Spirit of the Desert

To Africa I go:

While the first four months of my travels were mostly in Western Europe, the last two months were spent in Western Africa.

Catapulted beyond Western culture, I immersed myself on a brand new continent and entered an entirely different way of living. 

In my list of initial loose destination plans, I never considered going to Africa. At the start, Europe was exotic enough for me, scary enough for me for a first ever solo trip. If I could successfully accomplish that all on my own accord, then I’d feel pretty damn proud of myself.

However, in tune with the melody of open-mindedness, I found myself gaining confidence in my traveling, craving a deeper challenge and diversification, and therefore flying to Africa.

Dakar, Senegal

The Schengen:

Upon reflection, there is really one prominent thing that I can thank for nudging me towards travel in Africa— the Schengen Visa. The actual bureaucratic bane of my existence at the time, but now I am grateful to it.

The Schengen Visa is the 3 month free visa that we as Americans are alloted while traveling in Europe. European countries that are part of the “Schengen Region” allow non-EU citizens to travel freely throughout them for 90 days within a 6 month period.

3 months of freely-granted travel is pretty generous when considering, but let me tell you, it flies by and then all of sudden you’re in Barcelona at day 89 of your Schengen Visa and you’re heavily considering if the risk of illegally overstaying your welcome is worth it just to not have to leave the best city ever (Barcelona).

And best believe I milked that visa all the way up until day 90.

Then, ultimately, decided I did not want to tamper with foreign legal affairs, and complied to exiting the region. Which, all to say, is what led me to Morocco to volunteer at a surf camp for 6 weeks.

Surf lessons at Imsouane, Morocco (Christmas Day)

Family-style Moroccan breakfast every morning at Maroc Surf Camp

The Grandest Expedition:

Then, after 6 weeks of Morocco and becoming enamored with the slower, simpler pace of life, I decided I was not ready to go back home. I was on this great big beautiful continent of Africa and there was still so much more to see— why not go explore more of it?

One of my travel friends that I had met previously in London, Ben, was also in Morocco at this time and had plans to continue on further south down the coast, which piqued my interest.

We started plotting and scheming, diving into some research, consulting with some locals, and assessing the overall feasibility and safety of a crazy spurred idea…. 

Thus, bred the grand expedition of hitchhiking from Morocco to Senegal, ending in The Gambia, and furthering the exposure to new countries, new cultures, and new adventures.

Map of hitchhiking route:

Start point in Agadir, Morocco, went down the coast into Senegal

Once we got into Senegal, we stopped hitchhiking and used shared cars/taxis to get around and into The Gambia

This was a large turning point in my travels, and an undoubtedly spontaneous, wild, badass, once in a lifetime, story-to-tell-my-grandchildren kind of thing.

A turning point as well because this is where I truly fell in love with and fully leaned into the West African culture.

Hitchhiking is such a raw, exposed way to travel, and inevitably immerses you with the most local of locals.

Especially if the travel spans a long distance— it forces you to slow down, have patience, and fully surrender to and embrace whatever the segment of that day has in store.

Depending on where cars stop to drop you off, you're brought to some of the most random, off the map types of places, sometimes so off the map that there’s hardly any other living souls around (there were many moments in the thick of the Sahara where we were surrounded by nothing but sand, camels, and tumbleweeds).

Hope is an attribute you definitely end up holding out for, and thankfully, holding out for it always proved successful for us.

Hoping someone drives by soon

Nothingness after crossing the border from Morocco to Mauritania.

It also makes you highly appreciative of every small interaction with any human, as each person who decides to pick you up and drive you some distance, big or small, is an essential component to the overall success of the journey.

I wish I could gather every single person that picked us up at one point or another during the journey and throw a huge party for all of them and eat a lot of cake, in their heroic, noble honor.

