Chad Adventure I. Across Chad

Chad… Savannah, Sahel and Sahara.

With excitement, apprehension and expecting new things we went to Chad.  Chad rests in the middle of northern Africa, with savannah in the south, Sahel (a dry, fertile region) in the middle, and Sahara (Arabic for “desert”) in the north. Our travels would take us across the country on poor roads, no roads, and camels.  We would experience some of the most difficult travel and most amazing places and cultures of our lifetimes.  We were on our way.

Kelly’s thoughts…

Planning, preparation, packing. Since I first heard about the amazing place that is Chad, it was clear we needed to go. But it was a little surprising it was happening only a year after learning about the country. Last year in Kenya, our guide told me about this amazing country with land forms, history and wildlife to rival any place in Africa, or even the world. Riki and I had already been exploring the American Southwest, especially our beloved New Mexico, but I wanted to do something big for our first international adventure. I thought maybe somewhere I had been, so I’d know the travel issues, places to visit, etc. But then I thought maybe a new place for each of us would be better, to celebrate our new life and new adventure together. A number of places came to mind, but at some point I decided we could do this Big Trip together… if Riki was willing. And she was.

After weeks of arranging travel, outfitting with needed gear, getting passports and visas, arranging for the house and the dogs, one winter day… we were off.

Getting to Chad is no small feat. Our flights were originally scheduled from Denver to Munich to Vienna to Adis Abada to N’Djamena. Right away our flights to Munich were canceled because of winter storms in Germany. So we ended up in Frankfurt. Then further complications, but eventually we made it to Vienna. These were Riki’s first experiences with international travel and international airports, but she did just fine. A lot of cribbage playing and waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally we boarded in Vienna for Africa. A layover in Adis Abada, Ethiopia proved to be a somewhat bigger shock to Riki with a huge scrum of people, new smells, complicated scenarios and the awareness that we were really in an unfamiliar part of the world. Also, by then we were crazy tired from flights and airports. But our last leg to N’Djamena was uneventful. Our bags made it just fine, we got those valuable stamps in our passports, and exited the airport into the country of Chad.

Finally in Chad

We arranged our safari through Eyte’ Voyages in Chad. We were picked up at the airport by Adolfo, the owner of Eyte’, and Yves, our driving/interpreter/guide for the trip. A quick drive next door to the airport got us to our hotel, and after a quick planning meeting with Adolfo, we were left to ourselves.

The night in the hotel would be the last in civilization for the next 12 days. We enjoyed a nice meal and a couple drinks in the company of dozens of common agama lizards, which are everywhere in Chad.

Evening in N’Djamena was lovely at the hotel. We did a bit of laundry and enjoyed the sunset call to prayer from the nearby mosque (the president’s mosque). We were clearly not in New Mexico any more.

We awakened very expectant the next morning to find Yves with a loaded Toyota Landcruiser and our cook for the trip, Armando. After a few moments getting our packs secured, we all piled in, and off we went into Chad.

N’Djamena

Our first experience with the people and culture of Chad was driving through the outskirts of the dusty, lizard-ridden city of N’Djamena (from Arabic meaning, “place of rest”), the capital of Chad. N’Djamena was founded as Ft. Lamy by the French at the junction of the Logone River with the Chari River, which provides the water for Lake Chad. The other side of the river from N’Djamena is Cameroon where that country extends north in a sliver all the way to Lake Chad. We learned that Chad and Cameroon share a common currency, the Central African CFA Franc, along with Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon.

We had our first look at camels as well as Nubian goats, Sahel-type sheep with their long tails, cattle and donkeys. In Chad, there are about 32 million cattle, 37 million goats, 31 million sheep, 4 million donkeys, and 9 million camels (the most of any nation) according to the Google. This in a country with 17 million people. We saw these animals throughout the entire trip and will have more to say about them later.

Into the Sahel

As we left town, the road and the countryside became considerably more rustic. In fact, for the next three days we crossed most of the country through extremely remote and empty landscapes on “roads” that are barely deserving of that term. The roads were all two-tracks (see video in gallery below) and only rarely did we see the occasional UN or Red Cross vehicle. But we were almost never out of sight of the camels, goats and sheep. Small villages dotted our route, and we often saw people tending their livestock. But we learned that this was mainly just along this route. The region we crossed has a density of fewer than 1 person per square mile in an area including over 200,000 square miles (the northern half of Chad). In comparison, our New Mexico, not a really dense state, has about 17 people per square mile and an area of 120,000 square miles.

We drove most of each day, with two camps along the way. We slept in our own sleeping bags and liners in a small safari tent on mattresses provided by Eyte’. Yves and Armando set up our camps at places of their choosing while we explored nearby.

Our first camp was in a scrubby area near the road. Our first night out in Chad was uneventful except for the beautiful sunset, the lowing of doves, camels and donkeys wandering by, and our amazement at being in that place. In the morning there were fresh golden wolf footprints in camp from a late night visitor.

Our second camp was in the middle of a vast emptiness with another fantastic sunset and a sky lit by stars and the milky way far, far from any human lights. The sense of vastness and emptiness in the sky was reflected in the landscape of that place.

Wildlife

As we traveled northeast across the emptiness, we did see wildlife including many, many tenebrionid beetles, scorpions, spiders and other arthropods. Commonly we encountered giant buprestid beetles on the spiny acacias. These giant, beautiful jewel beetles were slow moving and slow flying and really impressive.

At one place where we got out to pee, Riki startled some locusts from an acacia bush. It turned out there was an entire plague of locusts in that area! (See video in gallery below).

