Tourist in Chad

Chad is not a country where I would recommend coming if you want to be a tourist. There is one safari park but it is a two-day drive away from the capital. Needless to say, Chad is not a tourist destination. But when I was in N’Djamena for a week over the holidays, I was able to ‘play’ the role of tourist by visiting the National Museum of Chad, the artisan market, and riding on a camel.

1) The National Museum of Chad was a lovely museum with sections on Islamic culture, ancient Chad cultures and traditions, and even some fossilized bones. I really enjoyed learning about the different types of money (metals formed into different shares) that were used in the past as a way of trading goods. Each area of Chad had a different language and a different group of people (eg. Sahra people, Ngambai people) which meant different money forms were used.

There was a section that showed some traditional musical instruments with different horns, and drums as well as a type of xylophone. Another section of the museum showed traditional tools and clothing that was worn by Chadians. I really appreciated getting the history through artefacts of different aspects of Chad.

When we went upstairs, we came to a room with fossilized bones dating between 1.5-7 million years. There were bones from the ancestors of lions, crocodile, elephants, and fish as well as many others. While we were looking around, we peaked behind a blocked off area to see many other old bones that had not yet been categorized sitting in cardboard boxes! Someday I’m sure they will also be out for display but we enjoyed looking at them in their boxes.

2) The artisan market is an area where there are about 30 vendors selling different products from paintings to cards to fabric to clay sculptures. The different items that they are selling come from Chad as well as countries nearby. It was good to see the different things, but I felt that during our time there all the vendors wanted us to come into their little kiosk and by the end, my ears were practically ringing from the nagging encouragement.

3) My final and most exciting tourist activity was riding a camel. We contacted someone from the Canadian consulate who had a connection with someone who set it up for us. We arrived at a nomad encampment where there were 5 camels waiting for us. After taking some pictures we got on the camels as they were sitting down. When they stood up, I realized that camels are a lot bigger animals than I had previously imaged. We walked around for close to half an hour with a few 10 year old boys as our guides. Then at the end of our trip, we thanked the chief of the encampment and went on our way. It was a neat experience but it is not very comfortable. I can’t imagine riding on a camel for hundreds of kilometres at a time!