Nouadhibou's port. Due to Mauritania's lax regulations, this port has become a graveyard for abandoned ships, since it is cheaper than disposing of them properly in their home countries.Arriving at the train station made me feel even more that I had crossed a border into a new land. The rails were simply two rails running parallel through an endless expanse of sand. If there were ties keeping the rails to the ground, nobody would know as they were buried in sand. The station itself was just a metal open-fronted shelter, occupied by Senegalese women selling bread, fruit, and packaged foods at exorbitant prices, and a few military officers in sunglasses milling about, doubtlessly taking their share from the hawkers. Men in long blue robes with donkey carts milled about, carrying loads of produce and other goods to the side of the tracks. I was amazed to see a crate of bananas coming from Cote d’Ivoire that would be headed to the interior of the Mauritanian Sahara. I couldn’t imagine who would be affording to put them in their mouth.
The train would supposedly depart at one or two in the afternoon, but since it looked like almost nobody had arrived yet, we settled for a long wait. It would be hours before we would even see anybody arrive with the intent of getting in the single passenger car. We, however, would not be getting in the passenger car, but climbing into one of the large empty cars that make up the longest train in the world (usually 3 km I think) that brings iron ore from the interior of Mauritania.
We spent our waiting time making friend with the donkey cart men, helping them push their carts through the sand, and, eventually enjoying tea with them. This was the first situation that I really saw the caste system in place. The black moors were doing the manual labor, pushing the carts and doing the heavy lifting, while the white moors seemed more interested in watching over and drinking tea. I had wondered why they weren’t inviting us to tea, because in Morocco, they would have invited us to join them as soon as their stove was on. But they finally did invite us to tea, as well as dinner, though I noticed it wasn’t until the blacks had finished their work with the donkeys and had left.
Susan and the train
Our things
Their things
The train arrives from Zerouat, filled with iron ore, passengers on top of the booty.
We drank lots of tea, and shared their meal of bland potatoes and a piece of fatty camel meat (more typical of the real Mauritanian cuisine, as opposed to the Senegalese food served in restaurants and on the streets). We asked them if the train would stop in the village of Ben Amira, and they said maybe, but if it does, only for two minutes. Our plan, we hoped, was to get off the train there, instead of continuing to one of the only two sure stops of either Choum, or farther on Zerouat, where the iron ore mine is. We wanted to stop in Ben Amira because it holds one of Mauritania’s little known treasures, the world’s second biggest monolith. Supposedly the only way to get there is on the sand/dirt road with a 4x4 from Choum. There is no public transport, and even with your own vehicle it would be a nightmare, and probably an entire day of travel. We hoped we would manage to get by with just the train.
Our train friends
Ready for a cold, dusty ride.
Before sunset we took our turns meandering through the sand dunes and rock-laden desert on the other side of the tracks. We had been told that the train probably wouldn’t come until eight, but we still weren’t going to stray too far as information can always be sketchy.
Susan loses a race back to the tracks against one of our tea-inviting friends.At eleven o’clock there was still no train, and the only rumor we got was that they were having trouble unloading the iron ore. Not surprising, but almost better for us, as we knew that the journey to Ben Amira would take around 8 hours, and we didn’t want to arrive at night, as we would need to see the monolith to confirm our destination.
Finally, at 1:00 in the morning, the train came. In a ridiculously pointless panic, we scurried up the ladder of the car that landed in front of us, haphazardly dumped our packs the six feet down to the floor of the car and jumped in. We gathered ourselves, saw we had everything, then laughed at ourselves for doing it so quickly as the train obviously would stop here for more than two minutes.
Train arrivesWe laid down plastic grain sacks to protect ourselves from the black dust coating the enormous car, and then toasted the new adventure and new country with some whiskey we had smuggled in (Mauritania is a dry country).
At sunrise, I awoke to a new world. We were stopped in a tiny village scattered around the tracks in the middle of an endless desert. The houses, all made of mud, were wading in about a foot of sand, and it seemed as if there was nobody. We saw a couple of train workers milling about, but everybody else was hidden indoors. The road that ran along the tracks was barely visible, and the train was obviously the only lifeline this town had to the outside world. With whiskey still in my head, I took my last sip of this new place, then laid back down.
I woke, confused, hearing Jonathan yelling something. It took me a second to understand. First I felt the hot sun. “Ben Amira! Joey, is this Ben Amira? Get up!” he yelled. I popped up, turned, saw a giant blunt piece of brown protruding toward the sky. I wasn’t certain, but then I turned, and the gaggle of men two carts in front of us, who we had shared tea with the afternoon before, were yelling and pointing. “Ben Amira Ben Amira!” I remembered that they had told us the train would only stop for two minutes. At least 30 seconds to a minute spent, I looked down at my bag and all it’s belongings spilling out. I checked to make sure that Jonathan and Susan were ready to go, then started throwing everything directly out of the train. My little boom box hit the ground and spilled its batteries and I kept throwing. I waited for Jonathan and Susan to clamber out, then I hit the ladder. When I got to the ground, I let out a gasp of relief, watching the gaggle cheering for us from the brim of their car. Then we got another laugh at ourselves as we watched the train sit motionless for twenty minutes.
