I am going to share my list of the top 10 places I want to go to before I die (in no particular order, although I hope dying comes last).
Posts Tagged ‘Sahara’
The climb that leads to hell
July 24th, 2009 |
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American vowed to come back in 2002 and gain revenge for being beaten by the climb into hell
With echoes of the Terminator, Lance Armstrong said after finishing a frustrated third atop Mont Ventoux in the 2002 Tour: “We’ll come back, I’m sure.” Seven years later, Armstrong, a man who thrives on personal battles, has a score to settle with the peak which will decide whether he stands on the podium tomorrow. He has never won there, in any race. The tale of frustration began in 2000, when he and Marco Pantani approached the top to contest the stage win, back in the days when the American’s dominance of the Tour was only just beginning.
Pantani was clinging on, a pale, tormented shadow of the (EPO-fuelled) climber who had won the 1998 Tour. Repeatedly he lost contact with Armstrong’s wheel, repeatedly he clawed his way back. Finally, the Texan appeared to let him reach the summit first. He later said he regretted the gesture, because he never managed to get to grips with the “Bald Mountain”. He suffered there in the Dauphiné Libéré race – which goes up almost every year – and lost again in the Tour in 2002, when he gave Richard Virenque a seven minute start at the foot of the mountain, in what seemed like a handicap race.
So it is personal today for Armstrong, but that is the way it has been with the Tourmen and the Ventoux since it appeared on the route in 1951. As Roland Barthes wrote, no other ascent seems to have a personality. “A god of evil, a despot of cyclists,” he called it. Barthes’s point was this: most of the Tour’s great ascents are passes, between two mountains. The Ventoux is unique because the cyclists have to go up a whole mountain, 5,000 feet from its vineyards at its base at Bédoin to its wind-blasted summit with the famous observatory. There is nothing else higher for many miles around. Ventoux stands alone, visible from 65 miles away. If the weather is clear, at some point today the Tourmen will come up a rise after leaving Montélimar, and they will see it, even if it is several hours of pedalling away. That plays on the mind, as does the steepness of the road, particularly the early kilometres, which go straight up the side of the mountain through a rock cutting and between stunted oak trees, without a single hairpin to give even a few seconds’ respite. It is also a relatively rare feature in the route: this is the 14th visit since 1951.
The mountain has its own microclimate: stifling heat one day – on his first time up there, Tom Simpson said he sweated so much his shorts nearly fell down – freezing cold the next. The conditions are intensified on the bare scree slopes at the top, where there is no shade on a sunny day and no shelter from the wind, only the vast view of Provence far far beneath the “sloping desert, the Sahara of stones”, as the late organiser Jacques Goddet called it.
Unlike any other climb on the Tour, the Ventoux has an evil reputation. Before the road was built to the top, Ventoux was fabled for wolves, and flash floods that wiped out herds of sheep, and its caves were said to lead to hell. Soon after the Tour’s first visit in 1951, Antoine Blondin wrote of the extreme effort it demanded of the cyclists: “We have seen riders descend into madness due to heat and stimulants, some going down the hairpins when they think they are going up. There are few happy memories attached to this witches’ cauldron, climbed with a heavy heart.”
It was this way even before the death of Simpson, in 1967, due to a cocktail of intense heat, amphetamines, alcohol and his indomitable willpower. Now, however, the two legends, mountain and man, are inextricably tied. Simpson’s monument stands near the summit, the goal for the many amateur cyclists who take on the climb, but, as I wrote in Put Me Back on My Bike, he has appropriated the whole mountain as a memorial visible from 65 miles away: you look at the mountain and think of the man.
But the 1965 world champion is not the only life claimed by the Giant of Provence. There was a host of crosses on the slopes to pilgrims who failed to make it to the chapel just below the summit. More recently, a cycling fan was struck by lightning on the day the 1994 race went over, soldiers from the observatory were frozen to death in blizzards, at least one driver died in the motor races that use the mountain, while most surreal of all, a woman tourist was killed in the 1970s by stones picked up by a particularly vicious wind on the summit.
