My brother and I boarded the flight at sunset. The terminal faded orange to gold as our tickets were checked and we walked the jetway towards the plane taking us into Algeria.
Our seats were comfortable and the meal of thawing chicken, butter and bread kilometers beyond continental US fare. They were all hard earned: Ben and I had been sweating the last month to ride this flying aluminum tube. In a frustrating circle of retribution and diplomatic slights, visas are not easily granted between Algerian and American citizens. At the Algerian Embassy in Tunis in a Turkish, Senegalese and Libyan audience, I had been used as an example of jurisprudence: even this American can’t get a visa.
Brother Ben and I had rallied friends from Pretoria, New York, D.C., Tunis, London and Algiers to get two plastic stamps allowing us to throw dollars in the Algerian economy and see our uncle. We owe not a few favors. It had at times seemed impossible, but as we disembarked and waited in customs, grins broke across our faces.
“We’re fucking here,” I said. Brothers McNeil in Algeria, a long way from Lufkin.
Two days later we were eating bacon in Algiers. My uncle’s good friends Janet and Dermitt had offered us some imported rarities, and we enjoyed blueberry pancakes alongside our haram meat and cups of joe bigger than a thimble. Alhamdu Lillah. I could not have slept on a better stomach. Rob left Ben and I eternally grateful in Algiers, all of us with stories for the moors and hearths of the future.
Ben and I spent the next three days visiting a city notorious, epic, beautiful and unknown. Most said before we left: Why? Is it safe? How did you get a visa? Our time was short, but I am eager to return, and hope time is good to Algeria.
Along the southern flank of the Mediterranean, north about 48 miles from Algiers, is the ancient Roman city of Tipaza. Broken columns and arches frame the restless waves. Popular for romantic rendezvous, birds coast in the breeze, lizards slither across timeworn foundations around soft words of love, promise and beauty. Our family friend Mohammed joined Ben and I for lunch surrounded by Roman walls. Men have torn flesh from gills here for millennia.
On the road back to Algiers is a large conical pyramid called The Tomb of the Christian. The stones predate the birth at Bethlehem, however, and an Algerian guide said the buried remains actually belong to a marabout, or Islamic saint. The tomb sits on a hill overlooking the Middle White Sea, and we drank in the view underneath the imposing shadow of its apex.
The next day, Mohammed took Ben and I to the Kasabah. Ascending its many steps and alleys all morning, I continually saw sets and scenes from The Battle of Algiers. Sweating, and cursing my still-healing broken toe, I thought about the revolution here, French colonialism, and its haunting linguistic specter. Rows and rows of knock-off clothes, jeans and jackets, Lacoste polos and Ray Bans, flank the main cobblestone. It looks like Tunis, with different brands. The language is very different, however, with new words for the basics like how much? and where? But the ever-present French is mostly what I hear, and a question forms in my head: why didn’t Algeria reject the colonial tongue?
Mohammed takes us back to Janet and Dermitt’s wonderful house, and we drink a nice brandy amidst a pile of books from their extensive, splendid library. The next morning, Ben and I board a flight to Tunis, getting back the monoscope at airport customs, and return to the country I now call home. A camera scans our body temperature in Tunis for swine flu, our bodies’ thermal images projecting normal, safe degrees.
We quickly go to Shoo Shoo, the local diner famous for its fruit cocktails and o’jja, and down some of their ambrosia. Algiers is a whirlwind of memories in the back of our minds, and as we walk the streets of Tunis’ medina, we begin planning our next journey. To have been there, and to be here, with him, is a fortune immense. Where we have been, and where we will go, is truly gracious.
Our seats were comfortable and the meal of thawing chicken, butter and bread kilometers beyond continental US fare. They were all hard earned: Ben and I had been sweating the last month to ride this flying aluminum tube. In a frustrating circle of retribution and diplomatic slights, visas are not easily granted between Algerian and American citizens. At the Algerian Embassy in Tunis in a Turkish, Senegalese and Libyan audience, I had been used as an example of jurisprudence: even this American can’t get a visa.
Brother Ben and I had rallied friends from Pretoria, New York, D.C., Tunis, London and Algiers to get two plastic stamps allowing us to throw dollars in the Algerian economy and see our uncle. We owe not a few favors. It had at times seemed impossible, but as we disembarked and waited in customs, grins broke across our faces.
