Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw

      When my family and friends learned that I intended to travel overland from Alexandria, Egypt, to Tangier, Morocco, they reacted with incredulity. My wife, Linda, and adult sons, Sean, 33, and Marc, 28, seemed to think that I was suffering from senile dementia. A three-month, twenty-one-hundred-mile trip that would take me through Libya, Tunisia and Algeria struck them as too difficult and too dangerous.

      Even casual acquaintances expressed deep concern and offered advice about U.S. Embassy contacts, armed bodyguards and Global Positioning Systems. Suddenly everyone was an expert. People who had never set foot in North Africa-especially those who had no firsthand knowledge of North Africa-regarded the entire southern tier of the Mediterranean as one long, turbulent strip of radical Islamicism, and they quoted news accounts about Egyptian terrorists having attacked tour groups in Luxor and Sharm El Sheikh, killing dozens.

      Libya, ruled by Moamar Qaddafi—“the mad dog of the Middle East,” in Ronald Reagan’s words—was still infamous for a litany of atrocities, the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, primary among them. Although the country had just emerged from two decades of UN, U.S. and European sanctions, it sometimes reverted to the behavior of a rogue state: flouting international law, abusing its own citizens and expelling and occasionally imprisoning foreigners. While it courted tourists, it wouldn’t permit them to travel anywhere in the country without an official guide and a preapproved itinerary.

      Pictured in brochures as an Eden of peace and beauty, tiny Tunisia had had troubles too. In 2002, on its resort island of Djerba, a truck bomb killed nineteen people at one of the country’s last functioning synagogues. More recently, Tunisian troops had had a shootout with a regional branch of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist band had kidnapped two Austrian tourists and held them for ransom.

      As for Algeria, the country had become synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism and sectarian violence. Over the past fifteen years, two hundred thousand people had died in an undeclared civil war between an autocratic government and a shifting cast of insurgent groups. Vast tracts of the country had degenerated into killing fields, and foreign diplomats and businessmen huddled in fortified bunkers. Paris, London and Rome were only a couple of hours away by plane, but conditions in the country remained largely unknown, particularly in the United States, because Algerian terrorists targeted journalists.

      Morocco boasted friendly relations with America and promoted itself as Europe’s winter playground. Luxury hotels, condominium developments and golf courses had cropped up in remote oases, along ancient caravan routes. Yet here, too, there had been riots and suicide bombings. Terrorist cells had killed dozens in Casablanca during coordinated attacks in 2004, and a band of Moroccan immigrants in Spain had planted the bombs that killed almost two hundred that year on Madrid’s commuter trains.

      While the geopolitical background to my trip was chaotic, even the basic facts about border crossings and road conditions seemed uncertain. U.S. Embassy officials in Egypt advised me that the frontier with Libya was theoretically open, but nobody knew of any American or European who had tried to cross it. State Department employees had had personal experience of driving west into Tunisia, but they could tell me nothing of the five-hundred-mile stretch between the Egyptian border and the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

      The U.S. public affairs officer in Tunis urged me to submit a precise itinerary and to alert her by cell phone as soon as I entered the country. Yet I had no precise itinerary and no intention of bringing a cell phone or a BlackBerry. This was a practical, not a philosophical, decision. I’m computer illiterate and don’t like traveling with any device, even a camera, that comes between me and direct contact with my whereabouts. Then, too, I knew from previous trips that nothing marks you as a tourist and target in Africa more than carrying expensive equipment.

      Algeria was the country that caused the greatest consternation. U.S. Embassy personnel warned me that the northeast region was unsafe and that overland travel from the Tunisian border to the capital, Algiers, should be avoided at all costs.

      Through contacts in Rome, I hired an Algerian fixer who promised to meet me at the frontier and drive me to Algiers. These same contacts said that the fixer was rumored to work for the Algerian secret service. This seemed plausible when the fixer sent word before I arrived that he had read a review of a book about Algeria I had written in The Washington Post. If I didn’t take greater care with the views I expressed, he added, I could expect to be followed throughout the country. On balance, being followed seemed to me no bad thing, and I assumed that anyone I hired would probably be forced to file some kind of report.

      An executive with a nongovernmental organization based in Oran told me that although he had never traveled in the northeastern part of the country, he routinely drove back and forth to Algiers, through what had been dubbed the Triangle of Death in the darkest days of the Islamic insurrection. He thought I’d be safe on my own in the northwestern provinces. But he warned that the border with Morocco was closed and uncrossable by anybody except smugglers.

      I processed this contradictory information and conjecture as little more than elevator music: inescapable, slightly annoying but of no consequence.