My Map Pins (10): The Berm, Guelta Zemmur, Western Sahara (Posted February 2021)

My mate Graham Ibbotson and I may be the only Europeans alive ever to visit Guelta Zemmur. True.  There is absolutely no reason to go here unless one of you, perhaps, is a slightly crazy novelist who wants to research it for a story. And yet the desert drive to Guelta Zemmur remains one of the most extraordinary journeys I’ve ever made. We went to find ‘The Berm,’ one of the greatest landscaping achievements of humanity. Or, if you prefer, one of the most disgraceful (and frankly unnecessary) engineering feats on our planet. It is a two thousand seven hundred km wall, built almost entirely out of sand. On either side of it lies the world’s longest continuous minefield. It is the most effective military border on Earth. Buried within it are more than seven million land-mines. An estimated 1,500 people have died from mine explosions along it. It still kills around 25 people a year. Imagine that. Imagine a minefield two hundred metres wide stretching all the way from London to Istanbul. That’s the Berm. It is a difficult construction to get close to (although Graham and I had both driven over this minefield before – but not at Guelta Zemmur – and that will need to wait for another story). 

 

We flew into Laayoune, hired a big 4x4, and drove into the desert. There isn’t a lot of traffic on the long roads of the Western Sahara. Here and there the wind blows sand across the road, and every hour or so a military checkpoint waves you through and on you go. Other than these brief respites, it is a singularly monotonous trail. It’s hot, and when you stop to stretch, the heat is like a foundry furnace. We drove into the bright light of the desert, taking turns at the wheel. The landscape stretched away forever like a Martian plain, rock strewn and featureless, but flecked, surprisingly, here and there by spots of green. Tiny purple flowers bloomed along the roadside. And every now and again a stubborn tree held miraculously out against the hostility of the environment. Guelta Zemmur itself is a tiny oasis with a population of fewer than a hundred people and that’s where the road ends. It is a day’s drive. A soldier, assuming we were military, waved us through and we found ourselves at the Berm. We looked at it. Took no photographs. And drove back. Lunacy. Total lunacy. But one of the best trips ever.   

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