My trip to the Algerian desert

From Tamanrasset, we went with a guide in the rocky desert, and believe me, this is something I will never forget. We had the opportunity to go for 3 days in the desert with a guide, a Tuareg (thanks to my friend who can speak Arabic and Berber... extremely useful!!!).This was absolutely unbelievable!! We were alone, far away from the tourists and their pre-planned tours, and it was absolutely stunning...

Our guide could only speak Berber, I had to rely on the translations, but it was worth it! We passed through amazing lunar landscapes that you can see only there, in Algeria.

Our guide told us that it was a bit dangerous sometimes, because of the wadi. A wadi or oued is an Arabic term for a dry riverbed that contains water only during heavy rains. An Algerian singer has even been killed because he had been trapped in a valley that was filling with water, and apparently, he's not a unique case...
That's a very entertaining story, but we had other wonders to pay attention to, like those spectacular rocky paintings, attributed to the Neolithic Age (see the Polaroid below). They seem to have been painted the day before, it's absolutely amazing!

When the night fell, we experienced what "pitch black" really means (as well as "silence", as explained later...); we had to pitch the tents, prepare the dinner, do the washing-up, get prepared to go to sleep, all of this by the campfire light...
And what happened? Well, easy to guess!! We had much more light at 2 AM with the storm and lightning to get dressed, take the tents down, put everything into the Jeep, including ourselves, and leave the place that what starting to fill with water at an incredible speed...
Our guide parked the car in a slope, so if anything unusual happened once more, he'd just have had to start the car and leave. But the rest of the night was quiet, except that no one could really sleep.

In the morning, we went to visit some friends of his, who basically told him off because he hadn't taken us to them during the night! They offered us some fried goat's meat and fresh goat milk (it had just been milked and was still warm), that we had to at least try... At 8 AM, it's not so easy to be polite!

This guide was absolutely fabulous! He led us to some heights in the mountains, to visit some of his family (absolutely charming people who offered us dinner), to make us ride some camels for free (with some other friends of his!), to meet the guard of the Hoggar National Park, who taught us to prepare food by cooking it into the sand (don't ask me how... I'm usually a bad cook...), and that was delicious...

The experience was unbelievable, and so unique. We went to some other places like The Assekrem, highest point of the Hoggar Mountains, and Charles de Foucauld's place of retreat, but nothing as magical as what we experienced before...