We spent New Year in the "Eye of Africa"...700 km from Nouakchott with stops at Chinguetti and the ancient caravan city of Ouadane. Sun going down over the west wall of the "Eye" on the last day of 2021:



The Eye is pictured from space here..


Located here:


It is a complex structure. The Atlas Mountains in Morocco and Algeria are in fact an extension of the Appalachians. But this dome has sedimentary rocks on the outside and violent igneous indications on the inside. Geologists have had a hard time explaining it. It just took a DGS contributor a minute to figure it out. It's an indication of previous earth giants shooting sporting clays. Elementary my dear Doctor. (Way too much drop for Stanton).

Looks like an interesting trip - going all over Africa on a motorcycle is on my fantasy trip list.

Dan...don't go. Not fun anymore from someone who was here 40+ years ago.

Now that is some sand.....

Serbus,

Raimey
rse

Way cool ......

Too much drop is better than too little. Just sayin'..........

SRH

How disappointing to hear - maybe it will be OK again by the time it becomes an option in a decade or so...

Outside of Chinguetti:

Gene, if you were properly dressed with kepi etc, that last photo would look like something straight out of "Beau Geste".

And you wondered why the Brits short of shrugged in 1885 and said...."well...ok...ok...France..we'll (reluctantly) let you have the place (he he he)." Actually it's beyond beautiful but with an ethnography that is both fascinating and deadly...the shatter belt between the Arab and Berber/Tuareg north and the Senegal/Niger river tribes and nomadic Peuhl's and all of them practice slavery.

Two types of deserts "Reg" = stoney. "Erg" = sandy. Half and half in the Sahara. But you know the place Larry...you were there (as Walter Cronkite used to say).

I guess that's as close as we are going to get when it comes to proof that Reilly actually built guns in a real gun factory that employed some 300 gunmakers.

If Ted's recent Thread about woodstoves was so off-topic as to be quickly deleted, then this one shouldn't stand a chance. Especially considering Argo44's recent comments calling for the censorship of topics or posts not germane to the stated purpose of this forum. Imagine if everyone posted Threads of photos of their non-doublegun vacations?

Happy Patriot's Day!

I never got all that far south of Marrakech.

In grad school, while I was on leave without pay from the Agency to finish my MA (ended up not going back), I basically recruited a fellow grad student for them. But when he told me what they offered him (contract rather than staff, and as a NOC in Ndjamena), I told him that I'd turn it down. He ended up going there. Came down with malaria. Wife had a worse problem: amoebic dysentery and she had no resistance to it. They had to return to the States. The doctors told her she could never go anywhere like that again.

I never could figure out why Qadhafi wanted to annex part of Chad. What the hell was he thinking? Wait . . . Qadhafi and thinking don't necessarily fit in the same sentence.

The Europeans who created a bunch of countries that are half Muslim/half Christian/animist didn't do the locals any favors. Frankly, I'm not surprised that Sudan split. Kinda surprised more countries haven't gone the same way. Unlike Europe, the Africans never had a chance to solve those ethnic issues before they became independent countries. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are good examples of what happens when ethnic issues aren't considered and foreign diplomats are in charge of drawing border lines on a map. Every now and then there's even talk that Belgium might split Walloon/Flemish.

And the French Canadians.go figure

Not to mention the Dixie Americans.

Larry, given the huge number of African tribes, I don't know how the colonialists could have created single ethnicity countries. For instance, modern Kenya is the size of California and contains 42 major tribes plus a number of smaller ones, many of which were and still are mutually hostile. And even large ones like the Maasai and the Somalis are divided into clans, often also at each other's throats; e.g. in the 1880's, the Purko Maasai nearly exterminated the Laikipiak Maasai. Forty or fifty countries in the space of Kenya would not be workable, even if the tribes had the will and organizational capacity to form stable multiethnic countries, which they did not. While there were some single ethnic nation states in Africa when the Europeans arrived, e.g. in Uganda and West Africa, I doubt if most of the continent was very different from Kenya. Of course, the same tribal situation pertained in much of the world that Europe colonized.

