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Published: December 1st 2004
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Have at last found a cyber cafe with a decent connection - in Noukchott, the capital of Mauritania. We arrived in Mauritania nearly a week ago, after a fairly uneventful last few days in Morocco. Our French friend, Christophe, met up with his friends in Dahkla, where we camped for two nights before setting off for the border crossing into Mauritania. En route we made some new friends - a couple of German travellers - Dietmar & Cisco in a large old bus and a couple of guys from Finland in a Landrover Defender. We camped with them in the dunes 60km from the border - and joy of joys they had beer & whisky - our first alchohol since Spain!
The border crossing was pretty uneventful - I don't know what I expected really - a striped barrier, an official looking building and a flag pole perhaps? ...but in reality it was a series of small shacks - and we didn't get too much hassle. (By all accounts crossing into Senegal is a nightmare, but we have that joy to come!).
Arriving in Mauritania, we immediately felt we were in Africa proper - the temperature soared and we
said bonjour to the flys - thousands of them, especially in Noudibou where we camped for two nights. Noudibou was like a very dirty smelly shanty town, complete with sand and rubbish and questionable fragrances everywhere.
After failing to persuade the Germans or the Fins to accompany us through the National Park and along the beach to Noukchott(they'd decided to take the road with a guide), we set off solo - with our GPS co-ordinates photocopied from a fellow travellers book.
After passing the Warning! Land Mines road sign, we took deep breaths and turned the GPS on...it was rough terrain for the first 60km until we reached the national park - then it was just us and miles & miles of endless desert, stretching as far as the eye could see. We camped by a sand dune, feeling better for having had a shower of sorts - water siphened from a jerry can! There was just us, the flies and some beetles.
The next day (me full of cold and with a streaming nose), we continued through the national park, wondering as we drove, where all the birds were. We were also feeling a bit peckish,
so stopped at the first village we came to, to enquire about provisions. We were duly invited to have lunch with Iysha who lived in a little house with her mother. She made us mint tea & then produced ice-cold coca cola - bliss! We then spent a lazy day on the beach, although swimming was prohibited by the hundreds of jellyfish along the shoreline. Iysha had invited us back for supper, having checked with her brother-in-law, chief of the village, that it was OK for us to camp in their village. I was invited to watch her prepare the evening meal of soup, vegetable stew and rice, which was truly wonderful and left us feeling very comfortably full - the first time for me since leaving the UK.
We set off bright & early the next day, navigating our way through the rest of the park - which was basically just miles & miles of more endless desert, punctuated by the odd little village here and there. Finally we started to follow the beach and were able to marvel at all the birds nesting for the winter, amongst them pelicans & flamingos - alas they were too quick
to capture on camera but my binoculars finally came into their own!
Then disaster struck as the back end of the landrover started bouncing all over the place. Investigation revealed that both shock absorbers had completely shorn through. There was nothing else for it - we had to drive, or rather bounce, along the beach at 10mph all the way to Noukchott (some 155km away). Our snails pace also meant that we had to camp on the beach for the night - and most of the next day, as we waited for the tide to go out again. The beach is only passable for a few hours each day. We passed dozens of little fishing villages along the coast - all of them shouting out for 'cadeux cadeux' - until we finally arrived in Noukchott in the early evening, where we promptly drove straight off the beach and into the middle of the fish market square! Much consternation from the locals alerted us to our mistake and we reversed, apologising to all.
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