Camping in the Wild: Africa

In Africa and particularly in the Sahara Desert one of the most important prerequisits of camping in the wild is always met: there’s room. The trouble comes when you have to put up or protect the tents.

by FERENC IVANICS
In Morocco it was always easy to find a nice camp site, we usually camped in forests—which became more and more fragmented as we walked south. We had problems near populated areas, but not with humans. Near Casablanca while putting up our tents we noticed lots of small, black balls. Next morning we weren’t awoke by a rooster crowing but sheep baaing near our tents. Sheep eat anything they find, especially in Africa where dried out, yellowish-green grass is their main course. When we noticed them, we had to get out of our tents quickly and drive away the animals, which were already tasting the skins of our home.


Apart of the domesticated animals there was another “enemy”, smaller but deadlier: scorpions. You can see scorpions of various sizes and colors. The more you travel south, the bigger they are. We had to close every small cracks and gaps and slots: with zippers, velcros, anything. You have to inspect very carefully the bottom of your tents every morning, and get rid of the arthropods that had spent the night there. That was quite a scary process at first but later became a dull routine.


The desert—doesn’t really matter if it’s in Morocco, Western-Sahara or Mauritania—is an enormous but poorly equipped camping. There’s space, but virtually there’s nothing else. Without soil we had to invent methods to fix the tents many times, and it was a tiresome job. It’s easy to drive stakes into the sand but they slip out just as easily. And in rocky deserts there’s no way you can drive the stakes into the ground. We used stones—their size depended on the strength of the ever-blowing wind—to hold the cords. I suppose there’s specialized tents for sand or snow, but we had what we had.


To use this method we needed stones. And sometimes it turned out to be hard to find them. Near the Moroccan-Mauritanian border we virtually camped on a landmine-field for ten days. Collecting stones on a mine-field is like playing Russian roulette, so no, thank you.


Near Essaouira there were no stones around. It was almost dark when we found some dry branches that the locals use to stabilize sand dunes. We borrowed some to stabilize our tents.


When we reached the savannah after crossing the Sahara desert it was like reaching the mountain meadows in Austria. All-in-all, we didn’t run into puzzling camp site related situations in Senegal. We camped in the wild without experiences worth mentioning.

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