“We’re fucking here,” I said. Brothers McNeil in Algeria, a long way from Lufkin.
Algerian customs consisted of two layers of security: blue customs agents checked our papers and grey uniformed domestic or airport security checked our bags. Both gave us helpings of shit. A balding, skinny blue shirt I came to know as Mr. Numbers pulled Ben aside. My brother’s visa was dated five days after our arrival. Mr. Numbers showed us by counting one day, two, three, four and five on his stubby fingers: Algerian visa leniency went only so far and we were just under the fudge factor.
We waited in the terminal, Ben fuming and I desperately trying to paint us in Arabic as innocent travelers keen on spending time with our uncle in Algiers. Hal laissa ka dhallika?
Mr. Numbers began calculating again when I attempted to ask who was his boss - his left pointer finger pulling back days on his right hand, starting with the thumb. Ben shot me boiling frustration in glances. Ben then called a friend whose connections pulled Mr. Numbers out of our path.
The grey shirts then searched our bags as we stepped through metal detectors. The x-ray machine piqued the curiosity of one guard. He pointed at the black and white, ethereal image of our bag’s guts and politely demanded we reveal one suspicious item.
“Mamnoo’a” he said, Forbidden, shaking his head and slightly smiling as he fingered Ben’s monoscope, my last birthday present to him. To better see Africa with.
The grey shirt was calling friends over as I brought Ben up to speed. One of them asked me if I could see in the dark with the glass. The question took me a few seconds to comprehend. This was a not covered in class. The situation was becoming ridiculous: seven or eight guards passing the monoscope, telescoping out it’s entire length, putting their eyes to the glass and discussing the potential spy works of Benjamin Williams McNeil, marathon runner and cook, trim and as physically capable as they come from Langley. I guess. (Soon he was to sprout a moustache and don aviator sunglasses, furthering his Hollywood spook.) Real spies don’t have visa problems, noticeable physical appearances or such low-power tools: the monoscope helps with birds and mountains but would be utterly, completely useless peering into security or industrial complexes from vantage.
With the devious splyglass in custody, Ben and I cut out into the damp fog of Algiers to the domestic flight terminal. Our spirits lifted when Uncle Rob sauntered round the corner. Hugs followed: a beautiful reunion and reminder of family ties and blessed binds. Many laughs and a wonderful bag of chicken sandwiches later, our tribe boarded a midnight flight to Beni Abbes. We nervously snapped a few shots of us with the tailfin in the background, conscious of the black-clad, heavily-armed security forces positioned around the plane. For the second time in our lives, Ben and I sat first-class, and fell asleep lushly in grey pleather. The next couple hours was a haze of exhausted bus travel down a two lane highway lit solely by our headlights. You couldn’t say we exactly slept, arriving at the adequate hotel at dawn.
A scant snooze later, we were chatting with coffee, yogurt and bread, looking out over a dried swimming pool and an arid landscape. We talked of the dilapidated, undeveloped nature of tourism in Algeria, with a few references to the recent civil war. When you have oil, why attract tourists? Transit subsidies are less tangible than oil rigs.
We spent the next day touring Beni Abbes on the edge of the Sahara. We visited a museum ripe with taxidermied desert creatures and a run-down zoo with a 100+ year old turtle. Drank iced sugar milk with dates in the shaded cool of a traditional, strawbale home. Lounged during the afternoon along liquid luxury: an aquamarine and chill pool, shocking beneath ruddy hills and thick heat. The temperature fell with darkness, and we wrapped wool and thick clothes in order to brave the night’s festivity.
Ben, Rob and I followed the crowd to the lamb feast. The roads were dark, the stars out, our bodies tired. We crashed crossed-legged on carpets spread around plywood tables two feet high. In a courtyard the size of small house we sat with nearly a hundred people. Robed in colorful cloth, our female hosts stood at the door, laughing and rushing preparations. The stars twinkled above through the open roof.