Other cycling careers, besides that of Simpson, have ended here: the great French hopeful Jean-François Bernard pushed himself to the limit to win a time-trial here in the 1987 Tour, and was never the same again. In 1955 the Frenchman Jean Malléjac, a decent Tour rider from Brittany, keeled over and never raced again, and in the same year, the Swiss Ferdi Kübler, winner in 1950, had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown in the searing heat.
“Ventoux has killed Ferdi,” he muttered, words echoed half a century later by Armstrong. “Mont Ventoux doesn’t like Lance Armstrong,” said the seven-time winner. Many of the field will share that feeling, tempered by the fact that this year, the day before the finish in Paris, they will see the Champs Elysées from the top.
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Mali ex-rebels to tackle al-Qaeda
July 20th, 2009 |
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The main group of Tuareg ex-rebels in Mali has agreed to help the army tackle al-Qaeda’s North African branch.
Both groups roam across the Sahara Desert and so correspondents say the deal could prove significant.
The agreement was brokered by Algeria’s ambassador to Mali. Algeria is where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb stages most of its attacks.
Last month, the group killed a British hostage who was being held in Mali after being seized in Niger.
Two weeks later, the army said it had seized an al-Qaeda base near the border with Algeria.
However, the group remains active in the region and has also staged attacks in Niger and Mauritania.
Military collaboration
The BBC’s Martin Vogl in Mali’s capital Bamako says the Malian and Algerian governments will both be pleased to have Tuareg forces as part of their offensive against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The Tuaregs know how to operate in the desert perhaps better than anyone else, he says.
Under the deal, special units of fighters from the Alliance for Democracy and Change (ADC) are to be sent to the desert to tackle al-Qaeda.
Although the ADC signed a deal to end its rebellion three years ago, one of its factions is still active.
The Tuaregs, a historically nomadic people living in the Sahara and Sahel regions of North Africa, have had militant groups in Mali and Niger engaged in sporadic armed struggles for several decades.
Meanwhile, Mali, Algeria and Libya have reportedly agreed to work more closely against the group.
Mali’s President Amadou Toumani Toure said he had agreed to share information and military resources with his two counterparts.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
World’’s deserts getting greener despite global warming
July 20th, 2009 |
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Contrary to the assumption that global warming would cause an expansion of the world’’s deserts, some scientists are predicting that water and life may slowly reclaim these arid places.
According to a report by BBC News, the evidence is limited and definitive conclusions are impossible to reach, but recent satellite pictures of North Africa seem to [...]
Green deserts
July 16th, 2009 |
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By Ayisha Yahya
BBC, World Service
It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world’s deserts, but now some scientists are predicting a contrary scenario in which water and life slowly reclaim these arid places.
They think vast, dry regions like the Sahara might soon begin shrinking.
The evidence is limited and definitive conclusions are impossible to reach but recent satellite pictures of North Africa seem to show areas of the Sahara in retreat.
It could be that an increase in rainfall has caused this effect.
Farouk el-Baz, director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University, believes the Sahara is experiencing a shift from dryer to wetter conditions.
"It’s not greening yet. But the desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received by the Earth from the Sun, and this over many thousands of years," Mr el-Baz told the BBC World Service.
"The heating of the Earth would result in more evaporation of the oceans, in turn resulting in more rainfall."
But it might be hard to reconcile the view from satellites with the view from the ground.
While experts debate how global warming will affect the poorest continent, people are reacting in their own ways.
Droughts over the preceding decades have had the effect of driving nomadic people and rural farmers into the towns and cities. Such movement of people suggests weather patterns are becoming dryer and harsher.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned recently that rising global temperatures could cut West African agricultural production by up to 50% by the year 2020.
But satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the Southern Sahara, although the Sahel Belt, the semi-arid tropical savannah to the south of the desert, remains fragile.
The fragility of the Sahel may have been exacerbated by the cutting of trees, poor land management and subsequent erosion of soil.
Namibia
The broader picture is reinforced by studies carried out in the Namib Desert in Namibia.
"For the last few years there has been higher than average rainfall"
Mary Seely
Gobabeb research centre
This is a region with an average rainfall of just 12 millimetres per year – what scientists call "hyper-arid". Scientists have been measuring rainfall here for the last 60 years.
Last year the local research centre, called Gobabeb, measured 80mm of rain.
In the last decade they have seen the local river, a dry bed for most of the year, experience record-high floods. All this has coincided with record-high temperatures.
"Whether this is due to global change or is a trend anyway, it’s hard to distil actually out of the [data] but certainly we’ve had record highs of temperature," said Joh Henschel, director of Gobabeb.
"Three years ago we had the hottest day on record, 47 degrees Celsius."
The mean annual evaporation is several hundred times higher than the actual rainfall. This is an intense environment.
Fluctuation
His colleague Mary Seely agrees.
"Deserts and arid areas always have extremely varied rainfall," she said.
"You would have to look at a record of several hundred years to maybe say that things are getting greener or dryer. For the last few years there has been higher than average rainfall.
"That said, there is even greater variability in the rainfall and the weather patterns than there has been in the past."
Though positioned on the Atlantic coast, the rain that falls on the Namib desert actually comes from the Indian Ocean, having travelled across Africa.
It is therefore hard to explain an increase in rainfall without accepting that higher temperatures globally are causing shifts in established patterns.
The thing these scientists are most keen to work out is what is man-made change and what is natural fluctuation.
Since 1998 the centre has observed a steady but unmistakable trend of rising levels of C02.
They are sure this increase has not been caused locally, since Gobabeb is in a pristine, isolated part of the world with no local sources of pollution.
This is a change that comes about on a global level.
Manufacturing green
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the continent, things are moving at a faster pace.
Global warming may be greening the desert in small, barely measurable ways but, in parts of Egypt, the greening is being advanced in an artificial way, and on an industrial scale.
Egypt has an expanding population and water is becoming an ever more a precious resource.
Waiting to find out if the deserts are greening is not a realistic option.
Remote sensing, radar imagining from space, began in 1981 and showed scientists what was going on under the Saharan sand.
The aquifer, a collection of reservoirs trapped underground between layers of permeable rock, was studied and mapped for the first time.
Tapping into this supply has meant deserts areas can, with skill and judgement, be transformed into farmable land.
Thank to the work of people like Mr el-Baz, the greening of the desert is happening in Egypt in a controlled way.
Out of the newly irrigated desert we now see the commercial growing of oranges, limes and mangoes.
Further, the Egyptian government is actually sponsoring people to settle in the desert to farm, using the water supply they can now tap into and pump out from under the sand.
The programme is part of an ambitious and controversial plan to reclaim 3.4 million acres of desert.
The trend in other parts of the continent may be a migration of people into the cities and away from arid and semi-arid places, but in Egypt, where the desert is undeniably getting greener, the reverse is true.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Growth factor that keeps brain development on track identified
July 16th, 2009 |
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Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that a growth factor called Fgf10 helps keep the brain’s development on track.
The researchers say that just like a conductor cues musicians in an orchestra, this growth factor lets brain stem cells know that the moment to get to work has arrived, ensuring that they [...]
Libya’s struggles
July 9th, 2009 |
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Travelling to the Libyan town of Sirte to report on the African Union summit, Christian Fraser considers whether Libya is ready for an era of mass tourism.
It is midnight at Tripoli airport, across the road from the arrivals hall. Beyond high mesh fences and the white glare of towering floodlights, a Chinese workforce is labouring through the night on a new terminal.