We're wandering into a fascinating OT. I spent a year in N'djamea recently....Chad has over 250 languages alone...let alone tribes and clans. There is no solution. I was always taught that countries tend to splinter along four fault lines - religion, language, race, political dogma. You have all four In every country in Africa.

I'd like to recommend this site for following the world's conflicts via tweets and posts. It is the best site I've ever found including governmental maps for understanding what's happening. The site will bring up Syria and you can scroll in using two fingers or out and read the tweets and look at the colors on the map. But you can do this on Ukraine, Iraq, etc. For the Sahel go to Africa then click on "Sahel". It will give an comprehensive idea on what is going on in the world of conflict.

https://syria.liveuamap.com

And as for Qadaffi and the Ouazou Strip.....a couple of observations. A treaty from the 1930's actually gave Italy the Ouazou Strip....there is gold there. It was never ratified. Qaddafi brought it back like a lot of crack-pot schemes.. And he funded terrorist attacks on America all through Europe and was one of the major drivers of the Lebanese Civil war from 1975.

I landed in N'Djamena in late summer 1981 on Air Afrique on my way to Brazzaville...the plane was chased down the runway and stopped by Libyan armored cars. But the fall of the Libyan army there to Hissen Habre 4 years later gave us a new word....."Technicals"......Toyota Hilux (Tacoma) pickups with light weapons mounted on the bed. At least something came of that adventure....a new word from the Cold War dictionary (and there are versions with "double guns" just to make this relevant). (Habre? - turned into a predictable homicidal maniac and was overthrown in 1991).



Habre's troops thought if they drove fast enough, mines would explode behind them....And I'd love to get one of these diesel engined Hi-luxes back to USA...has to be 25 years old though.

I could be wrong, but I thought "technicals" appeared on the scene earlier than that. Like when Algeria jumped into the Western Sahara mess and supported the rebels when the Spanish left and Morocco took over.

Talking Sub-Saharan nations . . . I don't believe there was one (maybe Somalia?) where a majority of the population spoke the same native language. So in that sense, the colonial powers did give their creations a common national language. The problem was that none of those countries were really ready for independence. Some of them still aren't. But the colonial powers might have solved some problems by doing a better job of separating Muslims from Christians/animists, as well as major tribes that were historical enemies. Stuffing them all together in one country where they've been enemies forever based on religion, history, whatever is asking for trouble. Creating a country and calling it "the land of the south Slavs" (Yugoslavia) didn't work out well at all after strong man Tito died.

I had Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians and Albanians in my platoon in the National Guard and they got along fine. The Bosnian was one of the best troops I ever served with. All are extremely successful in their civilian life also. If you were foreign born I made sure I got you. Zero problems.


_______________________________
If heaven ain’t a lot like Dee-troit, I don’t want to go.

Wrong side of heaven.

Best,
Ted

_________________________________________________
Righteous side of hell.

Just send me to hell or Minneapolis it’d be aboot the same to me.


__________________________________
PFC Lonny Rhoades USA (ret)

No Twins or Vikings in hell.

Last I checked, my hometown (Waterloo, Iowa) had the highest % of Bosnians of any city in the US. They have a good reputation. It's not that Waterloo is without problems from minority ethnic groups. But the troublemakers are not Bosnian.

When I was teaching at Iowa State and Bosnia was a hotspot, the college newspaper sent a reporter to interview the owner of the Serbian bakery in campustown. She didn't get much beyond introducing herself. The owner picked up on her name, asked her if she was Croat. She said her grandparents came from there. He told her that he didn't want to talk to her.

Get back to us when you get to the other side, and let us know if you still feel the same way.

Of hell or Minneapolis?


____________________________
We have “seen the elephant” and it is us.

The Lions and the Tigers live in hell.

Best,
Ted
_______________________________________________________
With Lonny. And a Cub. And, an RBL.