In September 2013, using the Travel House in Granada as the starting point, we got on a ferry and crossed into Africa, to travel around Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and Senegal. The trip lasted for three weeks and was very exhausting, partly for the heat, partly due to the bad and, as we ventured deeper into the Sahara, non-existent roads. Using a small pocket camera we recorded a lot of video-materials, most of which turned out to be completely useless: random, unrelated shots, coincidental conversations, eye-catching sights without any potential to combine into a coherent story.

We then chose one conversation and tried to make it into a short documentary, but we soon parted ways and the project was forgotten. It was completed almost five years later.

The context is deliberately omitted. A desert and an ocean, the Spanish language and Islam, a ship cemetery, together form a confusing, disorientating little window into a life that takes place on the landfill of civilization, which could be located anywhere. There is a lot more that is missing: the smells of  the ocean, corrosion and rot, large putrefied sea creatures scattered on the sand, Bible and Quran on a bedside table, our host's sincere anger at our offer to pay for his fuel for giving us a ride back to town, a memory card with music (which?) that we left him as a gift, our excitement and the feeling of being immersed in life.

The film is available in full HD.

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More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouadhibou

The Eye of the Sahara on Google Maps – it really looks like an eye!

A glance at Wikipedia told me it was huge indeed: the diameter of the outermost ring is 40 km (25 mi) in diameter. Also, it is not a hole, as I first thought: it could best be described as a series of concentric rings, each one forming an almost perfect circle. It is an "eroded dome" – not a meteor impact crater, and definitely not a mine.

** We recently published our first English book: Bantustan, Atlas of an African Journey. It is an illustrated travelogue with a collection of hand-drawn maps, available on Amazon. Find out more at www.bantustanbook.com **

The Eye of the Sahara was first described in the 1930s and 1940s and was considered to be a meteor impact site, but that theory was refuted in the early 2000s. It was created by erosion.

It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

From the moment I saw the giant circle on Google Map, I got very excited. I started wondering if it would be possible to go there. Not just to stare at it on the map, but to really, physically go there and step into the center of the circle. I invited two friends – Inesa Adamonyte and Uros Krcadinac – with whom I had traveled to crazy places before, and who I thought might be willing to go on such an adventure. First they tried to convince me it was suicidal, but finally I managed to talk them into it. That same year, 2013, we decided to go for it.

We met in southern Spain and crossed by ferry to Morocco. Then we went down through Morocco, Western Sahara and finally Mauritania, where the Eye of the Sahara is located. From Nouadhibou we took the desert train used for transporting iron ore and after that a series of "desert buses", Toyota Land Cruisers that take people between small villages in the Sahara. For the final leg of the trip, we hired a jeep with a Tuareg driver, to take us to the circle.

The daytime temperatures were above 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). After a while, our cameras and phones got overheated and stopped working. Uros and I suffered a mild heatstroke, while Inesa suffered a more severe one, and ended up in the hospital in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where we arrived after a long, arduous trip. After she recovered, we continued on to Senegal, from where we flew back to Spain. The whole trip lasted three weeks.

During the trip, it came in handy that Uros spoke  some French, and I could speak Spanish and some Arabic. French and Spanish were spoken in the cities, but when we got deeper into the Sahara we had to rely on my broken Arabic to find out where to go and how to get there.

We were planning to shoot a documentary about the trip, so we did a lot of filming along the way (until our equipment died from the heat), but sadly we never got round to editing it; it turned out that hours upon hours of desert footage don't make for a watchable story. The adventure was definitely the most challenging trip of my life (so far), and probably the most dangerous one as well.

However, I'd say it was worth it. There's no place on Earth that could be even remotely compared to the Eye of the Sahara. It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

And there's no feeling – at least not one that I'm familiar with – that comes close to standing in the very center of the innermost ring of a 40-km wide crater, in the middle of the Sahara, knowing that it all started with an evening of sitting at home, getting bored and randomly looking through Google Maps.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. I'd do it tomorrow.

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Photos by Inesa Adamonyte and Lazar Pascanovic.

I asked him about Western Sahara. Was it a part of Morocco, like the map shows, or a sovereign country occupied by Morocco? I got a fairly long answer that started with the sentence:

– You know, historically speaking, Western Sahara has always been our, Moroccan land...

