I forgot how I came to hear about Ghardaia. It must have been during an aimless google search of Algeria as a travel destination, and I probably have searched for “Algeria towns” and Ghardaia popped up amongst the image results. I quickly realised this is the best approach for any adventure travel that I wish to embark on — if I type just Algeria, google images churns out hundreds of photos showing demonstrations and an impassioned populace spelling chaos and instability. But try “Algeria travel” instead, the resulting images show something quite different and tantalising. I guess if one is passive about traveling, or is already fearful, then those fractious news and images rampant of certain countries will seem especially jarring. But with a little dose of skepticism and curiosity, there are always hidden gems waiting to be discovered.
What I do remember was seeing the photos of Ghardaia and feeling my excitement mounting: I have to go to Algeria, I have to see Ghardaia. It was an otherworldly desert town with peculiar architecture where the lines and planes melded with the shades and the shadows of the desert. In many ways Ghardaia pretty much sealed my decision to visit Algeria. I was aware of how far it is from Algiers and at the time of my research, I had the impression that it was very difficult to get to and visit independently. Even when I was making my visa application at the Algerian Embassy in London, the officer interrogated me on my itinerary and told me I can’t visit Ghardaia on my own and will have to book a tour for that part of the trip. Of course I said “sure” but wasn’t planning to book one till I arrive in Algeria and get a feel of the place, which turned out to be wise.
Instead of engaging a guide to visit the quaint UNESCO city, I turned to couchsurfing and hoped to stay with a local to have a more authentic experience. It turned out to be the most memorable couchsurfing experience I ever had.
I arrived in Ghardaia on an overnight bus from Constantine, and had an unpleasant encounter with a bus attendant who tried to coax me to sit next to him after a brief chat with him at our dinner stop, I declined and mumbled that I need my space to sleep. He then made superfluous attempts to alert me half an hour before we have even arrived at Ghardaia by accosting me at my seat and laying his hand on my thigh. I immediately jerked awake and used my 60L backpack as a shield. Thankfully he got the impression that I’m not to mess with and went back to his seat. I spent the rest of the ride without sleep and wishing very hard that my host will be at the station at 5.30am to meet me. And that he would be “normal”.
When I arrived, Karim, my host, was indeed there, and there was something about him that made my constricted muscles relax at once and I knew I was safe. I could write a whole essay about traveler’s intuitions but this is for another time. Instinctively, I got into the front seat of his car and sat next to him.
Karim was in his early forties and exuded confidence and openness but also seemed very down to earth. There were no contrived get to know you conversations as he drove me to his place in the car, just small talk about the trip and what I was planning to do in the next few days in Ghardaia. By the time we arrived at his place, which was a 15 min drive away from the bus station, we already have the next fews days’ itinerary planned out. He was the kind of host that takes care of you and felt a personal responsibility for your trip. I had no idea what there is to do in Ghardaia and was clearly in good hands.
When I arrived at his home, I was delighted to find that I basically had a room to myself. It was still a couch but in an enclosed room that served as an additional living room. I immediately fell into a deep sleep. I shall never forget the weird and blissful feeling of falling onto the unfamiliar couch in the unfamiliar room of a stranger’s home, and yet knowing I was safe and sound and could rest peacefully at last.
Ghardaia turned out to be the capital city of Ghardaia province. The first day in Gharadaia, Karim drove me to the one of the villages in M’zab region, or Ghardaia the province. We arrived and met with a French speaking tour guide and a French-Algerian couple who came from Avignon. So the officer at the Embassy was right that you need a tour guide, and can’t wander off by yourself. This is because the region is very conservative and the inhabitants don’t like tourists everywhere intruding into their daily lives without a guide. I find this a curious explanation, but I think another reason might be that there were a number of ethnic riot incidents in the south between 2015–2016, between ethnic Arabs and Berbers, and having a guide might have been a sensible thing to do since then.
Ghardaia (the province) did not disappoint and turned out to be much bigger than I imagined with its constituent villages. Originally built by the Ibadites, a schismatic sect of Muslims in the 10th century, the towns consist of stratified masses of houses on rocky peaks, each dominated by a mosque and minaret, elevated on the skyline like a divine finger protecting the unified, mythical community. The mosques, the mausoleums, the houses, all exemplified a simple, minimalistic style that struck me as at once rational and elegant, yet dreamlike and otherworldly. I could have been warped in time in a bygone civilisation, or in a distant future, or on a Star Wars footage.
You would imagine food here to be bland and sandy like the desert, they were not. There were the usual Algerian food like couscous and burek, but I ordered something I’ve never seen before — if I weren’t wrong (I probably am) it was (lamb?) meat wrapped in grape leaves which was so good that I sacrificed one piece amongst four of us for each to try, and there was this vegetable soup which was very light and delicious. This is the problem writing about food in your travels, you never know it to be special until you devoured it and don’t come across it again on your trip. Then you forgot about it because your other senses have been stimulated in so many ways and you fall asleep blessed and content full of whirling sensations from the day. And one day you wake up and realise, you forgot how it tasted like, that mysterious food you tried on a mysterious land. Regrettably I’m not the kind to take photos of my food, and the delightful tastes have faded into a distant dream.
