Investment Biker Page 21

  Ten miles away to the northeast stood Carthage. Over the past three thousand years the name alone has evoked terror, dread, envy, respect, and wonder throughout the world. The idea of seeing such a fabled city was as awesome as seeing the Gobi, Siberia, the Sahara, the Andes, or the Strait of Magellan, all of which I’d read about, studied, and wondered over, never expecting to see.

  Carthage was a maritime republic founded by Queen Dido from the Phoenician city of Tyre. Its near thousand-year rule in the western Mediterranean was challenged by Rome in the three Punic wars. Rome decided that Carthage must be destroyed. The struggle ended in 146 B.C. with the achievement of Cato the Censor’s dictum, “Delenda est Carthago.” A siege of three years climaxed in a battle that raged for seventeen days. The Romans leveled the city, then plowed up the ground and laced it with salt to make sure their enemies were utterly without resources.

  The reality of the small site that was the remains of Carthage contrasted sharply to whatever I’d expected after several thousand years of historical references. Despite the dominance Carthage had held over the ancient world, the Romans had done such a thorough job of demolishing it—for centuries even using the city’s foundations as a quarry—that its ruins were disappointing. Most of what there was to see was Roman, not Carthaginian, and there wasn’t much of that.

  It was hard to believe that such a meager port, two small basins, had been used by a navy that had ruled its world. From here, however, Hannibal’s legions set out for Europe, eventually to cross the Alps and challenge Rome. The southern harbor was the center of commercial shipping, at which the Carthaginians were superb. The northern one was the naval base, and the island in its center Carthage’s naval headquarters. To my amazement, historians reported that as many as 220 warships could be anchored there.

  The city’s location over the bay was magnificent, but at its peak its population couldn’t have been more than twenty thousand. In the same way that I was so forcibly struck by the early inhabitants of Samarkand, Moscow, and Xi’an, I wondered who they were and how they had done so much. All I could figure out was that expert sailors in small ships could achieve dominance if everyone else was struggling in small boats and canoes.

  Two hundred years after the Roman sack, Carthage was again one of the Mediterranean’s great cities. From 439 A.D. to 533 A.D. it was the capital of the Vandal kingdom, a status it kept even after the Byzantine reconquest and up to its next sack by the Arabs, in 697 A.D.

  The history of Tunis was far less imposing. The Carthaginian stronghold of Thynes, destroyed with Carthage, rose again as Tunes, a small but prosperous Roman and then Byzantine town. In the ninth century A.D., the fourth Aghlabid ruler, Ibrahim Ahmed I, made it his home.

  The modern French portion of the city was plain and functional, with few interesting features. Here Islam took a liberal form. In wandering around the new part of the city it was hard to tell that we were in a Muslim country, let alone in Africa. To me, the combination of nearby ruins and this functional, unhurried city was yet another vivid lesson in how nothing was permanent.

  As this was the hometown of the PLO in exile, we kept a low profile. To keep even more out of sight, we had new license plates made. Our new plates gave our proper license numbers but neglected to include “Alabama” or in what country we were registered. Since this was the norm throughout the world, no one noticed.

  The trek across the Sahara Desert loomed before us, another challenge of motorcycle touring.

  The size of the lower forty-eight United States, the Sahara is the largest desert on the planet, two thousand miles north to south, as far east to west as Los Angeles is from Washington, D.C. At its northern and southern edges lie paved roads, while at its heart are nearly five hundred miles of lifeless dunes and rocks without any sort of road, paved or unpaved, across which we had to drive.

  We planned to go along the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental, or Great Western Sea of Sand, which anywhere else in the world would have been a first-class desert in its own right. Here, it was only seven thousand square miles of rock and sand in the midst of a wasteland scores of times larger.

  Six thousand years before, the Sahara had been a savanna much like today’s East Africa. In fact, before the fifth century B.C., hunter-gatherers had roamed here. In Roman times the inhabitants had herded animals and took up a more settled existence. Before the Christian era, horses had been used for transportation; only afterward, as the region turned into desert, did the camel become dominant.

  Here was another example of nature doing what man today is often accused of doing, “ruining the environment.” If the Sierra Club had been around it would have obtained a court order from the Supreme Pliocene Court to keep the Grand Canyon from eroding a perfectly good tract of Western real estate.

  Although it stretched across all the countries of North Africa, most of the Sahara was in Algeria, a country three times the size of Texas, yet five-sixths of which was taken up by the desert. Only 10 percent of the country’s 26 million people lived in this vast wasteland.

  To get to and then across it posed one of the great challenges of modern travel. It was not for those who needed their comforts, for in the Sahara proper there were not only no roads, but also no hotels, no gas stations, and no restaurants. Every means of transport across it was rough, for no railroad or bus crossed it. Its climate ranged from fiercely hot to fiercely cold. Except for occasional oases, there was no water and no food. Its trails ranged from awful to nonexistent.

  We bought hats with large brims, water cans, gas cans, and dates, a desert travelers’ standby, which didn’t spoil. I wanted to buy or hook up with a truck and a driver with whom we could travel south, since for this leg of the trip it made sense to have backup transportation as well as an extra supply of gas, food, and water.

