1974
In 1973 I was a labourer on an Alberta Government Telephones crew ploughing cable underground. I saved lots of money. In January 1974 I flew to Ireland for what turned out to be a nine month journey. It was easy for me to travel in Ireland and Britain because I had family in Belfast, Liverpool and London. The last week of May I was at the Marseille youth hostel where Australian John Arnup (Tebessa photo) talked me into taking the boat to Tunisia. From there I traveled to Algeria, Morocco, Spanish Sahara, the Canary Islands, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Nigeria and Niger. (Continued below)
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Though I got a few rides in Algeria, hitchhiking was nearly impossible, so travel was often by bus and sometimes by train. However, at the bottom of Morocco you traveled in the back of trucks. There was no road then. Because of the constantly drifting sand, the track was sometimes erased. Several times the driver went in a large circle to find the track again. From El Aaiun, just inside the Spanish Sahara, I flew to the Canary Islands.
I was in the Canary Islands about a month. It was pretty much the same as being in Spain. There I got to know Brazilian Eduardo Brandao (Mali photo). We took a boat down the coast of Spanish Sahara. By sleeping on the deck, the fare was very cheap. At Nouadhibou we rode free in an iron ore car about 400 km east. From there transportation was by a small pickup truck with benches along the sides. I got a touch of sun stroke. Luckily we took a long break early in the afternoon. I was ferried across the Senegal River in a dugout canoe. Dakar, Senegal to Bamako, Mali was by train.
Perhaps in Ghana Eduardo and I met Joseph Rodriguez traveling in the same direction. In the Porto Novo souvenir stand photo he is on the right. I think the guy seated in the middle, Adechokan Mouba, was a friend of his who lived in Porto Novo. We stayed at Adechokan’s house one or two nights and he took us to a club where a band was playing excellent West African rock.
I had planned to go north from Nigeria across the Sahara Desert. At Lagos I went to the Algerian embassy two or three times but they were unable or unwilling to give me a visa. So I headed north to Niger by myself to get the visa. I rode a train from Lagos to Kano. I rode in the back of a pickup truck to the border and in the back of a larger truck to Niamey. I took the two Niger photos from the back of the truck, the first photo because of the flooding in an area that had experienced a very long drought.
When the truck stopped for the night, I talked to some locals who told me Agadez, in the Niger Sahara, was a tourist town, which made my plan sound much less like the adventure I had pictured. By the time I got to Niamey I had decided I did not need another week bouncing around in the back of a truck and I had seen plenty of the Sahara in Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania. In late September I flew to Algiers and took a boat to Marseille.
To create this page I looked at the photographs enlarged on my computer screen. I saw a number of things I don’t remember seeing before. In the Tebessa image the faces are so dominant that I had failed to notice someone peeking out from behind the door. I had never paid much attention to the Casablanca image. Now I noticed the ship and when I made the shadows lighter I could see much clearer more than a dozen people going about their lives, walking, standing, sitting, talking. In the first Niamey image, if you look closely near the middle, there is a fellow riding a camel.