Tea in the Sahara
Sunshine without rain makes a desert
Arab proverb
When talking with a Dubai friend recently, I was saying how much I miss the desert. I always liked the isolation, the remoteness and inaccessibility of it all.
While working in the U.A.E, we coordinated regular trips into the desert and wadis as part of running training for the International Award. My Saturday afternoons frequently involved being dropped off at a checkpoint in the dunes, by a shady tree if I was lucky.
I never needed much, just me, a tree and water. Maybe a book. I was content to be alone with my thoughts.
Space.
And if the desert is one of my favourite locations, Tea in the Sahara is one of my favourite songs. It’s a song with a bit of a story.
You might have watched the film The Sheltering Sky. Sting read the original novel by Paul Bowles and wrote the song. It was recorded and released by the Police on their final album Synchronicity in 1983.
When asked about the song, Sting explained:
“Paul Bowles has written very many books but he wrote a book called ‘The Sheltering Sky’ which became a film by Bertolucci, a few years ago. I read it long before it was a film. It’s one of the most beautiful, sustained, poetic novels I’ve ever read. It’s about Americans that regard themselves as travellers and not tourists, and I class myself in that category. I’m a hopeless tourist, but I’m constantly on the move. There was a story within that story – that was a sort of Arab legend that was told in the story of three sisters who invite a prince to a tea party out in the desert to have tea, tea in the Sahara. They have tea, and it’s wonderful, and he promises to come back and he never does. They just wait and wait and wait until it’s too late. I just loved this story and wrote a song called ‘Tea In The Sahara’. I don’t know whether Paul Bowles ever heard it, probably not, but it’s still one of my favorite songs”
— Sting, ‘All This Time’, 1995
I like the fable, reminiscent of the chance meetings, the wandering about, and waiting around of myriad journeys; typical traveller’s tales. Drifting.
We’ve all experienced something similar. The ‘what ifs’ on the road; What if we had gone to…? It’s the stuff that comes from not having a prescribed program when you are on a trip.
This raises the debate, what’s the difference between a traveller and a tourist. Do you see a distinction?
Perhaps it’s about the level of independence. Do you go to a place and go on a tour? Does someone else take care of the logistics? Or is travelling for you about doing it all for yourself?
We never have tour guides. We did once. It was on a trip in Australia and we found ourselves in the dusty Northern Territory town of Katherine. The tour guide rattled off learned jokes which were tried, tested and not very funny. The older members of our tour party laughed politely. We winced quietly.
Itineraries, time schedules and being herded on and off transport does not appeal. It’s just not travelling to me. We like to roam. And meander.
Maybe ‘travelling’ is determined by the destination itself, seeking out less obvious places to go to. We mostly subscribe to Dervla Murphy’s thinking. The Irish writer asserts:
“Choose your country, use guidebooks to identify the areas most frequented by foreigners – and then go in the opposite direction”.
She makes a very good point.
Murphy has written about places we have loved travelling around in; Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and, of course, South Africa. She deliberately goes against the crowd. And she travels slowly.
Is ‘ticking off’ the capital city of a country really travelling? Sometimes the best trips are not in busy, much visited locations, but rather in places where there is a distance between you and the outside world, where you can enjoy perfect, un-spoilt seclusion. Maybe that is part of the appeal of the desert.
Are you a traveller or a tourist? What do you see as the difference?