  Just as we hadn’t wanted to cross Siberia in the winter, we didn’t want to cross the Sahara in the summer, when the temperatures would overheat the bikes and us.

  I was looking forward to the trip as one of the great thrills of my motorcycling life. Tabitha had a sense of dread, as if she were sure something was going to go spectacularly wrong.

  I couldn’t decide if her female intuition was operating on target or working overtime.

  We cranked up and drove to Algeria.

  We passed European military cemeteries from wars, insurrections, and rebellions of long ago, acres of uniform white crosses, each well maintained. It was a surprise to come upon them, and it made us sad to think of young English and French men buried in the desert, thousands of miles from the green fields of home. And for what? I know their descendants did not have a clue as to what they had died for. In many cases they didn’t even know that Great-great-great-grandfather Pierre had died in some supposedly noble but forgotten cause.

  Who remembers today that Napoleon, out to topple the divinely crowned heads of Europe, bringing terror from revolutionary France, had been hated far and wide? Can any of us say why countless thousands died in the eighteenth century’s Polish-Swedish War? Back then the Polish and Swedish kings had ruled important empires, but today not only have those dynasties vanished, the borders that so many twenty-year-olds died to preserve have changed and changed again. That we view such a war as a joke today in itself displays the sweep of history.

  On this trip we stumbled across the artifacts of scores of ancient wars. Few, if any, of those wars seemed worth dying for. If history is a natural panorama of changing borders and shifting centers of power, why should twenty-year-olds die to speed up or slow this inexorable process?

  My antiwar fervor began back at Oxford. I often passed a stone passageway at Balliol on which were carved the names of hundreds of English youths, captains and lieutenants, killed in World War I. At the end of the passageway was another section filled with names, those of German students at Balliol killed in the same war. In 1905 England and Germany were the fastest of allies, as evidenced by the number of German youths sent to Balliol to study, yet by 1914 they were at
each others’ throats. It seemed absurd.

  On another night I was singing and drinking with a group of Spanish friends, twenty-two-year-olds like me, when the thought struck me that if my government decided it was the thing to do, I could be shooting these drinking companions in a matter of weeks. I was horrified. That night something in me shifted. I’ve never been able to see the utility of war in the same way as before.

  The city of Algiers was bigger and older than Tunis. To Tabitha’s eye it didn’t look as interesting as Cairo, although it did have a Casbah.

  Many of us know the Casbah from 1940s films, a marketplace surrounded by old buildings, overhead passageways, and screened-in balconies. During the Algerian revolution, the rebels darted into it as if the French were cats and it was a mouse hole.

  As visas are perishable, it was impossible on a trip like this to obtain them all beforehand. Here in Algiers we began to collect the rest we’d need for our route to Cape Town, those for the Central African Republic and Cameroon. We hunted up the Zairian embassy, which took two days of searching to find. At last we found the house of the ambassador himself, and his embassy turned out to be across the street.

  Economically Algeria was a real mess, another statist government that had misfired. It wasn’t a small economy as African nations went, $53 billion in gross domestic product with a per-capita GDP of $2,170. In comparison, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, had a per-capita GDP of $400, compared with the major industrial countries’ GDP of nearly $12,000. However, the socialists had mismanaged their potential riches from their huge oil and gas reserves.

  In reference to statism, I certainly don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m no anarchist. There are many legitimate functions governments must handle, mostly involving public safety, such as those of national defense, police and fire protection, air traffic, the inspection of buildings and food, and flood control. It’s just that after a century of experiments we can now see clearly that governments are terrible at engendering prosperity and wealth.

  Algeria is a prime example. During the sixties and seventies it was touted by many as a model for Third World liberation movements. The socialist government attended to social welfare needs while the economy grew rapidly, but now we can see this was not the result of good management, but of rising oil prices. What appeared then to be sound economic policy was actually one more case of a country riding the commodities boom of the seventies.

  Today petroleum and natural gas account for 95 percent of Algeria’s foreign-exchange earnings. When the price of oil fell, the country was socked hard. At one time it was self-sufficient in food production, but now it is highly dependent on imports. Algeria’s unemployment is at 25 percent, inflation more than 20 percent, and its people need housing. A couple of years before we were there, spiraling prices and shortages had led to riots in which the army shot hundreds of people. The widespread sense that government officials are corrupt continues to this day.

  The black market is rampant. Virtually nothing from the outside comes in, not even Western newspapers and magazines.

  The country had one of the more absurd currencies we’d encountered. On the black market we could get thirty dinars for our dollars, while the official rate was ten to one. This large discrepancy told me that the government had run its nutty economic policies about as far and as long as it could. At a 200 percent premium, it was worth everybody’s while to change money on the black market, whereas at, say, a 20 percent premium, otherwise law-abiding people would be reluctant to break the law.

  Because nobody was allowed to bring in outside goods legitimately, it was difficult to find any. The country had an external debt of $20 billion, which was serviced by most of its hard-currency earnings. If the central bank had had extra hard currency, legitimate merchants could have bought Sony TVs, cars, Italian shoes, and New Zealand lamb and sold them to legitimate customers. But since its hard currency was being used to service the debt, the central bank had none, merchants imported virtually nothing, and everybody was suffering.

