Grade Level: SrH-Adult
Producer: BBC
Closed Captioned: No |
Running Time: 55 mins
Country of Origin: Great Britain
Study Guide: No |
Copyright Date: 2002
Available in French: No
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Still attired in his Tuareg indigo howli, Michael is dropped off in a wilderness that is completely featureless, except for a short iron pillar, which marks the boundary between the Republic of Niger and the Republic of Algeria. There is one other feature, the carcass of a car abandoned in the desert, stripped of all colour by wind and sand. The journey North is a via dolorosa mile-stoned by the wrecks of 2CVs and Peugeots, memorials to the people who never made it in this hellish terrain. This was the desert in which Margaret Thatcher's son Mark famously went missing when the Paris-Dakar Rally passed through. Before reaching the spectacular Hoggar Massif, Michael encounters a fellow countryman travelling in the opposite direction, 68-year-old Tom Sheppard, former RAF Test Pilot and desert enthusiast, on his own and unarmed in country where lawlessness and banditry are rife. Still forging North, Michael reaches the oil and gas fields of Algeria, on which the economy of the nation depends. He pauses at Hassi Messaoud, where the installations built by the French in the 1950s have turned the desert into a piece of rural Europe – including a herd of very English-looking cows that supply the oil-workers with fresh milk. Across the border lies Colonel Gadaffi's Great Socialist People's Arab Jamahariya. It is quite a coup to get permission for a production team to film in Libya, a country just rejoining the world from its isolation following Lockerbie. Michael journeys West along the North Coast, past exquisite – and totally deserted – Roman sites at Cyrene and Leptis Magna. His destination is Tunisia – where he once was crucified. Much of the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian was filmed in Tunisia, and Michael revisits the old film locations in El Haddej, Monastir and Sousse. But this is more than a trip down Memory Lane. Tunisia is the only Arab country in Michael's Saharan odyssey where mass tourism plays an important role. He visits the island playground of Djerba, where one of the locals voices his grave disquiet at the rise of sex tourism. Then, after a lightening tour of a Roman brothel and a Roman public toilet, Michael boards the Maghreb Express to the dangerous and Frenchified city of Algiers. In a country which has seen the death of 100,000 Algerians and a hundred foreigners in a vicious civil war that has been waged since 1992, Michael cannot move from his hotel room without a substantial bodyguard. Undeterred however, and to the horror of the Foreign Office, he tours the Casbah, centre of Algerian terrorism, before boarding the 8.00 am to Oran, one of the most famous trains in the world because it has been blown up so often in a region South of the city, called The Triangle of Death. There is only a short stay in Oran before Michael arrives by ferry in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the coast of Morocco (in effect, Spain's Gibraltar). More to the point, Ceuta is a little chunk of Europe on the African mainland, and as such is a magnet for Africans who cross the Sahara to breach the citadel of Fortress Europe. He is almost home. An hour's trip on the ferry will take Michael back to Europe. Before the journey's end he sees disturbing evidence of illegal immigration on the delightful beaches of Tarifa. Thence to Gibraltar, and in his year away much has changed. There is the smell of betrayal in the air. The locals are facing another referendum on joint sovereignty with Spain, and as the ancient Ceremony of the Keys is performed in the Central Square, the words, “The Citadel is safe, and all's well”, ring out. But is the citadel safe, Michael wonders? |
