Agadez was the end of the tour from Mali, and the beginning and end of the desert eclipse expedition. Mohamed and Kone found us a hotel (there was some problem with our original reservation), and then gave us a tour of the town.

This was an incredibly decorated house in the old part of Agadez. I believe it may have belonged to a baker.

All the walls had mud bas-reliefs.

The camel market.

A view of Agadez from the top of the mosque's minaret, which is open to tourists willing to climb through very small openings.

A carving on the wall in the courtyard of our very modest hotel, which we were modestly placed in after the reservation at the Auberge d'Azel fell through. I suppose this must be Heinrich Barth; everything else is. The room was on the roof with a ceiling so thin we could get GPS through it. It didn't smell like a sewer exactly. It smelled like a paper mill, or rotten cabbage, a mercaptan. Distinctive.

It was rather embarrassing for them to end on the note of running around looking for a bad hotel. We gave them the tip we'd decided on earlier though, because they made up the price difference of the good hotel and the one that smelled like mercaptans. There were times on the way from Ouagadougou when I felt like a hitchhiker. Kone stopped talking about then, having run off the end of his string table. It occurred to me, as a natural egotistical reaction to my imagined Shame at having kept Mohamed away from his Mother, that what may really be happening is a couple of jokers seeing a chance to make the boss $600 a day for a road trip to see buddies at the cost only of having two tourists in the back for half the way. Kone had said, in Tahoua, that they intended to drive us to Agadez, then turn around and go back to Tchin-Tabaradene, which is the town that Mohamed was born in, and where his eleven surviving siblings live in a Tuareg tent. Then he said that they were planning to take us on a tour of Agadez, which would go against their driving 400 km back the same day. This may have been their last tour of this season. The table talk was that April is an unusually late time of year to be touring. But eclipses don't care about that kind of talk. I asked about all that driving, and they said that (for all the U.S. State Department warnings about not driving in Africa at night) they much preferred driving at night, which they weren't allowed to do with customers. But it's cooler, the truck runs better, the guards are more bored, and I suppose being Tuareg and all Mohamed wasn't going to find trouble with the natives.

Mouhmoudoune, the sheik of Araby.

A house painted light blue, like in Chefchaouen in Morocco. The brain seems to have some catchall category for "foreign" for things you don't have enough of to make a category by themselves. A blue house anywhere outside of San Francisco can remind us of any other blue house outside of San Francisco.

Metal toolboxes.

Trucks.

I admire the logos painted full size on the back.

One of the saddest things about West Africa is that litter covers the Sahel. They are quite careful not to throw food away, to give it to someone who needs it, but they have no qualms about letting plastic bags go everywhere, to light like bats in the trees.

A door. Could be the logo of a pharmaceutical company.

In the course of the dozens of hustlers one encounters in a Boltzmann distribution of eye contacts and acknowledgments, we wound up on our last afternoon in Agadez (after the eclipse expedition) walking with one of the guides who remembered us from the Hausa Baker's house tour we had when we arrived first into the town. He took us, in the informal manner of guides (you never know the precise moment when they are becoming paid travel agents — is it like that at Fisherman's Wharf, too? I wouldn't know, would I?), to a cafe called, perhaps not accurately, "Gourmet", next to the Hotel de l'Aïr. And next to that was a Fulani-Wdaabe trinket shop. This is a man in the shop.

The trinket shop was run by one of the dancers we happened upon at the restaurant Pilier the night before, entertaining three or four tour groups' worth of eclipse chasers on their way out of town forever. They recognized me, since I ended up directly at stage left so close they brushed against my ungainly western camera when they exited, and I recognized the phrenological type although not the individuals since it was dark, and they had been dressed in feathers and bangles, and painted with yellow stripes. This is their day job. They invited us in for tea.

I felt I should buy something. But not knives. Or Quran cases. I would buy a Quran case if it were as nice as the one Issouf has; but they never are. Neither are the knives. Everything on close examination seems to be pretty crappy. Just to be nice, we paid $20 for three trivets upon taking our leave, certainly twice what they would go for at Cost Plus. They had originally asked ?20 for one. The asking price is a curious case of butterfly/flower evolution. I don't suppose everyone in town got up one morning and decided to ask 5 times the highest imaginable tourist price as the opening gambit. But as the years wear on, the tourists expect to be able to get a 50% discount from the asking price, then 75%, then 80%...soon the economics exists in a world referring only to itself. It's an interesting field. There isn't properly speaking any "demand" for trivets and even less for Tuareg knives. The "Tuareg knives" I've seen offered in the window of the car wouldn't cut a meringue. The business is to create this social obligation. I liked "talking" to them. I liked the tea. Life is paying for social contacts. I should have been born anything but American, because only in America do you judge yourself on some nebulous criteria orbiting around the idea of being a Good Person and having lots of friend links on your myspace page; the rest of the world rather more honestly wants you around only if you can forward them to their next meal.

On to Desert Eclipse Expedition