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Sahara - 1999

Sahara - 1999

Jacek Pałkiewicz
2006-06-18 22:44:17

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we want". At that moment I thought of Saint-Exupery again: "Water, you have no taste or colour. You are indescribable, you are drunk unknowingly. You are not indispensable for life, you are life".

Truly, just an hour from home by plane, all values are completely different. Yet are the Beduins perhaps not right? There are very few things which are absolutely necessary. We are steadily imprisoning ourselves with a constantly lengthening list of objects that we are unable to give up. Even in the desert, our civilization is beginning to impose hitherto unknown demands. Take the modern craze for driving jeeps, for example. More for fun than necessity, the owners of these vehicles either open new paths in the desert, in order to avoid difficult stretches where wide clefts in the earth condemn the traveller to the back-breaking task of climbing uphill and downhill, or else they try to fly over them at fifty miles an hour.

I am not gentle with those who want to impose modern technology on another culture for the sake of their own amusement. Motorcyclists are the worst. They race about this terrain with even less restraint than the jeeps. The desert is a place where you should take the time to look into yourself, to pause for thought. The few people you meet there live like we did hundred of years ago. We arrive in their midst, without excessive fatigue, drink the water from their wells, poison their air with exhaust fumes, litter the place with plastic, cassettes, aerosol cans and jeans. We take away their serenity in exchange for our rubbish and the tracks of our oil-burning monsters, which scar one of the most fragile eco-systems in the world. It can take years for a blade of couch grass to root itself in the earth of the desert, but only a few seconds of thoughtless enjoyment to rip it up again, perhaps for ever. I detest enterprises like the Paris-Dakar, where an army of journalists, jeeps, and thrill-seekers roars through the villages of the Sahara, ...