Yallah!

Drawing inspiration from a 1940's travel book

Iv’e realised that many of my journeys have literary beginnings.

Most are a search for something that I feel is missing in contemporary European society.

One of the motivations behind my journey by camel across the Sudan’s Bayuda Desert, was a book called Yallah.

Published in 1957, Yallah combines the photography of Peter W. Haeberlin and text by Paul Bowles - a writer who is an important voice for me.

Yallah documents a journey through the Sahara.

The ideas in the book became a central reference for my journey.

The easiest way to get those ideas across is to include a text from Paul Bowles’s introduction:

“How greatly the West needs to study the religions, the music and the dances of the doomed African Cultures! How much, if we wished, we could learn from them about man’s relationship to the cosmos, about his conscious connection with his own soul. Instead of which, we talk about raising their standard of living! Where we could learn why, we try to teach them the all-important how, so that they may become as rootless, futile and materialistic as we are. Perhaps, at least, this is not wholly inevitable. I cannot help interpreting the title of the book (which in arabic means let us be off) as an exhortation to those of us who are able to salvage which is still intact and valuable”

My journey through the Bayuda desert, with the Bedouin – an ancient people who have not forgotten their connection to the land – was a way to do exactly that.

To travel slowly. To travel traditionally.

To accept the privations of the desert – far from the latest eco-lodge and ‘destination that’s having a moment’.

To share simple food around a campfire at night under cosmos, to access original wisdom of the desert and its inhabitants, and, for a short while, to taste a freedom that is unattainable elsewhere.

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Yallah also became the title of my SUITCASE Magazine article:

You might agree that these two desert journeys – 70 years apart – were in many aspects - remarkably unchanged.

There is still magic if you go looking for it.

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