The End!!!

After our grueling trip back from Timia to Arlit and then Agadez, we had another grueling drive from Agadez back to Niamey. These pictures were taken on a break at a gas station in Tahoua, where I drank two bottles of coke.

Moussa is utterly spent.

All the guys resting on their prayer mats

And the girls look just exhausted!

Back in Niamey, I had a couple days to get my visa extended (which was pretty easy) and to work with Etienne to get all the data downloaded from the PDAs (which was very hard). A dear friend of my family, Rev. Scott Clark, was in Niamey for a conference on using Arabic script to write local languages, so we visited the national museum to see if he could find any examples there. We didn't, but were directed to a research institute dedicated to studying and preserving them, which was fascinating.
The National Museum was fairly impressive. There are both pavilions and artifacts, and a fairly decent little zoo.
Beautiful water birds....
And a hippo waiting for his pool to fill back up

One of the dinosaur fossils - they have some pretty amazing skeletons in their collection!

This poor thing is the remains of the most famous landmark in Niger, the arbre du Tenere, or Tenere tree. At one point it lived in the desert and was the only landmark in the vast Tenere desert between the Air Mountains and the oasis of Fachi on the 600 km long camel caravan route. In 1973, a Libyan truck driver backed into it, and it has lived it the National Museum ever since.