January 26th: Algiers
In the morning Said picks me up and takes me back across the parking lot to the terminal where I am reunited with the policeman from the previous day. He ushers me through the airport at high speed. I am accustomed to running these airport gauntlets, but even so it is a wild ride. The only English word he knows is “Captain,” which he uses repeatedly. “Captain, Captain,” he jabbers incessantly as he beckons and gesticulates like a conductor, sending me barging through security lineups, through some metal detectors and around others, all the while shouting greetings in French and Arabic to guards and other police. He knows everybody and grins and slips cash to some with covert handshakes as we penetrate deeper into the airport confines.
He leaves me at the airplane with the fueler. After I finish fueling, I wait for over half an hour on the ramp for him to return and fetch me. Then I’m informed we must go pay the airport fees.
I’d been expecting this. On the way to the airport Said had tried to give me US cash to pay the fees. I refused it, saying that I had brought cash and if I couldn’t pay with a credit card then I would use that. This triggered a call to Samir, who was not impressed.
“They will only take US dollar,” he says on the mobile.
“That’s fine. I have some.”
“No, that is no good. Take ours, it is for you, we will pay everything.”
“It’s simpler if I pay. Relax.”
He gets increasingly agitated until the call ends with him saying, “Captain, I try to help you, you see, this is Algeria, you don’t understand.”
I think I understand that Samir has ulterior motives and may be laundering money, or at least trying to inflate the prices which will eventually be billed back to us.
The policeman leads me into the bowels of the airport, into a cryptic warren of offices. We stop at one that reminds me of my experiences being detained by customs officials in Russia. It is full of ancient PCs arrayed on antique wooden desks; the windows glazed glass.
The short, thin bureaucrat who collects the landing fees has dark skin and black eyebrows and his hair is pure white. He is impeccably dressed. Then I am taken to the guy who collects the parking fees. His face is swarthy with drooping jowls. His head and gut are rotund. His hair stinks and is slicked back with grease.
Both accept credit card for payment.
By the time I am finished with these two and delivered by the policeman to the other side of the terminal, the whole airport venture has taken me two hours and Said is still waiting for me.
I get back in the car with Said. We pass the hotel and are immediately stuck in gridlock traffic. He tells me that it is Erdogan, the Turkish president. His motorcade has wreaked havoc on what is normally already a brutal traffic situation. He compensates by cranking his terrible techno-pop music while raising his arms like wings, hands flat out, and pumping them to the music as if he’s dancing at a club, all the while driving like he’s possessed. He alternates between stomping on the gas and slamming on the brake, grinning at me and swerving onto the shoulder to whiplash by other cars and then cut them off.
“Hey bro! This is Algerian music. Whiskey! You like whiskey? At the club with whiskey, bro! Very good time, whisky and music, bro!”
I endure half an hour of this as we get progressively further from the hotel.
“Where the hell are we going?” I yell over the godawful music.
“You know I’m a pilot too, bro?”
“Fantastic. You know the hotel is way back there, right?”
“Ya, bro, don’t worry. We need to take different road.”
He cranks the music louder and continues to raise the roof in the driver’s seat, grinning like a lunatic. At some point I snap and he admits under duress that he missed the exit from the parking lot to the hotel and we are now condemned to fight traffic and poor city planning to slog our way back there.
Eventually he drops me off and says he will be back to pick Christophe and I up in half an hour for our tour of the city. I meet Christophe at the bar and tell him that he has to ride shotgun and speak French to Said because I can’t handle him anymore. We have a drink to brace ourselves.
Said seems to mellow out with Christophe in the front seat. They speak French and I relax in the back and enjoy the scenery as we begin winding through the narrow streets of Algiers. I see virtually no new buildings or modern business district. Old French architecture still dominates the city. Tall white buildings crowd together, black iron railings crawling across their facades. None of the streets meet at right angles and they wrap around the cascading hillsides upon which the city is built. The buildings cling to the slopes. They are pale and their stoic fronts and tile roofs red and brown rise from the Mediterranean stacked in ragged profusion so steep that each building seems to stand on the one beneath it.
The drive is a blur of honking horns and hairpin turns climbing hills between the crush of buildings and traffic. Several times we end up head on with other vehicles on streets too narrow to pass until somebody concedes and reverses between the rows of parked cars. In many intersections police stand arbitrarily conducting traffic, their whistles shrill in the clouds of exhaust. This is as orderly as things get in these crowded and chaotic streets that are otherwise a free-for-all battle of drivers’ wills.
Said forces his way between cars within inches or pulls out of side-streets into streaming traffic, stomping on the gas pedal to dash in front of vehicles bearing down on us and then charging through the gears, accelerating and careening between sidewalks and parked cars and through uncontrolled intersections.
We stop for a breather at the Notre Dame d’Afrique. Its sandstone walls hemmed with blue mosaic tiles glow in the sunlight atop one of the highest hills in Algiers. The Virgin Mary, in marble, stands astride its walls above the portico, arms spread towards the sea, gazing over the precipice that plunges down to the Mediterranean and the buildings clambering on the steep slopes like penitents at her feet.
Ninety-nine percent of Algiers’ population is Muslim, yet they recently finished refurbishing this hundred and forty-year-old Roman Catholic cathedral. It is a striking symbol of reconciliation in a country that only emerged from Les Anees Noirs (the Black Years) some fifteen years ago. For two decades before that the country was riven by a bloody civil war against Islamic insurgents.
They call Algiers the “Gateway to Africa.” Since the Punic Wars and its occupation by the Romans, the city has been a confluence of European and African peoples and culture. That legacy is tangible in the faces of the people on the streets, in their language, in the architecture, and is epitomized by this cathedral, this relic of Algiers occupation by French colonialists and those, like Christophe’s parents, who had to flee in the sixties in the wake of Algeria’s independence.
Despite my reservations, I am happy we took Said up on his offer to show us the city. Our only mistake was that we told him we had to be back at the hotel by four o’clock for a meeting. This ruse was intended to keep the trip short but now we are running late and Said takes his rally driving to new levels of madness as we race back to the hotel on the freeway, trying to make our imaginary meeting on time.
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