My Mercedes is Not for Sale
From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou...An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara
“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”
—Janis Joplin
A journalist’s intrepid endeavor to sell his used car abroad results in a high-spirited and revealing look at West Africa.
“Look, there’s my car,” I say, pointing at my Mercedes in the parking lot.
“Where?” a fellow desert traveler asks.
“There, that Mercedes,” I say.
He looks at me, questioning. “You want to drive that through the Sahara?”
Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy a clunker of a car in his native Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market even for jalopies still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusted-out 1988 Mercedes 190D with 220,000 kilometers on its…
$14.95
July 15, 2008
JEROEN VAN BERGEIJK is a journalist based in Amsterdam and has written for The New York Times, Wired, and many other publications in Europe and the United States.