We also crossed the largest protected area in Africa, the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve, a huge empty region in the middle of Chad. Here we saw a scimitar-horned oryx, golden wolves, striped ground squirrels, and numerous birds including Arabian bustards, one of the largest birds that can fly. We also saw many dorcas gazelles. These amazing antelope are extremely small (less than two feet at the shoulder), but run like crazy. We clocked them at over 50mph. And we found a dead African polecat and common agama lizards were everywhere. (See some animal videos in gallery below).

Kalait

The only village of any size we encountered was the small frontier town of Kalait. This village is on the trading routes from Sudan, Nigeria and Libya. Here we fueled up and explored the market. The people are unaccustomed to white people or tourists of any kind, and there is no real culture of tourism, so we attracted some attention, but Yves was extremely helpful.

From Kalait, we still had some distance to our first major destination, the Ennedi Plateau. As we continued to travel northeast, we began to encounter more varied terrain. It was exciting to see rocks and large outcroppings in the distance. The further we went, the more of this we saw until it became clear the terrain was changing entirely, and in the afternoon of the third day traveling across the emptiness of north Africa, we finally arrived at the remote and incredible Ennedi Plateau.

Riki’s thoughts…

My first international trip, and I did not know enough to have a focus for worry. Kelly wanted to make our first trip special. I remember some of his original suggestions. . . France, Peru, or New Zealand. Joining my life with someone who has been on dozens of trips all over the world, I knew that Kelly would know how to navigate any of those countries. But when he had gotten back from Kenya, he told me he wanted to go to Chad someday. Why not start my world travels there? He told me very little about what we would see and do there, knowing that I love surprises, and that I had no frame of reference for comparison, anyway. Sometimes, he struggled as we were with others, wanting to tell them about the trip, but not wanting to ruin the surprise for me. I could tell that he was super excited about what we were going to see, so I knew it would be amazing. He worked tirelessly planning the trip, booking the flights, purchasing the gear, and finalizing the arrangements with our tour company. I just waited and wondered.

The good thing about taking an extremely long flight for the first time is that there is no PTSD from prior flights that dampen the thrill of ten hours in a flying cylinder with hundreds of strangers and two fussy babies. I noticed that the airlines are always offering you a meal, no matter what time it is. They also control whether you should be awake or asleep by the cabin lights. The flight from Denver to Germany was an overnight flight with no problems. My noob enthusiasm and anticipation about the trip, along with my handsome and charming travelling companion, made the flight even better than tolerable.

The Frankfurt layover, though stressful for Kelly as he worked out flight cancellations, was entertaining for me. We enjoyed some delicious German soup while we waited. There was a little mouse scurrying around one of the gates. Bold little guy! We connected just fine through Vienna, and were on our way to Ethiopia on another long flight. More feeding us at random times, more force sleeping time, but my curiosity and my wonderful companion carried me through.

We landed in the morning at Addis Ababa airport, locale of my first meltdown. Everything was different: sights, smells, sounds, even simple things like bathroom customs and equipment. Before I braved the line for the restroom, I made Kelly promise not to leave me while I was in the restroom. I stood in line, fighting to keep myself from tipping over. Kelly’s gentle wisdom and assurance along with the distraction of games of cribbage in the airport helped me pull myself together. I think the most difficult part was a feeling that who I was (how I dressed, the language I spoke, even the way I moved through life) just felt wrong for the culture surrounding me. This was a feeling that lingered the whole trip. I think, though, that it is a good sensation to experience. It is perhaps a part of the broader human experience, and something from which I had been sheltered for the first 51 years of my life.

The last link in the flight chain was across Africa from Ethiopia to Chad. We were headed deep into a section of the continent that very few Americans visit. We saw four American Coast Guardsmen in the hotel. I am still trying to figure out if they were there on assignment in a landlocked country, or vacationing. I really wish I had asked. The hotel was very nice, a great place to spend the night before our road trip began. I loved seeing all the lizards on the outside walls and was relieved that they were only outside, for the most part.

The times that we stopped in the bigger cities were a bit overwhelming, giving me that airport feeling again. Even though I was dressed modestly in field clothes and a head covering, I still felt extremely uncomfortable. All the women I saw were dressed head-to-toe in bright cloth that only showed their eyes. In addition, we were the only Anglos in sight. I think it is a part of the world that rarely sees people of our skin tone. In fact, when we asked Yves, he said that there were less than 600 tourists that visit the Ennedi each year.

Our campsites for the first two nights were spots just off the road in a patch of trees, if available. The conditions were rough, and not having a bathroom was the hardest part. It felt like a grand adventure despite the challenges, or maybe because of them. I felt perfectly safe alongside my soulmate, who was confident and funny and entertaining and smart. The first time we had to take a pit stop was the worst, as Yves directed the men to one side of the vehicle, and the women (only me) to the other side. Trying to find the correct side of an appropriate prickly bush to serve as my potty place got easier every time. Travelling as the only woman in the party necessitated a decreased level of modesty and decorum. I have learned that just relaxing into the change, and going with the reality of the situation was the best way to deal with anxiety, so that I could stay in the moment, relishing the trip.

The rest of our travel days were spent speeding along two dirt tracks, through little villages, by herds of livestock. The 4-75 air conditioning (4 windows down at 75mph) worked great in the vehicle, mostly. I only got a bit carsick a few times. Those rough times were made bearable by hard candy, essential oils, and the medicines that Kelly had thoughtfully packed. He called it “better travel through chemistry.” The country through which we travelled was beautiful. It was three hard days of travel before we made it to our first official site, but the three days filled my mind with images and feelings that made me feel alive in a way I have never known.

Scroll down for more video and images.