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Published: November 30th 2010
Welcome to Mauritania
Sleeping at the Gendarmerie!!! Nice guys, but they couldn't make up for the fact it was too cold...Cute, very cute we were, but even more naive....The bus ride from Bamako to Nouakchott was indeed a bit more than the promised 30 hours, which I also mentioned in the previous blog entry. I would have settled for 40, but in the end it became 50 hours. Ok truth be told: we arrived just a bit too late at the border, so we were forced to sleep there. But the Mauritanian customs were nice and suggested to sleep next to the cabin of the border police: more safe. Ok safe it was, but still cold.... But the ride in itself was uneventful, too many 'security' checks, but that's ok.
The bus attendants wanted to collect bribe money to pay the police at the checkpoint, but we did not fall for it. They explained that we could have less lengthy checks, but they proved to be wrong. The checks were swift and most of all they did not bother with our stuff. Of course at the end of the trip the bus crew did not reimburse the other travellers who chipped in... Upon arrival in Nouakchott we caught up with some sleeping and found out that Nouakchott (built in the
Mosquée Saudique
It's dominating the skyline of Nouakchott, pretty nice, but we couldn't go inside for a peek. 1960's) is indeed not that interesting. But the Port de Pêche was nice enough to spend an hour or 2, at least Agi had a chance to build a sand castle (with the aim inspiring the local kids). In case that makes her happy, who am I to stop her.... And we also sent the 23rd postcard to the parents, so Mauritania: tickmark!!
Riding in the desert
In Nouakchott we met a friendly Slovenian guy, who was on his 4000 km cycling trip from Lisbon to Dakar. Had a good chat and he also introduced us to an Italian guy who lives near Atâr, in the Adrar region. So we fixed with Guido a 2-day trip into the desert in the region and ticked off the nearby sites on the Adrar plateau. Baba, Guido's local right hand picked us up in Atâr and took us to their house, which is built off Azougui village in the valley. Lovely setting, nice room, swimming pool (!!!), no other tourists and wives who learned how to cook perfect local and Italian dishes (free hint: marinate the camel meat or beef in white wine to make it more tender). What
else do you need to be happy? OK booze, and we also got that. So we ended up skinny dipping in an Islamic Country, who would have thought that???
Next morning we headed off to the Valle Blanche, a nearby sandy desert stretch. The panorama was really nice with black mountains, yellow sand and green bushes. Yes, green bushes, as the rainy season just stopped recently... From here we passed a small village in the middle of an oasis, where the locals produce dates. The grandparents of Baba were still living there and got their own date plantation. Got a free sample and indeed, the dates were sweet and tasty. We continued to crawl up to the plateau and had our lunch in a beautiful canyon. And to work on the calories, we went for hunting: Baba is an expert in catching the local lizards who are sunbathing in the midday heat.
We finished the day in Terjît, a village you would simply pass as uninterested, unless you know they hide a fantastic oasis in the backyard. Just outside the village there is a small narrow canyon filled with hundreds of palm trees and water is running all
The colorful boats
Ok, most boats were like the small one, but the bigger versions were also present. over the place seeping through the rock walls of the canyon. As Baba explained the water runs in circle in the canyon, being warmed up by the rocks, cooling in the stream and later on reentering the wall. Hard to believe, but it seems this is really the case. There are cold and warm water pools where you can jump in and we did not miss the opportunity!
Chinguetti, a town losing the battle against the sand dunes...
Next morning we headed off to Chinguetti, an ancient caravan town in the Sahara, the 7th holiest city of Islam. To get there we had to go through the Nouatil pass which brought us up to the lunar-like Adrar plateau. On the way to Chinguetti we took a detour to some ancient rock paintings which are showing elephant, giraffe and human figures on huge stones overlooking the canyon underneath. These paintings are supposedly over 32.000 years old. They were made when elephants and giraffes still wandered in the lush and green Sahara... If only we could have seen how it was at that time.
And we continued our new passion on the way to Chinguetti: hunting for lizards. Baba
and Guido wanted to have 7 of them to make a new daily record, we ended up with eight. We don't want to brag, but with Marko, the Slovenian guy, they caught
only seven. The good thing is even though Baba likes to grill and eat these creatures, but the intention was to introduce them to the valley in Azougui as these little beasts do a great cleaning job by eating the small flies and mosquitos.
Finally we made it to Chinguetti. It sits right in the middle of the desert with rolling dunes all around, which are actually threathening the town by slowly covering it with sand. Chinguetti used to be a stop for salt caravans of 30.000 camels back in the old times and also had 12 mosques and many Quranic schools for the 20.000 people who lived there. Today though it is pretty run down with only 4000 inhabitants, the houses in the old districts are abandoned and are slowly being overtaken by the dunes. The highlight of the place is the 16th century stone mosque with its mighty tower and the many libraries containing ancient Islamic manuscripts. We didn't go for the old libraries, as
we had to head back to Azougui.
After we visited the town and had lunch, we drove back, but not after getting closer to the sand dunes to take some funny photos. OK, it was not like dune bashing in the Emirates with huge dunes all around as far as you can see (which we did a few years ago, so not on this trip), but we still got some nice pictures. One sad story for the day, our beloved camera broke down and still has not recovered since then. So we had to switch to the less but OK Olympus for the remaining 3 weeks of our trip...
Riding the Iron Ore Train...
Next morning we said good bye to our hosts and headed off to Choûm by a local 4x4 taxi in order to take the famous iron ore train, which is the longest train in the world: approx 2.3 km long. The train arrived at 7 pm. We planned to take a couchette, but the locals convinced us that it's better to travel for free on the top of the iron ore as the cabins are smelly of urine... No need for more convincing
we climbed up into a wagon, put on all our warm clothes, covered our head, face, eyes with shawls and went off. Michael, an American fellow traveller, joined us, he was a bit better prepared though... He had US Army gogles and a huge bunch of warm, old clothes. But we were smarter: we had our dinner (biscuits with jam)
before the train took off. He ended up having his dinner for breakfast the following morning...
It was a pretty uncomfy ride, especially as the morning dew near the coast of Nouadhibou made our clothes a bit wet. The first half was really shit, but after the half an hour stop at 3 am, we actually got comfi and slept pretty good. Removing pointy rocks, getting lower out of the wind and having Agi's old poncho as a dust blanket did miracles. In the morning we cursed at the sun, as it was hiding behind the thick clouds, but from 8 am the sun showed itself and triumphant smiles appeared on our black faces. From that moment we actually really enjoyed the ride and the views. So we made it in one piece: a bit frozen and definitely ready
The Adrar Plateau
It's a bit rocky out there... for a hot shower. The only bad after thing was the laundry... How to get the black dust out from our clothes, ears and noses...
We ended up enjoying Nouadhibou's speciality: fresh fish. We stuffed ourselves twice in 2 different Chinese restaurants with great seafood and cold beer! The final thing we had to do was arranging the next leg of our trip: Crossing the Western Sahara with a shared taxi the following morning to Dakhla, the first bigger city in Western Sahara (Morocco). But that's a different blog entry!
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