Land of stone forests and giant stones... Tassili Njeir National Park in Algeria

During a tour among geological marvels, at the end of a long valley surrounded by rocky outcrops on either side, stands the Hedgehog Rock with its upper dome resembling a stepped stone staircase, the lower half of which has been carved over the eons by wind and rain. The weight of the hedgehog rock is distributed over three thin columns. This hedgehog seems to move his sticky snout to the side, as if he were smelling air. At first the idea that the rock was carved naturally without human intervention seemed absurd, but after two days in Tassili Negir Park, everything seemed surreal, as this kind of natural art became routine.

Have you heard of Tassili Ngir before?

Tassili Najir... If this is your first time hearing this name, rest assured, you're not alone. The truth is that I am not sure I would have found my way there at all if it weren't for a letter I received from a fellow writer, who recently returned from Algeria, evaded my questions about its northern cities, historical sites and the Mediterranean coast, and repeated that sentence repeatedly: "You must go to Tassili Njer" which aroused a lot of curiosity about why he was attached to that place.

Tassili Negir Park Geographical Location

Located in the southeastern corner of Algeria, the Tassili Njeir National Park covers an area of 72,000 square kilometers of the Sahara desert, making it slightly larger than Ireland. Across this vast expanse, the desert looks like a large patchwork of sandstone peaks, braided mountains and enormous sand dunes of multi-colored sand. UNESCO, which listed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1982, describes its landscapes that appear to be from another world as "stone forests.

Flying over Tassili Negir Park

By the time I flew over the Algerian desert on the two-hour flight south of Algiers, Tassili Njir Park had looked from above promising something liberating and surreal: the desire to own a giant piece of land of this size for ourselves.

Access to Tassili Ngir National Park

We landed in Djanet, in the southeastern region of Algeria near the Libyan border on a foggy afternoon. Our tour guide was waiting for us at the luggage carousel. A man of willow and joy, he wore a distinctive purple headdress known to the Tuareg, the original inhabitants of the Algerian desert, and a member of the dominant Amazigh tribe in southern Algeria. We jumped into an SUV belonging to our guide friend and drove east along an empty asphalt road.

Tassili Najir... Mystery Park

Tassili Njeir Park was really mysterious, it looked somewhat like a geographical plot, because our destination was unusually far away as if we had received a slap in the middle of the desert, and we were also very close to the countries of Libya and Niger, the guide said referring to the Tamrit, a huge cliff, which is currently blocked, because the inaccessibility hinders military patrols: "There were camel trips there." "Now very few Western tourists come here, and no one goes to the plateau."

We were heading south to an area of this sprawling wilderness that, despite being close to the Libyan border, is safe – a place colloquially known as the "Red Tadreart," a mountainous area that looks a lot like those places that appeared in the movies as being on the surface of the planet Mars known as the Red Planet. The night had started so we had to camp and stay overnight to continue our journey the next day.

Tassili Stone Forest

By the morning of the second day, after camping on the first night on the outskirts of Tassili Ngir Park, we had become familiar with the situations that had become familiar over the course of our road journey: the guide, the driver, the cook, the purple headdress wrapped firmly around the heads and necks, and in the front of the car was a box full of food and camping equipment to support us for six days in the desert, until we reached the stunning terrain and the spectrum of vertical shapes where there are towering heights that originate from the gravel plains, and with a series of brown rocks in the color of Cocoa, as the sand covers large areas and then scales into terraces of striped towering rocks. There are many caves that cannot be counted from their abundance. They are the stone forests of Tassili as they call them.

Tassili Njeir and the art of prehistoric rock painting

A few miles from the military checkpoint known as al-Bab, which served as the threshold of the red Tadrart region, we stopped by what at first glance looked like an empty plank at the base of a cliff. Just as we got closer we saw the pictures on the rocks... A herd of cows and a group of slender hunters run after animals resembling a pig, giraffe and another lying animal with spotted skin. This was one of the oldest works of prehistoric rock painting in the world.

Types of rocks in the stone forests of Tassili

One of the most scattered rocks in the stone forest of Tassili was reddish oxidized sandstone, the same reddish tint that stains many sand dunes, crushed and mixed with bonding agents such as blood and cow's milk. Some of the most elegant and sustainable works of art are painstakingly carved on the rocks with a thousand strokes of round stone. Among them, the images describe thousands of years of prehistory and depict the social developments shaped by the region's dry climate.

The stone inscriptions in Tassili date back to prehistoric times

Thought to have been painted more than 10,000 years ago, the oldest stone inscriptions depict huge animals such as elephants, giraffes, and lions revealing that today's desert was once fertile grassland. Later, Neolithic pastoralists settled the land, displacing wildlife. They left behind elegant symbols of pibald cattle that they bred on what remains of the savannah. The smallest drawings, which Salam despised as "not old" (although many are older than Roman ruins found elsewhere in Algeria) are abstract images of camels, symbols of the rigorous, semi-nomadic life that the Tuareg will inherit. Contrary to intuition, the refinement of art has been deteriorating in this recent period. Whatever opportunity early people had to stay where they were and immerse themselves in artistic motives, it evaporated with the spread of desertification. In the desert, non-stop movement is a prerequisite for survival.

Tassili Park ... Wonderland

After a day or so, I already had the feeling that we were on another planet from the great horrible sights of Tassili Park, we weren't seeing the rocks in their best light. Throughout the second afternoon in the desert, the Sirocco winds from the west were filled with orange dust. This had the effect of reducing visibility, but the fog also bled rocks of texture, depth, color and shade. In Mola Naga, where we camped on the second evening next to a pillar of rocks in the shape of a camelhead, you can look directly at the sun, a weak silver celestial body, half an hour before it approaches the horizon.

The next morning, I woke up early, and these majestic windows looked flat and spectral. This morning, they stood in complete comfort against a deep blue sky.

The guide told us on the return trip: "It's a miracle!" Given the reaction of other tourists, what the guide said was not an exaggeration.

We set off for a walk south through the valley basin. In some places, the floor had a thick, white-colored veneer, decorated with hexagonal notches. This crust showed the reach of water during the summer rains when Tassili Negir Park became a staging point for migratory birds and breeding grounds, and there is a bitter melon plant that extends and spreads on soft sandy lands, a desert grass with a spherical, pumpkin-like fruit, spread next to water sources through dry waterways and we crushed seed pods underfoot as advised by the guide, as food for birds and deer.

Meanwhile, the low sand dunes were a version of the previous night's activity. The tracks of the beetle are scattered in the drunken crescent. Raven's claws rotate in circles. The jackal's claw prints lined the unmistakable meridian through the sand. The entire tracking was intersecting with the small depressions of the jerboa, a strange rodent with huge ears and kangaroo-like legs, which we often spied on as they raided our camp in search of crumbs.

My visit to Tassili Negir Park was a truly day of wonder. I saw mysterious symbols from prehistoric times, eroding sandstone to almost every shape and size imaginable. Rocks like mushrooms. The rocks formed in perfect parabolic passages. Rocks that look like skyscrapers, spacecraft, or unbelievable two-ton hedgehogs. I would really recommend visiting Tassili Negir Park for anyone who wants to feel like they are on another planet, this is the perfect place for that feeling.