We wandered along the tracks, past a closed shop and a few silent mud homes until we met a person. He was a shopkeeper, of the other shop in Ben Amira. We decided to see what we had on offer in case we decided to stay a while. Sardines, sugar, tea, rice, pasta, sweets, onions, potatoes and of course Coca-Cola. Cold. Everything was a bit over-priced, but considering almost everything was imported, and then came on train, we were not shocked. We asked if there was any bread (Noadhibou had been loaded with fresh baguettes), and he said if we ordered it today, they would have it ready for tomorrow. We asked for three loaves.
The shopkeeper invited us to tea, and we sat on the floor of the shop with him and his male family/friends/servants (?) and sipped for a while. After the third cup, the shop owner said that we had to check in with the Gendarmerie. We trudged through deep sand, walking past more tiny, silent homes. We saw the occasional child scurry away, but that was it until the gendarmerie station a few hundred yards from the tracks. They acted very serious, as if we weren’t obviously just tourists with plans to walk out to the monolith. Perhaps it was curious that we arrived without our own transportation, and that we planned to camp at the monolith, for a period that we did not know. They let us proceed, and we complimented the officer on his camo green turban. It was very cool, but his facial reaction left us wondering if he agreed.
Ben Amira, the monolith, looks close to the village, maybe a few hundred yards, but the size of it along with the lack of anything next to it to compare it to, is deceptive. We pushed our way through sheep-skin littered sand, then across loose gravel, then dry mud, then stone and hardpack gravel. It took us an hour or more to reach the monolith, but a disagreement and miscommunication left me on the complete opposite side of it as Jonathan and Susan. I was mad that the original plan had somehow changed, so was stubborn and started to set up my camp. If they wanted to join me, they could. Otherwise I would be alone for the night. I was too tired and dehydrated to want to go to wherever they ended up. Plus, I had all the pasta, rice and couscous in my bag. It was heavy, and they would want it. Sure enough, Jonathan came around sans pack about thirty minutes later. He apologized for the miscommunication, but said they found a great spot with lots of shade, sand and firewood. I looked around my spot. A tiny tree with enough shade for one tent, gravel, a little sand and no wood. I agreed to go there.
It was stunning. We were tucked into a little cove right up next to the side of the monolith. The biggest tree in the area gave shade all day over a luxurious bed of sand. The surrounding trees had plenty of dead branches to pull off, and there was even some scattered charcoal left by a previous camper. I had to give it to Susan. When I wasn’t with them, she had insisted it would be better to go to the right side of the monolith, resulting in our separation. But this was an incredible camp spot, and completely invisible from the town.
We set up our camp and Susan talked about exploring. Jonathan and I thought she was crazy. We were too tired from the hike (yes, only 3 or 4 km, but our packs were still huge, especially with the amount of water we were carrying) and just wanted to relax. She went scrambling around the rocks for a while. Then an hour before sunset, she convinced us to climb the monolith. I said there wasn’t enough light left, but she said it would be fine. So I grabbed shoulder bag with camera and some water and started to climb. The first hundred meters or so was easy, but tiring, up steep sand and sand covered stone. A tiny trickle of water from somewhere turned into a tiny pool filled with bugs. I tasted it. Salty. Higher up, I was trying to keep sight of Susan as we made our weight through jagged boulders the size of trucks. Jonathan had taken a more difficult, but direct route, and he ended up between Susan and I, as it got increasingly steep. The sun was almost finished when I heard Jonathan start to panic. He had reached the steepest point, where the boulders gave way to a smooth sandstone face. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him yelling to Susan, who was much higher up than him. He said he couldn’t go on, that it was too steep and slippery. She told him he could. He disagreed. She called him a pussy. He agreed. Then paused. The shouting stopped for a bit, then I heard him panicking a little more as he ascended. When I got to this point, I started yelling as well. I had come barefoot, as my flip flops had all but disintegrated and I was still too cool for shoes. I knew I couldn’t do it. They both called me a pussy. I conceded. Then I tried going up a bit. I made it about ten foot, slipped a little, looked down, and was finished. It was almost dark, and even if I made it up this, I didn’t have any desire to descend it in the dark. I turned around, and cautiously made my way. It was slow, and the darker it got, the slower. The moon that wouldn’t show for a few hours, was a crescent, and with its orientation, perfectly mimicked the yellow one on the Mauritanian flag. It took me close to an hour to get down, but I felt relieved, and only a little ashamed.
A quarter of the way up Ben Amira
Halfway up. A nomad's camp visible in the bottom right.
I started to make a fire when I heard Jonathan and Susan yelling. I couldn’t hear what they said, but I was glad to hear their voices. They said they were ok, and that I should start to make dinner. By the time the coals were hot enough to start boiling pasta, I had stopped hearing their voices. As the pasta boiled, I continued to call them, but got no response. I got scared. Twenty minutes passed before I started hearing them again. I had thought they had fallen off the other side or something. By the time I had started to make the sauce, they arrived, saying they had got lost and did almost fall off a cliff. They had one small headlamp, but it was nearly useless for them to get down. We ate dinner, and enjoyed a bonfire to celebrate the abundance of wood. In the comfortable desert conditions, we slept right on the sand.
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