Set in the heart of the Sahara, the Ennedi and Tibesti mountains of northern Chad are spectacular and fabulously remote. They are also home to a “treasury” of ancient rock art, said Sophy Roberts in the Financial Times.
Made from ochre mixed with human saliva, these drawings date back more than 5,000 years, when the landscape here was green. Depicting dancers and hunters, cows and horses, elephants and giraffes, they are “masterpieces” with an “oddly modern” air, sometimes calling to mind Matisse, Modigliani or Chagall. The journey to see them, however, is “not for the faint- hearted”. Not only are the distances involved huge, but the Foreign Office advises against travel in these areas, with dangers including landmines and rebel attacks. I recently chose to visit even so.
Travelling with the long-established local tour operator Société de Voyages Sahariens (SVS), our party flew by small plane from Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, to the Ennedi Massif, where we stayed at SVS’s Warda Camp. Among the sandstone pillars and towering rock arches nearby, we saw paintings of dozens of galloping horses and a rider in a plumed headdress. And at Grande Riparo, a cave 50 metres above the wadi floor, there’s a magnificent 15-metre parade of running archers and cattle with sickle-moon horns. The flight onwards to Tibesti took a full two hours.
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We camped in the Ouri Valley, a great plain “hidden inside a formidable rim of Mordor-like peaks”. Our guides, Rocco Ravà of SVS and the rock art researcher Pier Paolo Rossi, said the air strip here had last been used in the 1960s, and only a few dozen foreign travellers had reached the valley overland since then. The valley is studded with rocky tumuli as much as 140 metres across – ancient “compass” graves, so named for their precise east-west alignment.
And there’s so much rock art that we found some hitherto undocumented examples – an elephant, a rhino, giraffes, and a dancing man with a birdlike beak and a penis “swinging down to his knee”.
A nine-night trip costs from approx. £15,000pp excl. flights (svstchad.com).
