4x4itania

After a couple hours sleep we got up to explore the town of Atar, it isn’t much more than a few sandy roads, a roundabout, a mosque and some small shops and restaurants so after this day we decided to keep moving. Bab Sahara, the auberge we stayed at, is owned by a Dutch man named Joost, who has been running his business for 20 years now. His friend Leonie was also visiting from Holland so we arranged to have a 4x4 pick up us up in the morning and between the three of us we got a very reasonable price for a two day excursion. We started off crossing the high plateaus, passing by some cave paintings believed to be 5000 years old before arriving in the ancient town of Ouadane. This was once an important caravan town in the middle of the Sahara but has now declined to a tiny settlement that makes Atar look like a metropolis. Still it was very interesting to walk around the ruins of the old town and imagine what it would have been like in its heydays. The next morning Lamine our driver took us out of the city and we abandoned the traditional roads for the desert dunes. It was a beautiful drive, and I couldn’t believe how Lamine was navigating us through the sand without a GPS or to my untrained eye any discernable landmarks. The landscape was surprisingly diverse as the giant rolling dunes turned into flat rocky and bushy terrain, the occasional oasis and at one point an entire field of seashells, proving this was all once part of the ocean, an inconceivable thought today.

Just as I was complementing Lamine’s navigational skills, it turned out we were actually lost, he kept scouring the horizon for any kind of sign but the dunes had changed and he couldn’t recognize where we were any more in the vast emptiness. We drove around for a while before a young nomadic boy appeared out of nowhere with his herd of goats, he pointed us in the right direction and we were back on track to Chinguetti. Like Ouadane, Chinguetti was once an important town for travelers and traders but similarly it has also fallen out of favour over time and now a ghost town lies here while the sand dunes are starting to encroach and take over.

We visited the ancient library and its charming caretaker Saif who was happy to show us some of the antique and impressive Islamic works, as this used to be a much needed stopping point for making the pilgrimage to Mecca. After this we drove back to Atar where we once more spent the night at Bab Sahara before catching a minibus the following morning to the country’s capital Nouakchott. Almost one third of the Mauritanian population live in this fairly new city which was no more than a village when it was chosen to be the capital 60 years ago. Designed to accommodate 15 000 people it is now home to over a million. There didn’t seem to be all that much to do or see here so after walking around the dirty, dusty streets and markets for a day we decided to head towards the Senegalese border.

We got a taxi to the “bus station” but there were no buses around, only personal cars, so we negotiated with a driver and waited for his old battered Mercedes to fill up. When we left, the back seat had four grownups and a child whilst Tre and I shared the cramped front seat for the leisurely 3 ½ hour drive to the border town of Rosso. Here we got relentlessly hassled by all kinds of people trying to trick us out of money, before finally getting our passports stamped and got on the free ferry across the Senegal River. On the Senegalese side there was more hassling but we got stamped in without any problems and walked for a few kilometres to find a bus station with an actual bus. We had to wait for this to fill up as well, but after about three hours of waiting patiently we set off and drove for a few more hours to finally get to the city of Saint Louis.