Mauritania

I visited Mauritania on my trip across the Sahara Desert following the Atlantic route south from Morocco and Western Sahara in December 2004.

Arriving in Nouadhibou
The iron ore train
Atar
Chinguetti & Ouadane
Christmas at Terjit Oasis

Atar
Nouakchott

Nouadhibou
Chinguetti
Ouadane
Atar & Terjit

Map of Mauritania

Camel

Video Menu - 4 videos

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Travel notes from Atar

Hi Everyone,

After leaving the Moroccan border post we entered no-mans land, a stretch of dirt track about a kilometre long winding through the rocks to the Mauritanian frontier. No-mans land was a surreal place, car wrecks littered the landscape, some had people living in them; it looked like the set of a Mad Max movie. I kept expecting to see Tina Turner jump up onto the roof of a car wreck and start singing; maybe the heat, after being cooped up in the back of a van all day had got to me.

The sun had set by the time we got to the three wooden shacks standing in the desert, which represented the Mauritanian border. I've seen far better constructed sheds in the local allotment than these out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The border formalities took some time. My name was shouted from one of the huts and I entered onto the gloom to answer the most over asked question of this trip, "What is your occupation?" Once he understood what a banker is, he asked me to hold his torch while he filled in his dusty ledger book with my passport details. There was no electricity out here, not even a car battery rigged up to a solar panel. Eventually, after having to pop into one of the other sheds to make a hard currency declaration, we were free to go on our way. Welcome to Mauritania.

It was dark now and we continued driving through the desert to the northern town of Nouadhibou. The road was tarred most of the way although we had to take a diversion for the last stretch along a dirt road running parallel with the railway line. Just as we were loosing hope that we would ever reach our destination the bright lights of Nouadhibou suddenly appeared out of the desert, 13 hours after setting off from the Sahara Hotel in Dakhla.

Nouadhibou sits on a peninsula by the Baie du Levrier. It is an unattractive place, but packed with friendly people; I was never hassled and wandered freely around what is termed as the town centre, in reality just a couple of main streets running north, south with a messy market area to the west towards the railway line. My reason for coming to this town was to catch the daily iron ore train out into the heart of the desert. After three exhausting days travelling non-stop through the desert I needed to spend a day relaxing and recovering from my almost 1,500km journey.

Noa, the Japanese guy I met in Dakhla, who I hitched across the border with, was also planning to travel on the train out into the desert. This train holds the record as the longest train in the world; on average the train stretches for 2.6km. It runs between the huge iron ore mines at Zouerat and the port at Nouadhibou. There is one passenger wagon coupled to the rear of the train. We waited for a couple of hours at the 'station' in reality just a patch of desert south of the town beside the bay littered with shipwrecks. The train arrived at 15:30 and went on forever until, with a squeal of brakes, the dilapidated passenger wagon stopped beside us.

Riding in the empty iron ore wagons is free and the choice for most Mauritanians together with their cargo. The passenger wagon was better than I had expected, a very old compartment carriage with six seats to each compartment. Everything was caked in dust, a clue to the journey we were about to embark on. Three Mauritanians and a giant television set shared a compartment with Noa and myself. One had brought a gas stove with him and kept a constant supply of tea going for all of us, while one of the others chanted verses from the Koran for hours at a time. Everyone prayed at least a couple of times during the 12 hour, 450km journey to Choum, our jumping off point to reach Atar. As you can imagine a 2.6km train rolling through the desert at about 40km an hour throws up a huge cloud of dust, and we were right at the back in a carriage where half of the windows were stuck open. Anyway, it was too hot in the train to have all the windows closed.

At 03:00 the passenger who had been making the tea woke us up, we were at Choum, a small town of single storey mudbrick houses straddling the railway line. We climbed out and onto a waiting bush taxi for the four-hour trip to Atar on the Adrar Plateau. The taxi only went as far as the centre of Choum were it took the next two hours for the two bush taxis, which had waited for the train, to decide who would go to Atar; there were not enough passengers for both the pickup trucks. After two hours of organising things in that quintessential African way, which either makes you want to scream or cry, we set off sitting on top of our luggage in the back of a 4WD pickup. There were 13 of us in the back, including an American, Jeff and a Frenchman, Josh, who had ridden the train for free in one of the empty iron ore wagons.

It was cold as we sped through the desert along a fairly smooth dirt track. Just as the sun was rising and we could at last see the landscape we were travelling through, we stopped so that everyone could pray. As the sun finally appeared above the escarpment, marking the edge of the Adrar Plateau, the temperature began to rise. As we drove up the escarpment, about 250m to the plateau, the views of the sandy desert plain below us in the morning light were absolutely stunning. It had taken a lot of effort and the occasional discomfort to reach this plateau, my aim of this trip, but now all that effort seemed worthwhile as I gazed out at some of the most stunning desert scenery I have ever seen.

At 09:00 we finally reached the small town of Atar, the commercial centre of this northern area with a population of around 18,000. It had taken 18 hours to reach from Nouadhibou on one of the greatest desert train rides in the world; I was exhausted. At last I was deep in the heart of the Sahara Desert.

Regards

Geoff.