Over the next two days I learned a lot about Karim and the realities of leading a life in this conservative part of Algeria. Karim’s family including his parents and siblings have all obtained French citizenship and emigrated to France because of citizenship rules recognising his father’s birthright in French Algeria before the country’s independence. When his father applied for the family, Karim was already above 18 years old and could not benefit from citizenship by virtue of his father’s birthright. He has had a complicated relationship with his father and despite no longer living in the same country, his father turned to him to help with buying a property in Ghardaia, intervened in his personal affairs and persuaded him to marry. Karim, trying to appease his parents’ concerns that he was fooling around with various women, met his wife only once while crossing her on the street and broached the subject of a likely match to his parents. So his parents spoke to the parents of his wife-to-be and a proposal of marriage was thus made. The reality is that he married someone he had never loved and they were mismatched on many levels, emotionally and intellectually.
The defiant millennial in me thought he probably had no balls when he was 30 and allowed his parents to walk over him and decide his life’s happiness, it’s a sad case but he just has to man up to it now. Then I thought about how different I was 10 years ago: to me the best thing in the world then was to be in medical school in Singapore and I didn’t think I’d leave the country; 10 years before that I had refused to learn French when it was offered for free at my school, thinking why would I ever go and live in France? Oh well. I guess external environment does dictate our way of thinking. It might not be my rebellious and independent mind that made me an independent woman after all. If I had lived in Ghardaia all my life, I might have delayed marriage as an attempt at rebelling, but still have let my parents picked my life partner, because I simply wouldn’t have known any better.
Still, it was difficult to fully empathise with Karim because his wife was not ugly or lazy or mean. She turned out to be of around my age, but much more beautiful and curvaceous with doll-like features and porcelain skin. She was also a good cook and bore him two adorable kids. On many occasions I tried to help her with food preparation but she always insisted that she will manage and that I’m the guest. Of her intellectual capacities I could not judge, but she was very kind and good-natured. She spoke with me in basic English while most Algerian women I met outside Algiers couldn’t speak English or French. We had candid chitchats over lunch when Karim wasn’t around. She told me how Karim favoured his daughter over his son, probably due to his own complex relations with his dad, and how he was never happy with what she cooked and was very distant and demanding at times.
Nothing she did seem to please Karim and throughout my stay it was evident that Karim paid more attention to me when I spoke, more than anything she had to say. In the evenings we would eat at home with her and the kids, or outside just the both of us, and then spend the evening drinking tea at some teahouse and chat about life, while his wife remained at home with his kids.
I could see that Karim definitely did not harbour any romantic feelings towards me, but rather I was a welcome escape from his life at home. We spoke French and his wife didn’t, so maybe that was another reason why he preferred to chill with me in the evenings. He told me that his wife already knows that his heart is not in the marriage, and that he would run off with a foreign girl and emigrate to another country, he would totally do it. In fact, he did fall in love with a Belgian girl who visited Ghardaia two years ago who stayed at his friend’s for couchsurfing, but Karim ended up showing her around and they even took a trip to Timimoun together. The girl even initially agreed to marry him and later changed her mind. They have been in touch to this day.
After an evening of long conversations and heavy revelations, he drove us back to his home. We stopped outside and he asked me how guys in my culture flirted with women. He has had no experience and wanted to learn. I was shocked. It turns out that he had never cheated on his wife, and never had any women before his marriage. He had only kissed the Belgian girl twice.
During my stay Karim treated me like family. On the first day when he drove to a viewpoint at higher altitude to show me the sunset, it was all dust and haze by the time we arrived and I couldn’t get a decent photo. On the day I was leaving he surprised me by driving there again and the sunset was in raging hues of orange, purple and blue, stretched above the moorish architecture of the M’zab villages. Thank you, I said, I’m so happy to be here. “Pas de quoi, je suis là pour toi.” He replied simply, like it was the most natural thing to do for someone you’ve just met.
There are a handful of people I’ve met whom I thought deserved much more happiness than what fate has ordained and Karim is one of them. I’m not pitying Karim or his life in Ghardaia, he has fulfilled his needs and is financially well off, but he is truly a Renaissance man with an open mind and a heart of gold. He deserves so much more happiness, and above all, freedom.
I imagined that if I were to obtain European citizenship one day I wouldn’t mind offering Karim a sham marriage so that he could seek his own happiness in Europe (since I’m not very keen on having a real husband anyway). Then I thought about his wife, and how much I liked her and how much he mattered to her. I guess I’d never do that. I was so in awe of the synchronicities that led me to this epic adventure in Algeria and grateful for this encounter that wished I could do more. Yet the universe has its unspoken laws as to how much we can help and meddle.
On the evening of my departure (on another night bus), Karim’s wife specially packed breakfast and fruits for me, and when I was leaving she asked Karim if she could come along too to send me off but Karim dismissed her whim in Arabic, probably citing looking after the kids as an excuse. As we hugged and bid goodbye I could see tears in her eyes. “I will miss you”, she said, holding both of my hands as she let the tears flow. I understood then that what mattered wasn’t the brevity and mundanity of our interactions, but that as a first solo female traveller in her household I was a window to a world beyond the confines of her home and a distant husband. That outside world closed upon her as I walked out of the door.
This first travel story is dedicated to my hiking friend Anna, who motivated me to write like she motivated me to move my bum up the Scottish mountains.
The itinerary: Algiers, Tipaza, Blida, Constantine, Timgad, Ghardaia, Timimoun, Oran, Tlemcen.