The bathroom was down a long, unlit hallway. When I returned, half a lamb was dropped onto our table. No utensils, a few napkins. A big knife was passed between tables, the sole tool. Our tablemates were five Algerian women, who quickly took charge of the tearing, cutting and slicing. I was grateful, and ravenously gorged on bristle, hot fat and tender meat. In a whirl of grease, teeth cleaning, and lip smacking, the lamb disintegrated. The pile of bones, charred or licked clean, lay before us, defeated.
After scrubbing our hands clean with sand, we were stirred to dance as a group of white-robed musicians took over the courtyard. The tables and carcasses were cleared. The rugs were pulled back, unearthing sand, and we danced barefoot to the harmonies of northwestern Saharan music, drums beating and feet pounding. A small boy whirled a wooden automatic rifle raised over his head, out of rhythm and this world.
The next morning Ben and I rose early to watch the birth of the day atop a large dune. The cold sand sucked warmth from my toes as we climbed. Gold began to peak out and slowly the sky lightened. Long shadows were cast. The city gurgled to life: a chicken here, a motor there. Sinking to our ankles in the red softness, we bounded down towards breakfast.
We then climbed through an old desert city, dead and crumbling after a bad rain storm and flood. We burned through breakfast quickly, and stood around in a palmerie afterwards, famished and waiting for lunch. Green crowns atop segmented brown trunks sprouted from the sand. I found some low-hung dates, and pilfered the nekhila for nourishment, carrying two handfuls back to the group. Lunch was a delicious pancake with meat and vegetables, hastily thrown down the gullet with syrupy soda (my friend in Tunis calls it The Black Liquid of Imperialism). I bumbled a little bit in Arabic with a smart and sweet Algerian couple before our posse headed out across the sand, towards the mesa.
Our road led us through another palmerie, this one lusher, verdant. Timur hung in their clusters from the palm fronds, the ripe ones dark. The group thinned out, trickling up the escarpment, pooling at its base, modern clothes stark against the ruddy rocks. Watching our ankles, we climbed up and over pebbles and boulders. Sweating at the top, we breathed deeply the air and view. Green stretched from horizon to horizon following the snaking path of water. We stood on a flat table of rock, like a wide tree stump. Pieces of the mesa lay below us, chunks chiseled off by water, weight and wind. My uncle, brother and I shared a water bottle before cutting across the plateau. The dry wind, the heat and exertion had dried our bodies and the bottle emptied quickly.
It took us over an hour, between the flat rock and hot sun, of scrambling and striding to reach a path down. Here, the cracks in rocks broken from the mesa were filled with dirt and vegetation. Exhausted, I thought waterfall of sand as we carefully slid down the bank. Immediately, the shade and irrigation of the palmerie cooled us. Invigorated, close to the end, we again found clusters of dates within reach: a new type. Nearly black, my favorite yet, they tasted like maple caramel. With their sugar coursing through our veins, we swiftly cut out of the palemerie to buy water. Then we did what we had to do: climb the highest dune in Algeria.
Ben and I started chests out, but the mesa crossing and sheer size of the dune lowered our posture until we were hands and feet, crawling towards the peak. A desert child, a small boy, passed me deftly during the ascent, smiling and nearly mortally damaging my pride. On the top, we caught the birth of night. We then took portraits before the awesome spectacle of the sand sea: moon above still-warm dunes stretching to the horizon in endless crests.
We waited in the terminal, Ben fuming and I desperately trying to paint us in Arabic as innocent travelers keen on spending time with our uncle in Algiers. Hal laissa ka dhallika?
Mr. Numbers began calculating again when I attempted to ask who was his boss - his left pointer finger pulling back days on his right hand, starting with the thumb. Ben shot me boiling frustration in glances. Ben then called a friend whose connections pulled Mr. Numbers out of our path.
The grey shirts then searched our bags as we stepped through metal detectors. The x-ray machine piqued the curiosity of one guard. He pointed at the black and white, ethereal image of our bag’s guts and politely demanded we reveal one suspicious item.
“Mamnoo’a” he said, Forbidden, shaking his head and slightly smiling as he fingered Ben’s monoscope, my last birthday present to him. To better see Africa with.