The air is hot and heavy. The face of Muammar Gaddafi stares out from a nearby billboard, as if micromanaging his country’s construction boom.
En route to the African Union summit, I had just emerged from the old arrivals hall – dour, disorganised and full of government spooks. I was delayed for an inordinate amount of time while they checked, then rechecked, that rarest of Libyan commodities, a journalist’s visa.
The two faces of Libya, a perfect illustration of where the country has come from, and where it is going.
Once the international pariah, now a state in full-speed transition.
Embracing capitalism
In the past year, Muammar Gaddafi has travelled the world signing profitable oil and gas deals that will help transform Tripoli into the new Mediterranean destination – or so they hope – for an influx of adventurous tourists.
There is still some way to go, but the beachfront is awash with five-star developments the government is building with its millions of petrodollars. No more sanctions, no more socialism.
"Twenty-five thousand new flats," beamed Ahmed, my government minder, as we sped into town past another busy building site – $200,000 (£125,000) each," he marvelled.
I could tell he was an enthusiastic proponent of the new Libyan capitalism. And a loyal subject – a Gaddafi key-ring was hanging from his trouser pocket.
Tourist restrictions
There is much to see and enjoy in Libya.
Spectacular Greek and Roman remains, the open-air galleries of prehistoric rock art and glorious largely uninhabited sandy beaches.
Plus, of course, that frisson that is always associated with visiting a country previously off-limit to Westerners.
And therein lies the rub. As much as Libya may like the idea of tourists, and the hard currency they bring, it has yet to embrace the reality.
Tourists must still travel in organised groups with a government-approved guide.
There is no opportunity to wander unfettered around the well-preserved Roman city of Leptis Magna or the magnificent theatre at Sabratha.
Accommodation shortage
Pity the poor tourist who runs into the Libyan control freakery I experienced last week on the way to this African Union summit.
It was held in Sirte, an undistinguished coastal town just along the way from Tripoli.
The flight to Sirte is a short one. A journey across a long stretch of barren coastline.
Beneath us those remote beaches from which hundreds of illegal African migrants escape to Europe every year. These are the people currently flooding into Tripoli.
I could see why stopping their advance proves such an enormous challenge. Aside from sporadic roadblocks, there is very little between the vast expanse of Sahara and the shoreline from where they set sail in their makeshift rafts and boats.
The building frenzy of Tripoli is yet to reach the distant outpost of Sirte.
"Mr Gaddafi cruised around his manor in one of those ostentatiously large buses favoured by touring rock stars"
Tourists might find a hotel room, but such was the shortage of accommodation during the summit, that journalists and dignitaries would be sleeping on a clapped-out, Panamanian-registered, car ferry brought in specially for the event.
No five-star facilities, these.
We paid top dollar for a cabin cloaked in the faintest whiff of diesel. Mine was already occupied by a cockroach and each day he raced me for the shower attached to the sink.
When Mr Gaddafi travels abroad he takes a Bedouin tent with him. I should have followed suit.
Closely watched
So why would you drag hundreds of summit delegates, 12 African leaders, diplomats, politicians and journalists to a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere
Simple really. It is the ancestral home of Libya’s egocentric leader, who for 39 years has fostered this one-man personality cult.
Throughout the week, he cruised around his manor in one of those ostentatiously large buses favoured by touring rock stars.
For his opening speech, he wore the golden robes of a king. One invited dignitary was so overcome in his presence, she fell to her knees at his feet.
Not satisfied with this all-encompassing power in Libya, the Colonel is even pushing a bold ambition for a unified continent, a United States of Africa modelled on the European Union.
EU ideals Tell that not just to the journalists, but also the VIPs at this summit who were herded from one location to another, closely observed at all times – and whose contact with the outside world was sorely limited by the electronic equipment used by state security, whenever the Colonel was in town.
Is Mr Gaddafi and his "new Libya" really prepared for all that comes with mass tourism The evidence of this African Union summit suggests not yet.
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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.