  Compounding their economic problems were low gasoline prices because of price controls, which encouraged wasteful consumption just as low bread prices had encouraged boys in the Soviet Union to use state-baked loaves for footballs. To dampen demand here, the government should have sold gasoline at world-market prices and shipped all it could overseas for much-needed hard currency.

  These economic problems were the principal reason for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism here. The Algerian people were looking for somebody to blame for this mess. As always, they had to have a scapegoat, such as the government or Westerners.

  Since Westerners had been gone since the early sixties and the secular socialists had run things for the three decades since, the people said, “It’s the fault of those godless ones.”

  Not having allowed an entrepreneurial sector to develop, the statist government was now faced with the choice of either continuing its policies, import and currency restrictions, or devaluing the currency, which would make not only import prices but also domestic prices rise sharply. Continued restrictions, on the other hand, would naturally lead to a larger and larger currency premium on the black market. Eventually no hard currency would be left in the country, which would mean nothing could be brought in from the outside world, as nobody wanted dinars. Since the economy didn’t produce much—certainly nothing to match Japanese cars, Italian shoes, and New Zealand lamb—life would become yet tougher on the people. Finally the government would be forced to devalue the dinar, but that of course in a single shock would make foreign and domestic goods that much more expensive.

  So the government had arrived at a point where it thought it could do nothing that was not political suicide. I knew its only hope now was to have a freely convertible currency, and to try to weather the political storm that sudden massive price increases brought. At least at that point goods would again become available.

  At the end of their rope, forced by the marketplace to face a similar situation, Polish politicians had done this. Their people, like the Algerians, produced little and could import nothing. They made the currency convertible, and it had worked. The conversion rate of the Polish zloty skyrocketed, but it didn’t matter, because this new high level was what the real rate was. Goods poured in, the government survived, and everything had been fine.

  Unfortunately, the Poles hadn’t had staying power. They and their ivory-tower Western advisors had been so sure democracy would cure their ills—all you had to do was look at the U.S. and Germany to see that democracy meant enormous prosperity—that they hadn’t seen the need to take other measures. Yes, Marlboro cigarettes and Toyotas were available, but they hadn’t realized that they needed to sell something to the outside world to pay for these new cigarettes and cars.

  Decades of shoddy workmanship, mismanagement, and little capital investment meant the Poles weren’t efficient producers of much that the outside world wanted. Still, the government felt it couldn’t fire the unproductive workers on its payroll. It feared that would have been another form of political suicide. So it printed money to pay these workers, expecting with childlike faith that any day democracy would explode into prosperity.

  These wheelbarrows full of money made the whole mess start all over again. Inflation came back. Since the government now couldn’t go back to exchange controls and nobody wanted the yet more worthless zloty, its value eroded again. Once you start printing money without anything behind it, nobody ever wants it. The public ain’t that dumb. Even if you call it money, nobody’s going to buy something without real value.

  Around me I sensed Algeria was seething and ready to explode. Yes, it was tightly restricted now, but how long would this last? Here was another country where socialism and the revolution had failed badly. As in the Soviet Union, the people were going to demand a big change.

  As we drove toward the Sahara we passed more Roman ruins. The village markets were lush with produce, big mounds of pomegranates
, dates, pears, and apples, but little else. Gradually the surrounding countryside became more desertlike. The closer we drew to the Sahara, the more expensive the markets became. Only gas, controlled by the government, was cheap, a fraction of European prices and a third of that at black-market rates.

  The Sahara proper began four hundred miles south of Algiers. Tabitha was still uneasy, but I was growing excited. I’d always enjoyed traveling through deserts. There was a romance to them, a poetry of starkness. A desert like this was like a tough market. It did not forgive mistakes and it forced you to be attentive, to be fully awake—and God, was it beautiful!

  Moving steadily south, we carried all the water we could, and extra food and gas. The terrain became dryer and rougher. Vegetation became sparse. Gas stations were farther apart. The landscape became more and more inhospitable to animals and plants alike.

  Two days of southerly driving brought us to the M’Zab, a scrubby valley occupied by the Mozabites, a puritanical Islamic sect. The people of this valley lived in a pentapolis, five villages that had developed independently of the country.

  We stopped in the main town, Ghardaia. Like the other four, it was built on a hill and crowned by a distinctive, unadorned minaret. We weren’t allowed to enter Beni Isguen, or “the pious,” the religious town of the M’Zab.

  We had passed from the urban civilization of Algiers, where few women wore veils, into such fundamentalist backcountry that the women exposed no more of themselves than one eye, which could be seen through a fold in the cotton cloth that covered them from head to foot.

  We stayed on a hill overlooking the town in the three-star Hotel Rostimedes. We’d been on reasonably good two-lane blacktop, but the ocean of sand we were about to plunge into kept looming before us. Still looking for someone to carry extra provisions, we drove out to the local campsite. We moved from truck to Land Rover, asking who was going south, who would carry gear and supplies for a few dollars.