When I woke up this morning I already felt a bit better. I took a long shower, although cold, it made me feel better. We exchanged some Ougiya’s, arranged an insurance and took of.
It was about 12:30 and with 103109km on the clock we left the campsite. We drove through the mainstreet where this camping was situated. The cars in Nouadhibou were really something, we had never seen cars in a shape like this. The cars were in such a bad shape, a car demolition center in Europe would not even pick these up. The metal was rotten so much and the cars were full of dents. Bumpers were fitted to the car with ropes, huge holes in the body work, taillights missing, people holding the doors in place, otherwise they would fall out, all kind of doorhandles and strips were missing, broken headlights, wheels who all tried to roll to a different direction.. You would only believe it when you see it. It was not the case for every car, there some pretty nice W201 (190) and W124 series Mercedes cars. The W123’s, the old Peugeot and Renault buses and cars were the worst ones. Maybe the cars which aren’t of any use for the moroccans anymore were exported to Mauritania.
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Mercedes W123 in Mauritania. But hey! Still rollin’!  (if you look closely, you see there’s a chrome strip missing). |
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| Mercedes W123 in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. |
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| Nouadhibou: Sand, one story houses and electiricity cables. That’s all there’s to it. And of course Mercedes |
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| Nouadhibou, Mauritania |
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Imagine you take a picture of a car and then print it on paper and then crumple it up completely and then unfold it again, this is more ore less how some cars look like.
Nouadhibou feels like Nowheretown. It’s in fact nothing more then some houses popped up in the desert, with no nice building or monument at all, no nice atmosphere or cosiness. These wrecks which are driving here transport the people, huge bags of rice and furniture from one place to another. With a couple of miles an hour they crawl through the streets. When a car moves to Nouadhibous it is definitely its last station.
The people around here are very strict muslims and it often shows they have a hard time living up here.
This place, full of small houses built from sand having corrugated iron roofs with satellite antennas on it, dirt lying everywhere and sandy dusty streets looks pretty sad to us. Huge piles of sand here and there and the old telephone poles make the story complete.
I found myself some oil in a small shop in a little bystreet. I had the default chat with some guys hanging around the shop. Soon a some people gathered around the car and we had the default talk again, about how good the car is, if we wanted to sell it, where we’re going to and again, how good these cars are. It’s always nice, to have these conversations and talk a bit about the W123 and travelling through their country. After I got my oil we said goodbye and started with our long trip to Senegal, we planned to do reach Senegal today.
At around 8 pm we arrive in Nouakchott. It looks already much better then Nouadhibou, but again, Nothingness plays the leading role here. A city devided in a nice raster of roads in the middle of this great desert. The now so very recognizable one story sand buldings. In the centre there were some bigger buildings to see. We manage to find an ATM and continue on.
The part between Nouakchott and Senegal is really beautiful, much more interesting in our opinion then most parts of the desert so far. Many big sand dunes to spot and now and then we stopped to experience the area. Ramon climbed one of the bigger dunes and rolled off from top to bottom.
The temperature was unhuman, I guessed it was about 50+ degrees. Sometimes the even hotter wind came from the inland, it then felt as if we stood in a hot-air oven.
Being here, in the middle of sand and stones was awesome. Noone to be seen and pure silence. Sometimes you see big dunes on the horzion, and sometimes the surface seems to integrate with the air on the horizon. While driving we had to keep the windows closed most of the time, the hot wind was even hotter then it was in the car.
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| Soft sand, Mauritania |
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| Sahara, Mauritania (Transatlantic route) |
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| Sahara, Mauritania (Transatlantic route) |
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| Sahara, such a vast endless wilderness. |
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| +50 degrees in the sahara in the summer and no airco, that’s just great . Having the windows opened just helped even hotter air coming in. |
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| Some do survive with practically no water. |
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| The Saharagelber in the Sahara. |
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| Dunes everywhere |
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While on the road we had the luck to spot one of our favorite animals (we got lots of them at home). The gerbil. To see these funny little creatures in the wild was complete new for us. I saw some of these crossing the road before but then Melissa and Ramon were asleep. I thought I recognized them as gerbils because of their way of running, it’s different then a mouse or rat. This time we stopped to check out if we could see it. And there it was, sitting somewhere on the side of the road. We approached very slowly and kept sitting over there. We opened the door to have a clear view of him, as it was very close to the car. We gave him a dried peace of fruit, which is what they adore. The gerbil sat there and tried the peace of fruit. It was so funny that it just did not run away and stayed with us, just walking around and washing itself, as if it was quite normal we stood there. After a while we said goodbye and went on.
