Times have changed when Chris Scott offers a book as a Kindle edition.
It’s not as though the desert travel veteran is un-tech-savy—his authoritative Sahara Overland Forum has been on the Web for what seems like eons. But Chris’s participation in threads there always had sort of a message-from-the-wilderness mystery to it—one imagined him typing on a gritty Panasonic ToughBook from the top of a sand dune, sending the signal via satellite using a generator powered by a camel harnessed to plod in circles, or maybe hooked up to the rear wheel of a knackered Yamaha XT500.
However, the advent of a Kindle edition of his Desert Travels means he must have snuck back to his flat in London for at least long enough to arrange the appropriate technology transfer. In any case, for the price of a cup of coffee ($2.99) you can now have the book downloaded to your Kindle, or a device that can read Kindle books (such as an iPad).
Desert Travels covers some of Chris’s earliest explorations in the Sahara, beginning with his disastrous initial foray and precipitous retreat on an XT500, ending with a fractious ride alongside a pseudonymed companion from Algeria to Mauritania, and centered around a foray into vehicle-supported (via a dodgy 101 Land Rover) guided motorcycle trips, on which “five set off . . . only one came back riding.” This period in the 1980s, just before the nomad rebellions began to make travel in the central Sahara, and Algeria in particular, hazardous in places for foreigners, is what Chris refers to as the Golden Age of Saharan Exploration, when anyone with the experience and/or commitment could undertake truly epic trans-national journeys across an area the size of the United States.
