile detour north to where I hoped the water would've sunk into the desert presented the longest snail's-pace low-range crawl in history. Unlike me, the G