At the “camping”, there were only a couple of motorhomes, occupied by elderly Germans. They were not the type that would be continuing on to Mauritania. We spoke with the manager, and he thought there might be a French guy that would be going in the next couple of days, but it would be better to come back in the afternoon.
During the down time, we went scouting for a camp spot in the area that we wouldn’t have to pay for. Just a kilometer up the road from the camping, we found a place where the cliffs above the beach had given way, forming a platform just above the water. It was a beautiful spot, and completely out of sight from the road, and Camping Moussafir. We swam a bit and waited until the afternoon, and found the French guy. He was on his way to Mauritania with a tiny red Peugot. A real beater. He was going to sell it at a profit of a few hundred euros. He said he needed to fix something before leaving, but planned to leave in a couple days and would take us. He seemed worried about the size of our bags and the weight in his car, but we assured him that it would be fine. He didn’t have a phone, so we would need to check with him every day to make sure of when he would be going. He then gave us a ride back to town. In the evening we hung out at coffee shops, challenging locals to games of foosball. We treated ourselves to a second night of hotel luxury.
In the morning, we bought provisions for a couple days of camping, and headed back to the camp spot we had found. It was hot, but there was plenty of swimming we could do. I was completely relaxed all day, and half-hoped it would take Susan a long time to get here. Jonathan tried to collect snails for dinner, as we had enjoyed eating them at street stalls in town. When he tried to cook them for dinner, though, they were too small to remove from their shells. I walked to meet with the French guy, and he said he probably wouldn’t leave the next day, but maybe the day after. Meanwhile, Susan was on her way back from Rabat, and had texted that she had gotten her first couple of rides.
Our camp spot
Our beachFor the next day, Wednesday, there is almost nothing to write about, because that is what we did. Nothing. It was the most relaxed day of this entire trip. One of the only days in memory where there was almost no task or obligation. I read, swam, ate sandy egg sandwiches and suntanned (?!). Jonathan sewed lots of torn clothes. He sewed a large patch that he had made to look like the Swedish flag. Placed vertically, though, it looked like he had just sewn a big yellow cross on his pants. In the evening, I checked in with the French guy, and he said he still wouldn’t be leaving the next day. We soon got word that Susan had gotten a ride with a Mauritanian man heading all the way to the border. Just her luck. She would be driving almost all the way through the night and would be arriving at the border in the afternoon the next day.
We had to wake up before sunrise to try and beat Susan to the border, but more importantly to the intersection of the main road and the road to Dakhla, as there was a military checkpoint, and we were running low on passport photocopies to give them. Of the original 15 that I had, I had only 3 left.
Let's go to Mauritania!
Sunrise before leavingA couple hundred meters from where we had set up to hitchhike, there was a group of vans and trucks that looked like they were packing up to head to the border. I walked over to look for a ride, but the Mauritanian drivers said it would cost 250 Dh ($32) each. This was ridiculously high, but given that there was no public transport between Dakhla and the border, they could charge whatever they wanted. We waited to hitchhike as the vans continued to pack. We got a text from Susan that she would be passing the road to Dakhla in an hour and a half. We debated taking the van, but decided it was still too expensive. As one of the vans passed on its way, it stopped, and we managed to get the price down to 100 Dirhams ($12.50) each. We hesitated, but decided that if we wanted to cross the border today that it would be best.
Our first long distance ride that cost money.Driving the 35 km to the roundabout that meets the main road took nearly an hour, and we arrived within five minutes of Susan. It was the first time that Jonathan and I had paid for a ride on the highway, but this was probably the one time it was really worth it.
Susan brought us our passports with our new Mauritanian visas, then jumped back in her ride with the Mauritanian man to go through the checkpoint. We continued on in our van, which was one of the least interesting rides of the trip. We stopped at one of the only buildings between Dakhla and the border. It was a fancy hotel, gas station and restaurant. The other passengers got out to eat tajines and couscous, while Jonathan and I ate the last of our stale bread with hard boiled eggs.
We arrived at the border about an hour after Susan. She could have taken her ride all the way to the capital, Nouakchott, if she had wanted, but we had agreed to meet at the border. Going through the border on foot did not seem common, and it was a little bit of an awkward process. All of our bags seemed to get searched at different points at different times. Susan had paid ten dirhams for some necessary form that Jonathan and I got for free. Just before passing through the final gate, some man waved us to another small building saying that we needed our bags to be searched. This was annoying as we had already had them searched (except for me), plus there was a line. As we waited in line, talked up the police officers, and even decided to play some music for them. This was our best tactics in breaking down the police to a more friendly nature, but I worried that it wouldn’t work in the scenario. It more than worked. The police clapped along, and laughed and completely forgot about our final search. They sent us along, and I wondered if we had really gotten away with anything.
As we crossed into the no man’s land, there was a mild accost of money changers and taxi drivers. We considered the good rate that the money changers were offering, but decided it would not be very wise, as we had to walk three km of no man’s land before reaching the Mauritanian side of the border, and this would leave us very vulnerable if they knew we had lots of cash. The taxi drivers were shocked that we preferred to walk the 3 km of dirt road and desert littered by abandoned cars. I had heard somewhere that it is best to take a taxi, as there are landmines in the area, but, even if that is true, it was not so difficult to follow the winding dirt road. I was not going to risk taking shortcuts though. We arrived at the border just twenty minutes before its 6:00 closing time. The guards were too surly to seem like they wanted to hear any music, so we kept quiet and orderly. It was surprisingly more straightforward than the Moroccan side, though we still saw some blatant bribery to smooth out the process on both sides. While Susan was riding with the Mauritanian man, she said they were always asking him for gifts at the checkpoints. They would point at all the things he was bring back from Europe for his family and ask if it was a gift for them. It never got so serious that he actually gave anything up. The most interesting part, though was that they would always try to hide the bribe request from Susan. They were more likely to ask for bribes from much poorer Mauritanian foreigners than European foreigners. Even the military and police was conscious of the reputation of Morocco it wanted to keep for the western world.
