listen to africa

Music and colour, sunlight and smiles, bureaucracy and political drama; we’ve reached West Africa. At least, we’ve reached one of its far northern outposts: Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second city, built on a windblown Atlantic peninsula.

The last time we wrote, we were in Dakhla – a very different second city (Western Sahara’s) on another windy peninsula. But the stretch of cycling from Dakhla was much like the stretch to it: big skies, empty roads, long distances between water points (up to 157 kilometres), good tarmac and, mostly, wonderful tailwinds.

The highlight of this stretch though was a visit from this little fellow, a gerbil or “desert rat”:

   

That we were quite so excited (and we were extremely excited) about having our tent invaded by a rodent is probably a good indication of our stimulation starved state of mind during this stretch. This kind of cycling can be harder on the mind than on the body and, as well as inducing a mild dose of stimulation-starvation, the emptiness can play tricks on your sense of progress. The dunes and rocks were flying past but we’d been in the Sahara for six weeks – were we actually getting anywhere?

We were and, finally, we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Two days later, we found ourselves nearing the Mauritanian border, cycling through a desert marked with land mine warnings. Both times we stopped for a break in the middle of nowhere, Moroccan soldiers appeared from among the rocks: Was everything OK? Did we need water or food or shelter from the wind? (It was very nice of them but, between the land mines and the invisible, omnipresent soldiers, the last stretch to the border was an experiment in cycling with my legs crossed…)

At the border hotel, little fragments of West Africa seeped over into Western Sahara. West African, Moroccan, reggae, pop, rock and dance music blared from the hotel’s speakers, unapologetically loud. We spent the evening on the terrace, soaking up the warm wind and the atmosphere, our toes tapping involuntarily for the first time in months.

In the morning, we ambled over to the border for a couple of hours of queueing, relieved by the occasional bit of paperwork. Our fellow travellers were Moroccans, Sahrawis, Mauritanians, Senegalese and Ivorians, along with three Frenchmen running who knows what between France and Mauritania and a French couple moving to Senegal.

As the queues grew so did the camaraderie. Our world map came out. People crowded around to show each other where they were from, where they had been, where they were going. Our planned route came in for much shaking of heads (“You wouldn’t catch me doing it. By bicycle! It is too hard.”).

Finally, we followed some of the vehicles through the four kilometres of “piste” (sandy track) through no man’s land towards the Mauritanian border post. About half of us took a wrong turn and one vehicle after another got stuck in the sand (prompting the odd “By car! It’s too hard…” from us). With a bit of teamwork and a lot of pushing, all the vehicles made it – but the piste is a graveyard of cars and trucks that didn’t.

The Mauritanian visas we’d bought in Rabat had expired a couple of weeks earlier and, as the Mauritanian elections approached, rumours had started flying that you could no longer get full visas at the border. At the Mauritanian border post, there was no opportunity to start the long, relaxed conversation we’d hoped for. I quickly explained we were travelling by bicycle and could we have two weeks please? “No problem.” Great, actually, could we have one month then? “No problem.”

The passport came back with a three day stamp in it. “You must extend the visa in Nouakchott [Mauritania's capital, in the south of the country] in the next three days.” But we need five days to cycle to Nouakchott – is there another possibility? “It is too hot to cycle in Mauritania. You must get the bus. It is better.”

This last sentence he said in the special tone taught at Bureaucrat Schools around the globe, where any words at all can be spoken and the meaning is always, unequivocally: “You will never win against the might of the bureaucratic machine, which, by the way, your country did so much to export to the world. If you insist on trying, your spirit will be crushed, your will will be broken and you will die a wretched death. And I will still be here, holding the stamp and the official looking bits of paper. Now go away.” So we went away.

Other than forgetting cycling through Mauritania or risking outstaying our visas, the only option open to us was to cycle to Nouadhibou, leave our bikes there, get the bus to Nouakchott, extend the visas and then get the bus back to Nouadhibou. This we’ve now done but, as I have a new resolution to write updates that are a little shorter than your average novel, I’ll leave our arrival in Mauritania – the warmth, the smiles and the political drama – for the next update. For now, I’ll just say we’re enjoying being here – and we’re no longer suffering from a want of mental stimulation.