My dunes are not yours

A man died in the sand dunes yesterday evening. Dunes we walked through a few days ago, wondering about the vivacity of the small green sprouts surging everywhere after the rain.
The desert was green. A very relative idea of green, of course, nothing to see with the Wales or Yorkshire, more a simple shade, like a muslin veil thrown over the erg, hard to distinguish as soon as you come nearer, but undoubtedly there.

Plants are fixing the desert. Sand progresses, in Morocco like in Mauritania, like everywhere. In a few months it can passes over the wall of our Oasis, and after a sand storm, large roads like the one between Erfoud and Rissani looks like a Saharan track. Lines of reeds are planted, tightly, to fix the dunes and stop their progression.



One day is enough for the Dakar to destroy that.

Of course, the Dakar is also (a little bit) profitable for local people. For two or three days, a large number of tourists land in a city, support teams, journalists, real and false V.I.P., people offered a small trip by their company, people following the Dakar, people making photos, people feeling important, adventurous, etc. Ouarzazate was traffic-jammed yesterday, a very unusual view of Mohammed V avenue, once littered with cars. You even had to walk a few meters away to park your car ! Not a rental car available anymore, not a free hotel room anymore.
For hotel, for car renters, for some restaurants, Dakar is a good opportunity, bringing several hundreds of customers at a high price, and off-season. But for the others ? Dakar brings its own infrastructure, a large part of the support (food, mechanics, even fuel) is brought directly from Europe… Hotel managers in Ouarzazate are not the Aït Haddidou nomads whose grazing areas are partially destroyed by the race, neither the inhabitants of Tazarine who see, some years, a flock of a new kind of locusts fly in for a day, leaving the tracks damaged, if not utterly destroyed.

Dakar is a killer. Was there a year without a death ? Participant, organizer, or worse even, a child looking at the cars passing by and not jumping aside quick enough.
Is the game worth it ? Surely for those who take part in it. Any death is deeply unfair and sad, but to die instantly, in the middle of a race, at a time one realizes his dream, seems not so sad, not so unfair as the fate of a child being killed by a machine appearing out of a sand cloud, the modern humming mowing-machine, as hard to understand for these kids of the remote doyars as could be the first trains for the peasant of the last century (actually the next to last century, I have a tendency to forget we are now in the 21st century!).

Dakar has been a real adventure, it has been the opportunity for a beautiful race, opened to amateurs like professionals, it has been the immersion in splendid, difficult and awesome landscapes. It has also lost all of that, becoming a huge organisation, a machine to make money. But it has never ever been the discovery of the desert.

Desert is loneliness, endless repetition of the same empty landscape, to and over the horizon, time passing by without anything moving, anything else than the feet of the nomad walking along his camel. Desert is abrasion by time and nothing, sun burning, salt burning, cold at night, dried lips and eyes tired by reflections over the black stones. It is silence, when one starts to perceive the small moves of insects, the far away echo, feeble as the dream of music in the oasis, the sudden fall of some sand under a bird.

How can you discover the desert when you cover in one day the distance nomads made in more than a week ? How can you actually see the landscapes, amidst the sand clouds of cars and trucks ? How can you feel desert's heat when you're sweating in you protective clothes and helmet ? How can you hear the furtive gliding snake going to meet the Little Prince among the roaring motors ?

The most accurate about the Dakar is its name. Dakar is a raid, a quick incursion into one's territory to rob him and leave him poorer than before. The small news clip showing Elmer Symons laying dead along his bike, with pieces of it scattered around was shown and shown again. Dakar does not even respect those who are part of it.