Public displays of nonaffection

---

I don't like to quote the lonely planet, but this very much is . Car wrecks, flocks of camels and nomads dressed in layers of light, pale-indigo coloured cloth blowing in the wind; with six metre long pieces of cloth wrapped around their heads covering all but the sand blistered eyes.

Crossing the border into Mauritania is a glimpse of African bureocracy to come. The actual crossing took us about four hours. We had to stop and show our passports at six places to answer irrelevant questions and to wait for the police/gendarme/military/visa-issuer and so on, to decide for how long time to hold us. Realizing that it would have paid of to attend french-class instead of German back in high-school.

In Nouadhibou we found our self a dormitory to share with some newfound friends and we tried to plan our budget for Mauritania.
There's no ATM in the entire country, so you have to carry hard currency and shop around for the least poor exchange rate among black market dealers and not to trustworthy "bureaus de change".
The water outside Nouadhibou is the richest fishing area in the world, but like elsewhere in Africa when there's an area rich in natural recourse of some sort, the EU or the USA are there to harvest. In this case the EU owns the rights of fishing.

The coastline is decorated with shipwrecks and offshore is crowded with huge fishing boats over fishing the waters.
The town itself is very noisy, dirty and polluted, but it's got an undefinable charm to it. A couple of blocks away from the stone and concrete buildings on the main road there's shantytowns built with whatever imaginable.
One wall could be constructed from the roof of a car, another with knitted palm trees. In this area, corrugated steel plates as a roof, is considered luxurious. Most people have to settle for what's left after the Syrian traders have bought all the scrap-iron thats not pure rust.
There's goats roaming the streets chewing on newspaper, tin cans and tetra packs, having pulp fiction as dessert.
The fishing boats down at the beach are painted in colourful patterns of circles and squares, mixed with Arabic inscriptions and joyous symbols. The fishermen put the catch of the day out for display in the sand, and I was amazed when I saw the piles of sea slugs. Some of them where bigger than basketballs. They're called "fromage de mers" I guess because of the flesh. They had moss green-brownish turning to purple skin; and a very pulsating alien feel.

Left for Choum on the longest train in the world. At times it's more than 3km long. Carrying iron ore in open carts. Either you pay three $ for a couchette, or you ride the open carts for free.
Doing so will wreck all your belongins, but it's a memorable experience well (?) worth going for. It gets very cold in the night. We used our mountaineering-metal-foil-blanket as shelter but after an hour it had turned into bits and pieces flying around in the clear, starclad night like metallic kites. Then leaving the train at 3a.m. did a bad try to bargain over the price of transport to Atar. An adventurous journey in the dark, accompanied by three goats. Two hours of off-road driving in the desert, seeing no more than the reach of the weak headlamps. At times there's four tracks, the next second only one, then suddenly no tracks or tracks going all directions. I got no clue at all of how the driver could navigate in the night, by the look of it; chosing tracks at random doing 70km/h between rocks, bushes and desert rabbits.

Brief stop in Atar to cheer up our mood and then of to Chinguetti. Driving on the steep slopes of mountains shifting in colour as its inhabitants. From the cafe-au-lait coloured skin of the arab moors to the descendants of enslaved blacks, with skin as darkbrown as a cup of expresso.
Slavery was declared illegal 25 years ago, but can still be found throughout the country.
The black people are threated as third class citizens and Mauritania is imbued by strict islamic rules.
Chinguetti is surrounded by dune desert. It's a calming tranquil feel to walk around in the desert where the silence shout in your ear.
It's also the seventh holiest city of islam, once an important trading stop for caravans crossing the Sahara. Now a sleepy oasis suffering from drought, with most of its citizens earning their money on tourism.

We spoke to the owner of our guesthouse over a meal on night. He explained to us how he bought his wife a year ago, at the age of twelve, and that now she had given birth to his first son.
She was quite expensive.
500 euros, same price as a camel. He said.
Of course she didn't love him. He told us.
But that was of less inportance; explaining that his dream was to have four wifes, as that was the limit if the quran.

To me this felt very distant. But here:
-The man is the boss! 22 year old Abdu, let us know.

Getting away from Chinguetti was just as tiresome as getting there. There's only three paved roads in this desert country, one which goes from Atar to the capital Nouakchott. A journey said to take four to five hours with a normal car, took us 15 with a badly battered bus (you'll find cars in better shape at a car cemetary).
Held together by welded sheets and bars of scrap iron. Steel net for the windows, the front window cracked in a mosaic pattern, doors closed by strings and ropes. Rust, broken lights, crying kids, a crazy wretched driver and a man beating his wife (as witnessed earlier the same day in a restaurant).
Reaching Nouakchott was a relief.

It's big, crowded and polluted, but you can at any time escape back to your guesthouse. And that's where we spent most of our time here.
The best guesthouse we've been to so far.
Most of the guests are french (of course this is the case here in francophone Africa), but you get a good share of travelers from the rest of the planet. It's a favorite among overlanders and everyone has an adventourus journey to tell, or yet to experience.
Lots of stories to be shared.
Drinking Slovenian wine and loosing in chess.

Didn't stay very long, only ten days in total, but that felt like enough. There's beatiful seashells everywhere on the ground, wild dromedars trudging throug the desert, men chewing sticks and smoke rising in the nights from nomadic encampents. But there's also rubbish everywhere, and this strict islam? I don't know.
To stand and idly watch this organised break of human rights, gets to me.
Once again it's time to leave.

A taxi bruche' will take us to the border with Senegal.
The notorious border crossing at Rosso, with dodgy officers eager for a bribe and cunning pickpockets.

Mauritania has been a fulcrum between black- and arab-Africa, and we wount miss the latter.

---