Another Update…
So… my my what a couple of days! I’m sitting typing this on wordpress direct, while connected to the internet… that said, I’ve scheduled it to be delayed by a bit for safety reasons…
Where did I leave off… oh yes, Dahkla! We planned to leave Dahkla at 9:00, and in perfect African timing we got on the road around 11:00. No big issue, but we did get moving. On our way south, our convoy broke up a little bit… at a certain point, we started looking for the tropic of Cancer… which in theory was supposed to be a couple of km south of a little village… we ended up finding the sign, about 20km south of where the map said.. oh well, got the picture 😉 (and promptly broke the sign! well, not me… but we did repair it!)
Oops, stolen wifi crashed! Let me keep typing in word, then copy it over…
So, tropic of Cancer passed, we keep driving south… then we started seeing signs with either “DANGER MINES” or “DANGER: ENCOURS DEMINEMENT”… the first one is quite easy to translate, just drop the French accent… the second says “Danger, demining in progress”. Fun territory starts! (oh yeah, and we drove though a UN town… quite literally, a town that sprouted because there is a UN base there)
Anyhow, no issues… we finally got to the Moroccan border, where some guys tried to sell us the fiches (paperwork) we needed to fill out for 5 Dirhams… ignored them, and some guys decided to stay in some tents around the back (I preferred to sleep in the car… gladly so, as the pug guys had their sunroof pried and someone tried opening my car’s door at 7-am… ugh!). We also got a fire going in our makeshift border campsite; an after a few drinks one of the girls jumped onto a passing Humvee… the soldiers weren’t too impressed, but they didn’t say anything (just stopped the humvee and one got out…)
The morning after, having been woken at 7am by the door opening attempt, I decided to take a picture of the sunrise… so I walk behind the petrol station, behind a large generator and towards a dune… only to hear someone running after me shouting “Pate Brioche!” (or, that’s what it sounded like to me). My groggy self was thinking “not really, I prefer a jam brioche…”As he got closer, he realised I had no clue what he was saying, and said “Pate Brioche, Mines, Boom!” which gesturing with his hands in an upwards motion… Re-oops! A few careful steps backwards, and he explained that they demine only a strip of land, and are hoping to build a road to Mauritania across no-mans-land… and only afterwards demine the rest… As such, I was walking from the safe zone into, quite literally, a minefield! Yikes!
The border eventually opened at 9:45 (9:00 African time), and after the endless checks, stamps and signatures we got admitted to the last checkpoint… where they took our license plate numbers, chassis number and names/nationalities of the occupants in each vehicle… just in case they needed to know what went boom…
As we entered no-man’s-land (a 3km-15km strip of land, depending on who you ask, that is a neutral zone that belongs to no country… oh, and it also happens to be a live minefield) we got accosted by another gendarme who basically told us to keep to the left, as the right had a sand-trap that was tough to get through…
With all this information to hand, we braved the minefield… quite fun actually! A nerve racking 4km or so of off-roading, with car wrecks everywhere (and fridges for some reason)… the girls decided to go off early, and got stuck in the sand trap on the right… oops. Then the zebra van went a little late, and we lost sight of them. As we cleared the Mauritanian border on the other side, we saw a pickup rush off… Apparently, the zebra van kept a bit too much to the left, and ended up on the old Spanish road… which we are told has the highest concentration of mines… double-yikes!
Anyhow… we then met Idoumou and Sidi, our guides… those who in theory would liaise with the military escort… turns out, there is/was no military escort! Instead, they charged us another 20euros to get through customs… and then another 40 to see the Desert “with a guide”. Hmmm…
We’ll, Sidi is a good desert guide, no questions there. We did some serious off-roading (and I’m proud to say that the merc NEVER got stuck! The only car in our mini convoy not to get stuck). That said, he is also quite expensive at 40-euros per car.
Anyhow, from the border we went towards the national park of the “Arguin”; and our convoy split into three… one set wanted to take the highway to Nouakchott, one the park/beach route with a guide and one the park/beach route on their own. I was undecided, but ended up in the guided park group… As I sit in Nouakchott typing this, the highway group are here and our group is here… we don’t have any news from the “on their own” group…
Anyhow, after some offroading, (and a lot of pushing and shovelling of the brava/pug205) we got to the beach, where we camped for the night. The view of the stars was absolutely breathtaking. It was like sitting in a planetarium… no lights anywhere for hundreds of miles… spectacular. I ended up staying awake until 5am gazing at the stars…
At 10ish, we moved away from there (and with the brava stopping only once as their radiator got rammed into their engine) we got back to the highway and eventually onto Nouakchott. (Where we almost got splattered by a runaway octopus that climbed out of the truck in front of us). We’re spending the night here, camping on the roof of the Auberge du Sahara – right next to the headoffice of the “Police des Mines”…
The plan is to hit Kiffa tomorrow (with a 7am start and camping next to the gendarmes/police station) and then Bamako the day after. We aren’t allowed to tell anyone where we are going unless they are army… so if this is my last post, I’m typing this shortly after having uploaded the video of me making a fool of myself on a sand-board. I’ll schedule this to be uploaded in a few days, by which time we should be snuggled away in Bamako and past the most dangerous bit…
M over and out… I’ll check back-in in a couple of days… hopefully on a faster connection where I can upload a longer video or pictures…
M.