Day 16 crossing the border into Mauritania and Nouadhibou

An early start brushing my teeth by starlight for our first real border crossing today. The expectation is that we will be asked to take all of our large rucksacks through customs to be scanned and then the border officials will board the truck. At this point there are a number of options.

1. The smell of a confined space, holding 18 unwashed people and their snacks may repel the officials immediately and they bid a hasty retreat.

2. The sight of all our luggage balanced precariously on numerous overhead lockers invites a cursory glance through some of the items that look less likely to fall and cause an injury.

3. The amount of stuff we have in the truck looks like a curiosity shop of treasures and for the next 7 hours they go through every bag to see what they can seize.

As a group we have a sweepstake on how long it will take us to go through the border. Mark reckons 3:24:52 (as this is also his marathon running PB), so he is confidently expecting to say he could run a marathon faster than the time it takes to cross the border. I’m going for 3:44:43 as irritatingly, Gemini and I think Mark might be spot on, so I’m relying on a couple of members of the group to bring our average time below the collective wisdom of the internet.

It turns out that we didn’t need anyone on the truck to bring our time down, the Moroccan officials managed that all by themselves. We were super impressed when our passports were successfully checked and the truck went through a 6m high moving X-ray scanner within 30 minutes.

The next 3 hours passed less quickly with 2 more passport checks, a sighting of a suspected dead dog lying by the side of the road, a turkey and coleslaw wrap for lunch courtesy of the cooking group’s strong preparation skills yesterday and an official stamp for the truck to drive onwards. So just the three hours to leave Morocco then……

Finally at just before 1pm we crossed no man’s land towards Mauritania.

At 4pm we left the Mauritanian police office PK 55 that had fingerprinted us, photographed us, checked and stamped our passports (as well as tried to sell us cigarettes, phone SIMs and water). We boarded the truck, drove 20 metres down the road and watched an official come up into the truck and check the stamp they had just put in our passports.

30 minutes after that, after 6 hours and 29 minutes of hanging around, we drove off towards Nouadhibou. One winner of the sweepstake with a guess of 7 hours won a warm chocolate biscuit that had now melted in the heat inside the truck.

In the whole process we also discovered that Mark’s second passport application in the UK has potentially put a spanner in the works for his Ghana visa. The time he applied for a second passport was the same time he applied for his Ghana visa with his existing and perfectly valid first passport. This was also the time we transferred all the passport details into a single folder on the desktop PC at home so we could have a single source of truth for all the paperwork we needed to do. The passport office in their wisdom then issued Mark’s second passport as a replacement for his first one, dutifully cancelling his first one in the process. This is because there is essentially no process in the UK for applying for a second passport, you just add some small print to the end of a normal application and attach a letter of justification. Realising their error, the passport office then rang Mark, while walking half way down the UK to let him know that they would now be issuing him a third passport, that would function as his second valid passport. 

In all of that palaver, Mark’s Ghana visa has been approved with his first and now invalid passport number. Watch this space for how this unfolds……..

So what’s the low down with Mauritania?

The view out the window looks remarkably like the Western Sahara….

….with one key addition: the iron ore train tracks.

The iron ore train is a hot topic on board the truck as two passengers are going to ride in one of the wagons this week.

This train ride is gaining social media attention as either the bravest or most stupid thing anyone can do on a train. In brief, riding on top of the iron ore as it is transported through the north of Mauritania from where it is mined has the following features:

1. It’s illegal to do this, so you have to jump off the train as it slows down 20km outside of the final stop
2. The train is 2.5km long, so getting on the train is not as simple as turning up at platform 2 and hoping another traveller hasn’t stood in your spot
3. The train may or may not run on time, the window of opportunity is ~48 hours wide
4. Depending on the time of day you catch the train you will experience boiling hot sun without any shade followed by a freezing cold night without any shelter or the other way round.
5. Sitting on top of iron ore for ~16 hours fills every crevice you and your phone have with toxic iron ore dust. Face masks (multiple) and duct tape are essential items.

Here’s a link to someone else’s experience should you want to add this to your bucket list.

Mark and I decided that if it took a couple of hours, we’d be up for it, but that’s as long as our collective attention span could manage. Good luck to our two adventurers on the truck this week.

The last moment of the day was spent looking at the view from the rooftop of our camp site. No showers, water for the toilets or WiFi, but we have a pretty view, towards the town that is over 10km/£6 taxi away and a campsite owner happy to charge us 10 euros each for supper that he hasn’t got ingredients for yet. Some of us are less than ecstatic.