The grey shirt was calling friends over as I brought Ben up to speed. One of them asked me if I could see in the dark with the glass. The question took me a few seconds to comprehend. This was a not covered in class. The situation was becoming ridiculous: seven or eight guards passing the monoscope, telescoping out it’s entire length, putting their eyes to the glass and discussing the potential spy works of Benjamin Williams McNeil, marathon runner and cook, trim and as physically capable as they come from Langley. I guess. (Soon he was to sprout a moustache and don aviator sunglasses, furthering his Hollywood spook.) Real spies don’t have visa problems, noticeable physical appearances or such low-power tools: the monoscope helps with birds and mountains but would be utterly, completely useless peering into security or industrial complexes from vantage.
With the devious splyglass in custody, Ben and I cut out into the damp fog of Algiers to the domestic flight terminal. Our spirits lifted when Uncle Rob sauntered round the corner. Hugs followed: a beautiful reunion and reminder of family ties and blessed binds. Many laughs and a wonderful bag of chicken sandwiches later, our tribe boarded a midnight flight to Beni Abbes. We nervously snapped a few shots of us with the tailfin in the background, conscious of the black-clad, heavily-armed security forces positioned around the plane. For the second time in our lives, Ben and I sat first-class, and fell asleep lushly in grey pleather. The next couple hours was a haze of exhausted bus travel down a two lane highway lit solely by our headlights. You couldn’t say we exactly slept, arriving at the adequate hotel at dawn.
A scant snooze later, we were chatting with coffee, yogurt and bread, looking out over a dried swimming pool and an arid landscape. We talked of the dilapidated, undeveloped nature of tourism in Algeria, with a few references to the recent civil war. When you have oil, why attract tourists? Transit subsidies are less tangible than oil rigs.
We spent the next day touring Beni Abbes on the edge of the Sahara. We visited a museum ripe with taxidermied desert creatures and a run-down zoo with a 100+ year old turtle. Drank iced sugar milk with dates in the shaded cool of a traditional, strawbale home. Lounged during the afternoon along liquid luxury: an aquamarine and chill pool, shocking beneath ruddy hills and thick heat. The temperature fell with darkness, and we wrapped wool and thick clothes in order to brave the night’s festivity.
Ben, Rob and I followed the crowd to the lamb feast. The roads were dark, the stars out, our bodies tired. We crashed crossed-legged on carpets spread around plywood tables two feet high. In a courtyard the size of small house we sat with nearly a hundred people. Robed in colorful cloth, our female hosts stood at the door, laughing and rushing preparations. The stars twinkled above through the open roof.
The bathroom was down a long, unlit hallway. When I returned, half a lamb was dropped onto our table. No utensils, a few napkins. A big knife was passed between tables, the sole tool. Our tablemates were five Algerian women, who quickly took charge of the tearing, cutting and slicing. I was grateful, and ravenously gorged on bristle, hot fat and tender meat. In a whirl of grease, teeth cleaning, and lip smacking, the lamb disintegrated. The pile of bones, charred or licked clean, lay before us, defeated.
After scrubbing our hands clean with sand, we were stirred to dance as a group of white-robed musicians took over the courtyard. The tables and carcasses were cleared. The rugs were pulled back, unearthing sand, and we danced barefoot to the harmonies of northwestern Saharan music, drums beating and feet pounding. A small boy whirled a wooden automatic rifle raised over his head, out of rhythm and this world.
The next morning Ben and I rose early to watch the birth of the day atop a large dune. The cold sand sucked warmth from my toes as we climbed. Gold began to peak out and slowly the sky lightened. Long shadows were cast. The city gurgled to life: a chicken here, a motor there. Sinking to our ankles in the red softness, we bounded down towards breakfast.
We then climbed through an old desert city, dead and crumbling after a bad rain storm and flood. We burned through breakfast quickly, and stood around in a palmerie afterwards, famished and waiting for lunch. Green crowns atop segmented brown trunks sprouted from the sand. I found some low-hung dates, and pilfered the nekhila for nourishment, carrying two handfuls back to the group. Lunch was a delicious pancake with meat and vegetables, hastily thrown down the gullet with syrupy soda (my friend in Tunis calls it The Black Liquid of Imperialism). I bumbled a little bit in Arabic with a smart and sweet Algerian couple before our posse headed out across the sand, towards the mesa.
