Tit Travel Guide

 JLBG Says:  We had carefully prepared our travel and I had in the Land Rover not only a complete set of tools to fix any mechanical breakdown of one of the cars but also a tow-bar. It was actually great that we had it as I actually towed the Renault-5 for a good thousand kilometers,... 

 JLBG Says:  Enlarge all three photos, you will see that the sand wind is increasing and that there will not be any other ride. In Spring (we were in April) sand winds, which were almost absent all winter long begin to blow. In summer again, they will not blow often neither but it is not... 

 JLBG Says:  This photo shows exactly what a rider should NOT do! On this photo, the rider did not prepare himself (step 1). The photo of step 2 shows that the rider did not push on the neck of the camel with the feet and did not hold the camel's hump. He the cameleer does not help him,... 

 JLBG Says:  These two photos show how to go down from a camel.1- Before the camel folds his front leg, the rider must push firmly with its feet on the neck and hold strongly the hump tuft (first photo).2- When the camel folds suddenly his front legs, all the weight of the rider is on... 

 JLBG Says:  As a young child could not at the same time sit on the saddle and push on the camel's neck with his feet, he has to ride in another way, behind the hump and hold the tuft of hair on top of the hump. May be that would not be very comfortable for a long ride but for a few... 

 JLBG Says:  Our friend drove the camel by the leed (rahla) and the kids and adults that rode it had just to stay on the saddle. However, these three photos show well how a camel show be ridden , Saharian style (different from Middle East style). The saddle is arranged before the hump... 

 JLBG Says:  Camels are usually not very nice animals. They do not enjoy to be harnessed (would YOU?), utter in with a very strong and unpleasant voice and moreover they can bite. Most of the time cameleers tame camels tightening the rope (rahla) they have in their nose. This cameleer... 

 JLBG Says:  As camels roam more or less freely in the desert, they have to be identified. Here, in Tit, they had scars drawing geometrical marks on their neck and head. These marks looked like the fonts used by the Tuaregs, named Tifinagh. They allowed identification of the owner at... 

 JLBG Says:  One of the young men of the village proposed a camel ride for the kids (and for those of us that had never experienced riding a camel). He began to fix the Sudanese style Tuareg saddle on the back of the neck, just before the hump of the camel. 

 JLBG Says:  With the sand wind brewing, we were more than happy that villagers proposed us to spend the night inside their home. We were in a long and narrow room with the walls painted in white with a frieze of vegetal décor at the bottom. The soil was sand and very clean. 

 JLBG Says:  The photo shows that the each flower-bed (vegetable-bed?) in the oasis is framed with a 10 cm “wall” made of dried earth. It allows to water separately each bed and to adjust the input of the precious water to the water rights of its owner.If you look at the close-up (second... 

 JLBG Says:  The dunes around Tit are not very high but allow to have a nice view on the oasis. If you enlarge the photos, you will see that that it is windy and that the horizon is misty. That means that the sand wind is brewing! This is where the Renault-5 got a major breakdown with... 

 JLBG Says:  Tit oasis is not larger than In-Ghar. The 1392 peoples inscribed on the voters lists that I mention in the introduction of this page are certainly not living in the oasis, which looked very quiet with not many people wandering around.Same as In-Ghar, Tit has also foggaret... 

 JLBG Says:  We had been given the address of a Frenchman that was working as a teacher in the school of in-Ghar. He had been working in several oasis in the Sahara for more than 20 years and lived in a banco that nothing distinguished from the houses of other locals.As every local... 

 JLBG Says:  As I wrote in the introduction, the oasis of In-Ghar is very small. As seen on the 1/200,000 map, it has not more than a few houses with a small palm grove. If you enlarge the picture, you will see on the right to the oasis, lines of small blue dots with larger dots every... 

 JLBG Says:  This is a perfect example of a good bivouac : no tuft of plants (snakes, mice, insects), not stones (scorpion), perfectly flat (no accumulation of sand), no need to have tents but polyurethane foam mattresses and a very good sleeping bags. 

 JLBG Says:  This was not the photo I wanted to put here at first. This is our bivouac in the space, I mean in the Tidikelt !?!?…I must admit that it was submitted to a few Photoshop manipulations! As I felt that the results was amazing I thought that I might give it as a front photo,... 

 JLBG Says:  For a bivouac, we found a nice wide area, not really a reg but not an erg neither. May be we should have called it a very sandy reg (for definitions on ref and erg, see my In-Belbel page). We had a nice dinner with two packs of lyophilized soup each (a must in the Sahara)... 

 JLBG Says:  And the winner is… the Land Rover which never got stuck a single time, but this is not really a surprise, is it?Though 4x4, the Toyota got stuck once, in the beginning of the journey, 50 km east to In-Salah. It was deeply stuck, down to the frame and required a lot of time...