We changed some Dirhams into Ougiyah (pronounced oogie-yah), and got the exact exchange rate that Jonathan had checked on the internet two days before. He said it was the first time that he had ever changed money for the exact exchange rate, and didn’t know how it was possible. The only time I could remember this fortune was in Belize.
The sun was going down quickly and the border was just about to close. We were 90 km from the nearest town. Jonathan and I didn’t want to camp here, even though it was one of the less sketchy borders we had ever been on. There was a relentlessly annoying young man who wanted us to stay in his large nomadic tent at an exorbitant rate. We considered looking into taxis, but Susan said we should just try hitchhiking. We argued that there was only one car left to go through the border, and otherwise we could only take a taxi. She insisted to hitchhike, and if we didn’t get a ride, we would walk out to the desert and camp. In the back of my mind were the landmines I had heard about from someone somewhere, but they thought I was silly to worry.
The sun was down, and it was almost dark when we stuck our thumbs out for the single car. I knew if it didn’t stop, we would be camping. But it did. From the passenger side jumped a short fat man with a beard in a white robe, and a Saudi Kaffiyeh. He asked where we were from and when I said America, he laughed and cheered, “Osama Bin Laden, haha! Boom Boom!” making large gestures of explosions as he continued to laugh. I laughed back and shook his hand not sure what to make of his reaction. We piled our bags in the shiny SUV and crammed four into the back seat. Two of the guys said they were going to Nouakchott for business, the fat man for a religious conference.
The men were very friendly, and talked a lot about Islam and how great it is. We passed through several checkpoints between the border and Noadhibou, a relatively large port town. The officers seemed confused about this mix of people, but didn’t give us any real trouble.
When we arrived to town, they said they were staying at a hotel and they knew the owner. He would give us a good price. Susan still didn’t want to stay in a hotel even though she had not slept much in the last several days. She had pulled off the most impressive hitchhiking mission I had heard of. Something around 2,400 km, in about three days, not including time waiting in Rabat for the embassy to open. She said we should find the beach and camp there. Another rule, though for Jonathan and I, is that port towns, like border towns should be taken with a degree of caution and we were not sure we wanted to do this on our first night in Mauritania at 8:30 at night. We also felt that we owed Susan for going on the visa run, so paying for the hotel room for the night was the least we could do. She didn’t like the charity, but we insisted.
The man who ran the place came off to me as a large, greasy businessman, who thought talking enough about being a good Muslim would make him one. After putting our stuff away, we made friends with one of the employees of the hotel, Eric, a 30-year-old Liberian man who made me nostalgic for the jovial nature of West Africans. We asked him where we could get some cheap Senegalese food, and he insisted on taking us out to the area where the restaurants were because it was far.
It was Thanksgiving, so I insisted on treating everyone to dinner (not so generous as it was about $.75 per plate). Eric refused, saying that he had already eaten. When I asked Eric, discreetly, how he liked Mauritania, I expected a wishy washy answer, saying it was ok, there was work, and Liberia continued to be a difficult place to go back to. Instead, he went on a tirade about how much he hates it. The wages are bad, the blacks are treated poorly, the people are bad, everything. As with many West African blacks living in Noadhibou, he had set his sights on Europe, but for whatever reason, landed in Noadhibou. He had dreams of playing soccer in Europe, but now was settling for playing for a local Muaritanian team. He said he planned to go back to Liberia soon.
A little about Mauritania, it is a truly interesting place, if only for its demographics. It is split in thirds between white moors (bidhan), black moors (haratin), and blacks. The white moors, the same ethnic group of Western Sahara, are the most powerful, and basically rule the country. Second in line are the black moors. They have adopted Moorish language and culture, and, historically have been the slaves of the white moors. In fact, slavery was only banned in 1981, though it persists with an estimated 600,000 slaves throughout the country of just over 3 million people. It is believed to have the highest rate of slavery in the world at 20%. And at the bottom of the pile are the blacks. Those more closely linked ethnically to the peoples of Senegal and Mali, and more similar to what people think of as “West Africans”. Eric is in the last group, and working for a white moor can’t be the ideal situation, though there is little other choice in this country.
The sassy Senegalese women at the restaurant were a breath of fresh air after the subdued nature of most women we had met in the last couple months. The mafe (peanut sauces) and noodles was tasty, and an interesting indicator that pasta had now become cheaper than rice in these parts. Another thing about Mauritania, is that from what I could perceive, I have never seen a country with less of a food identity. Any restaurants were either Senegalese and Morocco. What Mauritanians actually ate at home would remain a mystery for a while. I knew, though, that none of it was worth putting into a restaurant.
As our conversations continued, Eric revealed that we should be careful how we talk around the hotel owner, as he is a spy for Mauritania’s military dictator, Abdelaziz. He didn’t say that there was anything we shouldn’t say, just that we should know and be careful. That is why he insisted on coming with us to dinner, so he could tell us.
Eric was a good man, and we exchanged information with him in case we would end up in Liberia after he had gone back home. We hoped this was possible, but I was mostly just excited to be in a new country that seemed so interesting.
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