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| Rolling of the dunes! |
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| and Roll! |
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| What you see in front, you see in the back |
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| Various colours of the dunes. |
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| Such a cute gerbil we found in the desert. |
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We continued on to Rosso, a milestone of the Africa trip. From this point you more or less trade the sand and emptyness of the Sahara for the greenery and colourful Africa. But first, you have to pass Rosso. The place -not- to be, so to speak. It’s dangerous, tedious and the only way to cross except from a smaller border downstream the Senegal river. We had to find out if we could drive along this river. As we were tremendously tired. We drove through the whole of Mauritania in one day. As it was the middle of the night. The streets are deserted. We tried to figure out where the border crossing is. While driving through the streets which were covered with litter and goats we found out there is nothing here. Some fellow hung around the streets and overall it was very dark. The only thing we saw was a big gate and when we stood there someone was approaching us. We didn’t feel to comfortable about it, though I opened the window to hear what he had to say. He starts a story about the border which is closed and that he had a place to sleep for us. I thanked him and continued on. He starts trying to stop me but I kept on moving.
I left for the streets again, manouvering between the big potholes. The darkness, all the litter and the strange sounds all made the atmosphere not too cosy, to say the least. Nobody seems to be here and the small houses look like they’re deserted. On top of this, a car appears in my mirror and keeps following us. We kept on driving, and find out the situation here and think about what to do, if we would stay in a hotel somewhere. Trying not to hit the potholes or the goats we drove around, with that car behind us. We seem to drive on a dead-end road and have to go back.
We passed the car which was following us and saw to men sitting in it, one opened the window to start talking but I kept on driving. They probably want to stop us for some place to stay for the night, but we prefer to find something ourselves. We decided to stop at a place where some military guys guarded some building. They didn’t seem comfortable about me getting out of the car and asking about a place to stay. Then the car which was following us came towards us and the man got out of the car and started taking over my chat with the guard. He appeared to be very kind and offered us (indeed) a place to sleep. He told me there was no hotel of some sort over here, so there were no options to stay here. ‘That’s of course because nobody WANTS to stay here’ I thought. So there we are. I thanked the man for his offer and got in the car again. The man explains the border is closed now and we can cross it tomorrow morning. I asked him about the alternative route, the one to drive along the Senegal river to Bge de Diama. They told us the road was flooded because of the heavy rains and it would probably not be possible to drive this road, the piste would be tricky because of this. They still decided to bring us there and guide us to that border. To my information that is quite a distance! Before we knew we drove behind them out of Rosso.
I talked about it with Melissa and we decided it was not too smart to follow some fellows out of Rosso in the middle of the night. I flashed with my lights to stop them. I told them we were too tired to do drive it now and now we knew which way to go we would try it the next morning.
By the way, we had travelled for 12 hours already so it was wise to have a good night rest anyway, before continuing. After all, I was still sick this very morning.
We tried to drive out of Rosso, as there was a building that looked like a hotel. We entered the place and found out noone was there anymore. We to the entrance passing lots of cockroaches buzzing around on the porch. There was a bell so we rang it. After a while someone came and offered us a room, quite expensive but we now knew why: there was no alternative. While unpacking the car some guys from the hotel started to chat.
As I was awefully tired I was not able to follow their french too good, but it was important to get some info from them, like the ferry departure times, the way it worked at the border in Rosso and the possible flooded road on the alternative road. Then, apart from that, I had to think about every sentence to check if it would be in his advantage to say that. Was the road really flooded, as they wouldn’t make any money if we were taking that road? I was too tired and after I heared about the departure times of the ferry I said goodbye to them and I clearly stated that we did NOT have an appointment for this guy to guide us in Rosso, we would see tomorrow. I’d like to arrange it this way, otherwise this guy will probably keep bugging us all the time, so I preferred to find him if we needed him tomorrow.
I got up to the room which was too darn hot to sleep in. Also, it was quite dirty and the beds weren’t clean, so we slept in our sleeping bags.
Melissa and I discussed what to do, taking the guide tomorrow to spare us all the hassle of the border we heard so much about, or try to get the piste to the west. We could hardly thinkg straight and all this stress and being exhausted made us quite irritated. We decided to postpone this decision till tomorrow. Luckily we were able to fall asleep very quickly, 3am, great.. We were put to the test today, you could say.