Touggourt across the Saharan Atlas

 Touggourt across the Saharan Atlas 

We set out from Timgad on a bright and sunny morning. We passed fields that has been ploughed and ready for grain to be planted and orchards with many of the rows of trees covered with white muslin cloth. There were green fields where there was irrigation, trees and low hills in the distance.

We some entered the foothills of the Saharan Atlas Mountains, an extension of the Atlas Mountains more assciated with Morocco. The Saharan Atlas sepaarte the coastal plains and plateaus from the Sahara.

After 40 minutes of driving we passed a sign telling us that we were at 1,550 metres and since Timgad is at 1,000 metres, we had already climbed 550 metres but the road continued upwards. There were fields in the bottom of the valley but the upper slopes were rough pasture and scrub, patches of rock and very few trees. The road hair pinned upwards, giving views back down the valley. We crossed a pass and the road descended.

Many of the smaller valleys had small earth dams with pipes leading to a small cistern or reservoir to provide water for irrigation. We turned along a valley bottom until the next turn that would take us up the Ghoufi Canyon. There were steep sides and the cliffs closed in on the road with little space for anything else.   

A view back down the canyon. The road turns a corner in the centre of the photo. 

There are two Roman inscriptions. The one being pointed at under the curved black bar is virtually illegible. The one to the right under the straight black bar commenorates the legion that built the road through the canyon. 

Just metres further up the canyon is the monument recalling the first shot fired at the outbreak of the Revolution (what locals call it, whilst we would refer to it as the War of Independence) on 1st November 1954. A bus that a politician was travelling on was stopped and he was shot dead.

After a coffee break we stopped at Ghoufi. It is where there has been a village for over 1,400 years. The river has carved out a deep canyon. There are 26 types of date palm growing in the bottom of the canyon. The water is often only knee deep but in 2024, a nine metre high flash flood cascaded down the canyon causing a lot of damage. Only one old lady and some goats still live there. 

It has some troglydyte houses built half way up the canyon's cliffs, the dark line running along the far cliff face in the middle of the photo. Algeria's second highest mountain is just behind the horizon.  

This is a fortified granary with sheer drops on three sides overlooking the canyon. Each family had a separate room to store their grain together with any valueables.

We stopped for a lunch of traditional wheat soup, chicken and fruit in Biskra. Biskra is considered to be the gateway to the Sahara. We left Biskra and headed for the desert. On the fringes of the town, the desert is being invaded by urban sprawl with new housing and factories being built with scrub desert vegetation between plots.

The desert is largely flat with a few low hills in the distance. There are a few scrub plants but little exceeding knee height. But there is water in places and where water seeps to the surface, it evaporates and leaves a white salty deposit. Entreprising farmers have levelled the surface with salt free soil and sand and planted date plantations on the salt free new soil to give them time for seeping water to help the palms to establish themselves as date palms are moderately tolerate of brackish water.

The sun set and the moon rose as we entered Touggourt, formerly a simple oasis town that has doubled in size in the last decade. Touggourt was te starting point of the first motorised crossing of the Sahara devised y the then Citreon owner.