Shhh...don't tell anyone I took these, I'd hate to see what'd happen to me.
This is the super exciting, lavish, extravagant, temporarily muddy, mosquito-filled, metropolis of N'djamena, the largest city in Chad, and capital. The city's population is a suprisingly high 721,000, though I constantly wonder where all them live, especially now that half the northern section is underwater and people use canoes to paddle home. The town's name means 'Place of Rest' in Arabic, and in Archabic it means 'Place with lots of garbage, really muddy roads, homeless children, and aerobics loving Air Traffic Controllers', though this translation has yet to be fully adopted by the current regime. The airport is to the left, to the bottom on the opposite side of the Chari river is Cameroon. Do you notice the difference? Neither do I, all well. Also on the city side, exactly on the banks of the river, farther to the left is the Novoutel, the pool, and scantily clad westerners. Its not visible in this picture but to the upper right, about 20 miles Northwest is Lac Chad, or atleast its remnants.
This is final approach into Sarh's Runway 22. Huge. Absolutely huge. Actually its long enough to make it boring, but its still quite muddy when it rains, which is everyday lately. Notice the people carrying things on their heads in the foreground and the blob on the runway about 1/2 way down on the right. Yeah thats a villager just kinda hanging out for a nap. I noticed him as I put the camera down, and we gave both each other a good scare. Lesson to everyone out there: A runway, as tempting as it may be, is not the most ideal location for a mid-day nap. While we are discussing it, neither is an interstate freeway.
This is a picture that means more to me and people that are familiar with Abeche then the majority out there. When I arrived 2 months ago everything was brown, desolate and dead anywhere near Abeche. It made the southern New Mexico dessert appear a lush oasis. Now its a million shades of green, an appearingly fertile landscape dotted with tilled fields, camel trains, and donkey gangs, yet its only temporary. Come late October the rains will cease and the colors will slowly fade, and shift again to khaki and burlap tones. From November until next July there will be little to no rain, and my favorite little mud frogs will go back to sleep for 8 1/2 months. Damn.
Still most of the dessert looks much like this, in Chad's mid section. Brown with green brush strokes through...the flooded Ouadiis (arroyos, streambeds, though it literally means flat space or field in Arabic). After a big rain, when we fly into Abeche its interesting to see what is floating downstream towards the vacant dessert in the distance. Maybe pieces of the market again? A camel, a donkey, a house, a white guy who took to many pictures of locals? Saw a horse one day. Sorry Mom.
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