France with Arabs Among the things you're more likely to do in Algiers, is going to museums. These are spread all around the city, and many of them are actually worth visiting. The French city, which is far more predominant here than in any other North African city, is not all in all to well kept. Many areas are very nice, but oh so European. Still the waterfront area, facing east is beautiful, and if it wasn't for all the veil carrying women around you, you could have been in France.
The old city of Algiers is one of the worst to be found in North Africa. If you want to see real slum, this is the place. This has been one of the most dangerous places for foreigners to visit, during the upheavals the last years. Entering this place is still a suicidal act. Despite it's size Algiers was not among the best places to eat, fast food was the frustrated traveler's choice. But if you're ready to move around the whole city, you can visit a new, good restaurant for at least a fortnight. The monument above all other Algerian monuments is the 100 meter tall Martyr's monument, some three km out from town center. It's a big open square, with the monument in the middle. The whole structure can virtually be seen from wherever you are in Algiers, but most of all, from the sea.

Grand Erg Occidental:

Unlike what many people believe, most of Sahara is not soft sand dunes only broken by a thriving oasis with a little blue lake in the center. It is rocks and pebbles for thousands and thousands of miles,- it doesn't make as good photos as the sand dunes, so therefore less attention.

When however, Sahara becomes real endless sand dunes, this is a specific natural phenomenon called erg. The Grand Erg Occidental is the second largest of the two dominating ergs of Algeria (there are several, altogether), and as there is no way any human life could be sustained here, no villages are found inside it, no roads crossing through it. The experience of it, will be from the fringe, most of the time from a distance, other times it will be feasible to make long enough walks into

it, to really get feeling of solitude and inferiority compared to the powers of nature. Of the cities that makes excursions into the erg possible, Taghit, Beni Abbes, Timimoun, and El Golea are counted for being among the most beautiful