For two and a half years, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa, a tiny drum-stick shaped country wedged between Togo and Nigeria. I'd accrued quite a few holidays, and Shelly and I were jonesing for a break to the desert. Just us, the sun, the moon and the sand, and the greatest desert of all, the Sahara, was only a few days away. Unfortunately, our chosen spot for this adventure was in the midst of some turmoil.

Agadez is a mud-brick town in the middle of nowhere, way up in the sandy northern reaches of Niger. Since the days when salt was traded ounce-for-ounce with gold, its been an enclave for the Tuareg, a nomadic people known amongst us Peace Corps Volunteers as the "blue camel cowboys," since their life-style is somewhat akin to the old cowboys of the wild west, and their flesh often has a blue tinge to it from the indigo turbans they wrap 'round their faces to protect them from the sun.

Nowadays, Agadez is a dusty old town. Though bustling when compared to most desert enclaves, it has a ghost-town aura to it, as the streets are lined with abandoned shops which once offered amenities like luxury Italian food and pastries. Today, the typical fodder is more dates and rice than pasta primavera. However, abandoned though they may be, these restaraunts are the reason I have a story.

You see, a while ago the road to Agadez was known as "The Uranium Highway." Air conditioned Land-rovers zipped back and forth on it, carrying hordes of people from foreign corporations, squeezing in to negotiate for the rich Uranium fields that had been found in the area surrounding Agadez. Trade flourished, the city grew, and alongside the desert tents of the Turage rose hotels, restaurants, cafes to service these corporations.

Eventually, the Uranium dried up, the stores shut shop, and all the Land-rovers zipped back to their own countries. When the dust had settled, the local Tuaregs found that not much had changed. Although millions of dollars were made from the Uranium reserves in their land, the Tuareg population was left without decent schools, hospitals, or state-representation.

About the time Shelly and I were planning our trip, oil was discovered near Agadez, and as the air-conditioned Land-rovers started zipping once again up that old Uranium highway, the people saw the writing on the wall, and they were not going to stand for it.

Many groups of Tuaregs organized into rebel groups, harassing these passing vehicles. Cars were hijacked, buses robbed, people were killed.

Clearly, in the eyes of the U.S. government, this was not the place for their young psuedo-hippies to be playing, so all Peace Corps Volunteers were forbidden from travelling in the region. Of course, this only increased the intrigue for our lot, and as stories of other volunteers' recent excursions to Agadez began to sift through the gossip-seive, our curiosity grew.

Besides, collective Peace Corps wisdom held that things had cooled down quite a bit, and that the rebels knew the difference between a ratty old Peace Corps Volunteer and an oily.

So, one damp August morning, Shelly and I boarded an old peugot in Tangueitta, and, squashed between a big market-mama and a couple chickens, set out for Niger. We arrived in Niamey (the capital of Niger) to discover that Agadez was now served by just one bus, which made the trip just once a week, under the protection of an armored convoy. Supposedly you could pay a taxi to take you there on a non-convoy day, but we'd had enough experience with broken old taxis not to risk our hides out in the desert on one of those things, unprotected.

We awaited the arrival of the bus, and had a jostling, dusty but otherwise uneventful journey to Agadez. Other than the occasional shock at being passed by a pick-up truck with a huge machine-gun mounted to its rack, I spent the two days there dreaming visions into the swirls of sand that billowed up from the bus and blinking at the bright sun from behind my two-dollar sunglasses.

We arrived in Agadez, babbled our way through the surge of guides eagerly offering their services to us two silly Americans, and found a man who would take us out to the desert on camel for a few days. Just us, the sun, the moon and the sand. And Mohammhed. And the camels. And our crappy little water filter.

I must admit I was a little dissapointed with my first impression of Mohammhed. I'd heard stories of the regal Tuareg, the tall, agile blue cowboys who strutted through the toughest region in the world. But Mohammhed was almost as short as me. And his nose was squat. And his Turban wasn't even blue. Sheesh.

He taught us the basics of riding a camel: how to yank on their back hair to get them to stand up, not to pull their heads up too high when they jallopped down into a river bank, and how to sag into the sway so it felt more like a bumpy boat ride than a car with a flat-tire at 60mph.

Well, 60mph was certainly not our biggest concern. These guys travelled at their own pace, bumbling along, stopping to chew on thorns or sniff the air, and curling a nasty lip at us whenever we tried to break them from their revery and jostle them onward.