Our land... Coming from the Balkans, I've developed a habit to stop listening after those words. They are usually followed by a lengthy, tedious tirade copy-pasted from official history books.

We were sitting on the balcony of his house in Marrakesh, where he occasionally hosts Couchsurfers because he feels lonely. Husam is a software developer, he speaks good English and he is thirtyish. Over the next few days, as we hitchhiked all across Morocco, we learned that no one had ever heard about any desert wall.

When we decided to go to the west of Africa, we weren't sure where exactly Morocco ends. It begins just below Spain, but where does it end? To the south of Morocco lies a large strip of land called Western Sahara.

The transition from Morocco to Western Sahara is barely noticeable. A few (Moroccan) flags and then frequent police checkpoints. Before entering any town, after leaving any town, in the middle of the desert:

– Name? Passport? Student? Are you sure? Where from? Karadzic? Djokovic? Are you sure?

The desert is a fascinating place. I felt antsy about the possibility of being surrounded by the monotonous sight of plain nothingness for days; but there were days when the scenery kept changing rapidly – from hour to hour. Golden dunes in the distance and then white sand, red in contrast with the aquamarine of the Atlantic, rocks, dry bushes, camels, rubbish.

On the fifth day, we reached the final point of Western Sahara. From there, we took a night ride to the border which doesn’t open until about 8 a.m. The Arabs that gave us a lift kicked us out at the end of a long queue, because there wasn’t enough space in their car for all of us to sleep. We were encountered by dark and eerie silence. There was no one outside. We were speaking in whispers, though we weren’t sure why. Where are we going to sleep? It was one o’clock in the morning. We could see silhouettes of cars and trucks, and a little bit to the front, we saw a light, possibly coming from a candle. There was some tea boiling on a campfire, and next to it, two skinny men were lying on their sides. Only their dark faces were brightly illuminated.

When we realized that we were going to spend the night at the border in the desert, Katarina insisted that we joined someone, so I asked if we could join the two of them. First they told us to go away, but when we politely insisted, they invited us for tea. For the first 15 minutes we sat in silence, just staring at each other. Both of them were unkempt and tired, as if they had been on the road for a long time. Mohamed, a skinny guy with a moustache, was wearing a blue dress with golden weaving, a traditional Sahrawi robe of Western Sahara's indigenous population. The other one, Anouar, offered us some tea. He poured the thick green tea with mint and a lot of sugar from one cup to another at least two dozen times, in order to create as much foam as possible. Tea without any foam, he explained, is like a girl without a dress. I didn't understand if that was a good thing or a bad one, but I didn't ask. Instead, I asked where they were heading.

– Why do you want to know? Who are you? – they asked in panic.
– We're just students. From Serbia.
– Students? Are you sure? Show us your passports!
– Alright.

Mohamed ran his fingertips down his moustache, looking at my passport, and then got up and went to the car. Are we in trouble? He came back, spread a map next to the little propane tank they were using for making tea, and started pointing:

– We started from here, from Spain. We are heading to Tindouf, in Algeria. We are going all the way down to Mauritania, and then up, over here – he said, pulling his fingertip along the map. – That's where our families are. The Moroccans banished them after we lost the war. They are living in a big, improvised city in the desert. While all that was going on, I was studying abroad...
– But the road you are taking... it's a huge detour. Why not go this way? – I pointed at the map, suggesting a more logical route.
– In fact – he said – it is one and a half thousand extra miles. Unfortunately, this area is off limits. That's where the wall is.
– What wall?

Anouar came closer and started whispering:

– The wall. All the way down across Western Sahara there is a huge wall surrounded with landmines. Almost three thousand kilometers. It splits the country lengthwise in two unequal parts: the one occupied by Morocco, and the free territory. All the Sahrawis who fought against the Moroccan government were ousted deep into the desert, on the other side of the wall. Families were separated. Some of us live here, others live here, and in between there is a wall that officially doesn’t exist.

We asked about the new, empty villages we saw along the road. There are two theories, he said. According to one, the villages were built for remaining Sahrawis, but they refused to move there. The other theory is that they were designated for future colonization by the Moroccans.

– How will all that end? – I asked.
– How do you think it will end? – Anouar replied. – It will be ours again, of course.