To my mind, already overawed by the conceptual space of the Saharan plains a few hundred miles south, this surreal yellow twilight emphasized a couple of things about Algeria. That the country is huge, certainly, the 10th-biggest in the world by area. But also that it is obscure, hidden behind barriers both geographical and artificial.
Five days earlier, in the capital Algiers, my guide, Omar Zahafi, had started filling in the void. A 36-year-old Algiers native, with a prodigious beard and an ankle-length orange chemise covering his giant build, Omar was well acquainted with the discrepancy between his country’s size and its reputation.
“When I’ve been abroad and told people I am from Algeria, they would say, ‘Nigeria!?’ ” he said. “And I would be like, ‘You know between Morocco and Tunisia there is that big space? That’s my country!’ ”
Old Algiers, Omar explained on a crisp morning last month, was a city in two parts. The lower section, from the embanked waterfront to the boulevards, is the French quarter, once the hub of colonial power. Today, the tall white facades molder above shops old and new, the flaking stucco reliefs looking preposterous next to the brightly colored laundry draped over the balustrades. Immediately north, forming a wedge, is the original town, known as the Kasbah, a ramshackle labyrinth of alleyways, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1992. Much of its layout dates back to its time as an Ottoman protectorate and entrepot for corsair plunder, in the centuries before a French expeditionary force landed at Sidi Ferruch in 1830.
In July, Algeria will mark 60 years since the country gained independence from colonial rule. But the wounds of that era, and the brutal, seven-year war of independence that was its coda, remain ever-present in the capital. If the city has a nucleus, it is the elevated, scimitar-wielding statue of Emir Abdelkader, who led the resistance against the original French invasion. In the heart of the Kasbah, opposite the shop of a honey merchant aswarm with bees, Omar showed me a great hole in the otherwise tightly packed buildings, tiled rooms open to the sky, the unrepaired blast area of French bombs.
Algeria had its modern preoccupations, of course. Murals of Riyad Mahrez, the country’s preeminent footballer, now enjoy similar prominence to the old iconography of revolutionary martyrs such as Ali La Pointe, who was immortalized in the 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers.” But it explained something of Algeria’s sclerosis that the shadows of that conflict remained so tangible. Tourism was a future thing, and Algeria was still dealing with its ghosts.
For people like Zahafi, whose tour company, Fancyellow, is one of only a handful of agencies catering to foreign visitors, the coronavirus pandemic had been another setback in a long campaign to awaken a sleeping giant, arguably one of the most culturally distinct places you can reach via a short flight or overnight ferry from mainland Europe. He told me that his recent overtures to a noted travel publisher to update its Algeria guidebook had been rebuffed. “They said there is no market for it,” he said.
Over the next few days, we would be testing this pessimistic appraisal with a road trip along the coastal belt, the strip of fertile, mountainous land that sustains Algeria’s agriculture, and the vast majority of its population, before tapering into the Saharan wastes that cover about 80 percent of its surface area.
It was dark when we arrived in Constantine, Algeria’s other unmissable city. Accommodating my impatience, Omar…
Read More: Exploring Algeria’s coastal belt – The Washington Post