Our road led us through another palmerie, this one lusher, verdant. Timur hung in their clusters from the palm fronds, the ripe ones dark. The group thinned out, trickling up the escarpment, pooling at its base, modern clothes stark against the ruddy rocks. Watching our ankles, we climbed up and over pebbles and boulders. Sweating at the top, we breathed deeply the air and view. Green stretched from horizon to horizon following the snaking path of water. We stood on a flat table of rock, like a wide tree stump. Pieces of the mesa lay below us, chunks chiseled off by water, weight and wind. My uncle, brother and I shared a water bottle before cutting across the plateau. The dry wind, the heat and exertion had dried our bodies and the bottle emptied quickly.
It took us over an hour, between the flat rock and hot sun, of scrambling and striding to reach a path down. Here, the cracks in rocks broken from the mesa were filled with dirt and vegetation. Exhausted, I thought waterfall of sand as we carefully slid down the bank. Immediately, the shade and irrigation of the palmerie cooled us. Invigorated, close to the end, we again found clusters of dates within reach: a new type. Nearly black, my favorite yet, they tasted like maple caramel. With their sugar coursing through our veins, we swiftly cut out of the palemerie to buy water. Then we did what we had to do: climb the highest dune in Algeria.
Ben and I started chests out, but the mesa crossing and sheer size of the dune lowered our posture until we were hands and feet, crawling towards the peak. A desert child, a small boy, passed me deftly during the ascent, smiling and nearly mortally damaging my pride. On the top, we caught the birth of night. We then took portraits before the awesome spectacle of the sand sea: moon above still-warm dunes stretching to the horizon in endless crests.
Two days later we were eating bacon in Algiers. My uncle’s good friends Janet and Dermitt had offered us some imported rarities, and we enjoyed blueberry pancakes alongside our haram meat and cups of joe bigger than a thimble. Alhamdu Lillah. I could not have slept on a better stomach. Rob left Ben and I eternally grateful in Algiers, all of us with stories for the moors and hearths of the future.
Ben and I spent the next three days visiting a city notorious, epic, beautiful and unknown. Most said before we left: Why? Is it safe? How did you get a visa? Our time was short, but I am eager to return, and hope time is good to Algeria.
Along the southern flank of the Mediterranean, north about 48 miles from Algiers, is the ancient Roman city of Tipaza. Broken columns and arches frame the restless waves. Popular for romantic rendezvous, birds coast in the breeze, lizards slither across timeworn foundations around soft words of love, promise and beauty. Our family friend Mohammed joined Ben and I for lunch surrounded by Roman walls. Men have torn flesh from gills here for millennia.
On the road back to Algiers is a large conical pyramid called The Tomb of the Christian. The stones predate the birth at Bethlehem, however, and an Algerian guide said the buried remains actually belong to a marabout, or Islamic saint. The tomb sits on a hill overlooking the Middle White Sea, and we drank in the view underneath the imposing shadow of its apex.
The next day, Mohammed took Ben and I to the Kasabah. Ascending its many steps and alleys all morning, I continually saw sets and scenes from The Battle of Algiers. Sweating, and cursing my still-healing broken toe, I thought about the revolution here, French colonialism, and its haunting linguistic specter. Rows and rows of knock-off clothes, jeans and jackets, Lacoste polos and Ray Bans, flank the main cobblestone. It looks like Tunis, with different brands. The language is very different, however, with new words for the basics like how much? and where? But the ever-present French is mostly what I hear, and a question forms in my head: why didn’t Algeria reject the colonial tongue?
Mohammed takes us back to Janet and Dermitt’s wonderful house, and we drink a nice brandy amidst a pile of books from their extensive, splendid library. The next morning, Ben and I board a flight to Tunis, getting back the monoscope at airport customs, and return to the country I now call home. A camera scans our body temperature in Tunis for swine flu, our bodies’ thermal images projecting normal, safe degrees.
We quickly go to Shoo Shoo, the local diner famous for its fruit cocktails and o’jja, and down some of their ambrosia. Algiers is a whirlwind of memories in the back of our minds, and as we walk the streets of Tunis’ medina, we begin planning our next journey. To have been there, and to be here, with him, is a fortune immense. Where we have been, and where we will go, is truly gracious.