MauriTrainia

Tre and I got up early to meet our grumpy taxi driver Cher and set off for the border. We crossed over the Moroccan side and then had our lives in Cher’s hands as we passed through the road-less few kilometres of no-man’s-land, where you really have to know which dunes to cross and tracks to follow, as you can easily get stuck in the sand and the area still has landmines spread around. It was like driving through a cemetery of abandoned cars which have just been left there to disintegrate. We made it over to the Mauritanian side where they now issued visas at the border, meaning I wouldn’t have needed to arrange that in Rabat, but there is just so little information on this to be found, and when found it is very contradicting. Once we arrived at the outskirts of the small town of Nouâdhibou, Cher was grumpier than ever and decided to drop us off. This was an issue as we had none of the local currency Ouguiya, but we found a taxi driver who was willing to drive us in to the centre where we could exchange some Moroccan Dirham pay him and find a place to stay.

When I first started mentioning this trip to friends back home, the first place I knew I’d be visiting after Morocco was Mauritania (or I guess Western Sahara as well if you consider that a country) a place that most people would look at me sheepishly asking “Is that a country?” Well I can tell you all now that yes it is. It is actually a pretty big country, the 28th largest in the world by area but also one of the least densely populated countries in the world as the Sahara takes up 75% of the country’s surface. A more concerning fact about the country is that it was one of the last in the world to abolish slavery, and although it is now illegal, somewhere between 4 and 20 percent of the 3.4 million population are slaves to this day. We spent one day walking around the sleepy coastal town, seeing the ship graveyard, eating a kilo of barbecued goat meat and buying two necessary items for our upcoming trip, sunglasses and a headscarf.

We had both heard and read about this famous iron ore train, one of the longest trains in the world stretching a staggering 2.5 kilometres from the locomotive to the last car. It isn’t a passenger train per say, but you can just climb aboard and get a free ride if you like. It doesn’t really have a fixed schedule, so we sat by the train tracks waiting for three hours in the blistering sun, but once it arrived there was no missing it. It stop’s only for a few minutes so we quickly climbed into one of the last carts and made ourselves as comfortable as possible. As we were travelling from the coast towards the mine it doesn’t have any cargo, but if you do the trip in the reverse direction you would have to sit on top of the mounds of loaded iron ore. It was all very exciting, sitting in this empty bucket, under the sun watching the desert chug by, but we were very glad we had our sunglasses and headscarves to somewhat protect us from all the sand and ore particles whipping your face.

Once the sun had set, you could squint and see the amazing starry sky, however it was freezing cold and although we wrapped up in as many layers as we could there was no way I could sleep. And maybe that was lucky, because after about nine hours of rocking around, the train came to a screeching halt, it was pitch black but I could see some figures running and shouting by the tracks. It seemed we had arrived in Choum the place we wanted to get off, knowing the train wouldn’t stay still for long, we threw our bags down and jumped off the cart. Here young men were pulling at us from every direction as we held onto our bags with iron grips. For a while it was slightly unnerving and scary, we were groggy from the long trip and covered in dust from head to toe. In all the confusing chaos of people pushing and yelling in a mixture of different languages we got dragged into a van, which we found out was heading for the nearest town Atar. This was luckily where we wanted to go, and a few hours later we arrived, it was still dark outside but we managed to find an “auberge” where we could wash the worst of the dust off our faces and finally crash in a much needed bed!