Part 1: The 10-year desert journey begins

In this four-part series, gardening writer Henry Homeyer shares his “memoir in progress,” telling the story of traveling across the Sahara Desert in 1972. This led to a 10-year stay in Africa, including three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, two short contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development  and more than four years as the Peace Corps country director in Mali.

By Henry Homeyer
© 2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

In July of 1972, when I was 26 years old, my first wife, Gretchen, and I set off to hitchhike around the world. We were motivated, in part, by an invitation to visit my sister, who was living in Cameroon, in Central Africa. We rented out our house in Cornish, N.H., and bought a bright orange L.L.Bean four-man backpacking tent and one-way tickets to London.

We spent the summer in Europe, visiting the great art museums in London, Paris, Rome and Madrid. We lived cheaply — we mostly cooked on a tiny propane stove, or bought food at farmers markets. In the countryside, we camped out; in the cities, we stayed in youth hostels and cheap hotels.

In the fall, we returned to France from Germany and worked the grape harvest. I was a “porteur,” carrying heavy plastic bins of grapes on my back and dumping them into a truck. Gretchen was a picker — she stooped over all day, filling a 15-liter bucket with grapes as part of a team of eight pickers. We worked seven days a week for three and a half weeks. We were given room and board, and Gretchen earned the tidy sum of 35 francs (about $7) each day. I got an extra 50 cents a day for being a porteur. At times, the load in my pack equaled my body weight. But we saved all our money — about $350, which would be enough to get across the Sahara and to our destination of Bamenda, Cameroon.

We hitchhiked down the length of Italy, then took a ferry to Sicily and eventually a boat to Tunisia in North Africa. While in Sicily, we spent a few days traveling around, enjoying the warm, sunny November weather and seeing many of the old ruins. One night, we camped in an orange grove, and when we awoke in the morning, we gasped when we saw Mount Etna looming over us. We had arrived on a moonless night and didn’t know it was right there. The trees were heavily laden with fruit. Big, delicious-looking oranges. We discussed whether it would be OK to pick a couple for breakfast, but decided not to.

Shortly after we finished our stale bread and hot coffee, along came a man carrying a gun. Yikes, I thought — it’s a good thing we don’t have orange peels on the ground. He was delighted to see us, particularly when I told him we were Americans. “Oh,” he exclaimed in Italian. “I have a cousin in Brooklyn named Mario. Do you know him?” I had learned basic Italian working with Italian pickers during the grape harvest in France. I said I didn’t know his cousin, but he picked some fine oranges and handed them to us, enough to eat all day and into the next. After he left, Gretchen and I had a good laugh. We decided our new friend was not the owner of this huge field of oranges, but a hunter out to shoot a rabbit or two for dinner.

One morning in Palermo, I saw a long line of people queued up on the street near a food vendor. If he could attract so many locals, I wanted whatever he was selling. So, I got in line. It turned out that he had freshly baked soft rolls, still warm from the oven and filled with homemade coffee ice cream and fresh whipped cream. I got two and brought them to share with Gretchen in our room. And then, like the good Labrador retriever I am, I went back and got in line for two more.

To start across the Sahara, we took a boat from Palermo to Tunis, Tunisia. It left in the early evening and sailed all night. I didn’t sleep — well, maybe a few winks — sitting in a third-class cabin chair and thinking over the wisdom of hitchhiking through Tunisia and Algeria. It was 1972, and the Black September group had massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Our government was at odds with many Arab countries, including Algeria. I wondered if we would be safe.

Arriving in North Africa,
with luck as our guide

We got to Tunis on a gorgeous sunny morning. From the boat, as we approached land, I saw that all the signs were written in Arabic, but there was one word I could recognize: Coca-Cola, in English. I didn’t want one, but it somehow reassured me that we would figure things out.

We found a cheap, sleazy hotel and took a short nap. Then, we were off to see the city, starting at the souk (market). There were piles of olives a yard square and nearly a yard high. Not just green and black olives, but also red, purple and other shades of olives I had never seen. Young men speaking French — Gretchen and I both knew the language — offered to take us around and show us everything, but we declined. We knew they would expect money, and we were on a tight budget.

Everything in Tunis was different — the clothing, the architecture, the smells of food sold on the street. Some women wore burkas to hide their faces, and men wore long, loose robes. Kids were begging and wore nothing but shorts and maybe a T-shirt. In the market, there were dancers — young men wearing brightly colored gowns and often face makeup and big earrings, dancing and singing to the beat of a handheld drum.

It was Thanksgiving Day. American Thanksgiving Day, that is. No turkey dinner was available. Nor did we see mashed potatoes or peas or cranberry sauce on the menu at the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we ate. We had couscous, with too much red pepper. Hungry, we ate it. We were both a little homesick, thinking of past Thanksgiving feasts.

Gretchen’s father knew that a colleague of his at DuPont had a son who worked in Tunis as a photographer for National Geographic magazine. We had his name and part of an address: the souk. That’s all we knew, just that he lived in the old part of town near the market. We decided, after dinner, to see if we could find a needle in a haystack. And we did.

Luck seemed to follow us everywhere. As we walked around the old town, asking passersby if they knew the American who lived there, we heard a voice coming from a second-floor balcony. In English. “Can I help you? What are you looking for?” It was the man we sought. He invited us up, and we had a delightful evening of talk, complete with a touch of American Thanksgiving: He served us mincemeat pie. I will never forget the room of photographs taken from the top of a mosque, with a 360-degree view. Each panel was roughly 3 feet wide and 6 or 8 feet tall, and in black and white. It was amazing.

From Tunis, we hitchhiked west toward Algiers, our departure point for crossing the Sahara. That first day, we made it to a good-size city in Algeria: Constantine. We found a reasonably priced old hotel and got a room on the second floor.

For dinner, we often cooked soup on our little stove. Knorr soup was readily available in foil packets — just add it to water, bring to a boil and serve. Baguettes were everywhere too, and they helped fill us up. But our trusty stove that night turned out to not be as trusty as usual — the cartridge of propane ran out before the water boiled.

Fortunately, I had spares, but when I screwed one in, I did not notice that the rubber gasket that served as a seal had stuck to the old cartridge. Propane spewed out, and I had no way to stop it. Double glass doors leading to a tiny balcony outside the hotel room were painted shut, but I quickly forced them open and brought the stove out to spew its contents. Crisis averted.

Next week: Starting out across the Sahara.