Mohamhed showed us where a river had once flowed, and we followed along the dry bed, stopping at the infrequent mud puddles to filter into water. As the sun started to show signs of its departure that first evening, my glassy-eyed gaze off into the mountains was broken by the distinct picture of a man, entirely out of spirit with the slow pace of the dessert, sprinting down the mountainside toward his camel.

Before I had time to point him out to Mohamhed, our guide had whirled around on his camel to face us, and eyes firey, whispered harshly

"Give me your money!"

My head swirled. Out here in the desert, somewhere we weren't supposed to be, days away through unstable territory to my safe little village, we were being robbed by the only man who knew how to lead us back. I'd been so worried about the rebels, I'd forgotten about the petty theives.

"Give me your money. That man on the mountain is a bandit, and if you don't hide your money with me, he will take all of yours. Save a little to hand over to him, but give the rest to me for safekeeping."

Trusting Shelly quickly handed over her pouch, which Mohamhed promptly stuffed down his pants. I shook my head at her, but followed Mohamhed's lead and stuffed my money pouch down my own briefs.

"Now, follow me!" he shouted, and tore off on his camel, no longer a plodding awkward beast but a powerful, if not agile, thoroughbred.

Shelly and I followed his lead, kicking our camels' sides and clicking our tongues as he had, but our camels merely turned back at us, squinted their big ugly eyes, and begrudgingly, slowly.

plodded.

forward.

Mohahhmed whirled around impatienty, came back to us, shouted and smacked at our camels, and their crawl quickened to a stroll, a bumpy swaying stroll.

In my mind, the bandit tore up a wake of sand behind us as we stopped to chew the thorn-bushes, and I kicked and yelled at my camel like some guy at his sputtering car, wincing in anticipation of the blow from behind.

We came up over a hill to find a small camp: a Tuareg tent of woven thatch, a firepit, and a few ramshackle storage sheds, with two or three people preparing for the evening meal below.

"Friends of yours?" I asked hopefully.

"No. This is a rebel camp."

So there I was, stuck between a bandit and a rebel camp, with only a stubborn camel and a crappy little water filter to help me.

My voice cracked, "So,what are we going to do? Hide in the rocks?"

"No," he responded, bemused, "We'll stay with the Rebels tonight." And then, to put my mind at ease, he reassured me, "Don't worry, they've got guns."

No response was needed. My gagged expression said all I was thinking.

Mohammhed smiled and shook his head at the sily American, "Don't worry. The bandits want your money. The rebels just want autonomy." And as he looked over his shoulder we stumbled down into the valley where the camp lay.

Sure enough, we were safe with the rebels. We shared a meal of "pain de sable," a gritty bread made using the desert itself as the furnace. Once the fire had smoldered down into embers, a ditch was dug, and the cook dropped the springy dough in, covered it with sand, and shoveled the coals on top. In about twenty minutes he removed the coals, unearthed the bread, gave a few sharp smacks to release the sand, and we all dug in, ripping into the communal loaf with our hands and dipping into a big pot of tomato sauce.

After our day, it tasted just like pizza, and I fell asleep on the sand with a warm full belly inside of me and a sky pierced with stars above.

When I woke up, I knew quite some time had passed because the constellations had all shifted rather dramatically. There was a cool breeze blowing, and a familiar smell.

A little musty, but fresh, not really a smell of its own but more an emphasis on all the smells around me. I sought to place the smell, familiar yet somehow out of place here.

The cool breeze grew to a wind, and the thorn bushes shivered and rattled their dry leaves. "It was rain," I though, not believing it- I mean, we were in the desert. Nothing grew but thorn bushes. The only fruit to be found for miles were those dry dates down by the groves near the oases. So I rolled over and chuckled at my missed perception.

The first drop on my face opened my eyes. Suddenly, the night was alive. Dark figures whipped washed clothes off their racks on the thorn bushes, and the goats stumbled off their feet and took to bleating. Then we all piled into that one Tuareg tent.

While we ate dinner, the rest of the group had drifted back, and our original pot for five turned to a pot for eight, for ten, and by this time there seemed more than a dozen of us stuffed into that little tent, taking cover from the rain.

And don't forget the goats. I won't forget the goats. All night bleating and pressing their noses under the edge of the tent, the Momma smacking them when they had managed to wedge themselves too far under.

Well, it didn't rain any more than trip, and we didn't see any more bandits, nor rebels. We just plodded through the desert for a few more days, taking cover under the thorn bushes at lunch, watching the horizon during the day and the moon at night, just us, the sun, the moon, the sand, the camels, Mohamhed and our crappy little water filter.