Desert Man:

I’d have a particularly special and unwavering gratitude for our main hero, the guest of honor, a guy named Zechariah: a Mauritanian man who picked us up in his semi truck, rickety and slow through the unpaved bumpy desert road, but nonetheless hauled our grateful asses without question for EIGHT hours straight, from the border of Mauritania into the capital city of Nouakchott.

Packed so tightly, all three of us in the front (and only) row of the truck, us and our bags taking up most of his personal space, and he never once batted an eye of discomfort or concern.

He offered us snacks that he had with him and he smoked his tobacco pipe formidably out the window.

He wore a lightweight, white airy gown with a wrapped turban.

A true man of the desert. A legend. A force to be reckoned with.

The semi truck in all its glory

A glimpse into the view from the inside of truck

At one point during this long ride with Zechariah, as the sun started to set and darkness slowly crept in, he began slowing his truck down and pulled over on the side of the road. Mind you, as we were still very much in the middle of nothingness.

My highly sensitive cautionary awareness perked up a bit thinking— there is absolutely no one and nothing around for miles, what in the world could we be stopping for?

Are we out of gas?

Do we have a flat tire?

Is his truck breaking down?

Is he over this whole situation of hauling two American kids that are just taking up the limited space in his truck and now he’s decided to drop us off on the side of the road and leave us to our own helpless devices?

But then he mysteriously and silently exited the truck with a plastic jug of water, he walked a few yards into the infinite expanse of the sand surrounding us, took off his sandals, placed them neatly beside him, and began rinsing off his hands, face and feet with the water.

He then knelt on his knees and started to pray.

The slight panic that had so quickly seeped into me had just as quickly dissolved once I realized why we had stopped. Nothing was wrong, no tire was flat, he wasn’t kicking us out, there was no looming doom.

Quite the opposite, this man was praying! It was his call to prayer time, and prayer is something one can do anywhere. Even in the arid void of the desert.

But from my view, he wasn’t just praying. He was one with desert, calling to the divine, transcending us beyond the physical realm into some otherworldly desert nirvana. Praying in the middle of the Sahara Desert, what could be more transcendental??!

Just watching him through the window from inside the truck filled me with awe:

A perfectly framed view of this Mauritanian man bowing gently in prayer beneath the dusky amber sky, saturating the vast empty landscape with a palpable spirit of holiness.

The best word to describe it: ethereal. A true beam of ethereality pierced through every tinge of paranoia that may have been lingering, washing over me in a wave of peace and safety.

He wasn’t just a man of the desert, he was our desert savior (literally saving us from potentially staying stranded in the night).

Zechariah- inside truck view

A magical desert sunset

He stopped to pray a few more times throughout the remainder of the way to Nouakchott. It was almost midnight when he dropped us off safe and sound and in one complete piece at our destination.

We watched and bid farewell as he drove that comedically slow and shaky, yet undeniably trusty, semi off into the dark distance of the Mauritania night.

Immense progress was made that day in our hitchhiking distance due to his charitable act.

God-willing:

Stories of similar acts of kindness and selflessness like that one with Zechariah were so abundant all throughout my time in West Africa.

So many people willing and excited to engage in conversation, so many people going out of their way to help us or accommodate us in any way they could. (Another honorable mention story is of a Gambian man that insisted we stay at his apartment he had in Dakar for 4 nights after overhearing us talk about finding a hotel).

To the many car rides spent trying to cross our language barrier, through mutual efforts on both ends, always ending in genuine laughter, deepened understanding, and when the ride came to an end, an endearing exchange of Hamdulilahs and Inshallah goodbyes— that feeling of magical connection that transcends borders is unlike anything else.

The gnarly, vulnerable, and slightly risky conditions that we subjected ourselves to during the hitchhiking process, ended up giving me one of the most fruitful adventures of my life.

Multiple days spent standing out on the side of the Saharan road with our thumbs up, completely surrendering to the spirit of the divine desert, was not only an epic journey, but also the segue into my deep intrigue and appreciation of this region.

It was also what awakened a new, more intentional approach to my travels.