I spent quite a bit of time wandering round the town this morning on the hunt for a replacement laptop charger which I have somehow misplaced – it’s not the end of the world because I can still charge my laptop from my solar-battery, but that’s pretty slow so it’s a real annoyance not to be able to charge from power when we have it.
After walking about 15km, and talking with a lot of computer sales people, the main thing that was going through my head was an extract from the Murray Head song One Night in Bangkok.
It’s a drag, it’s a bore, it’s really such a pity
To be looking at the board not looking at the city
Whattaya mean?!
You’ve seen one crowded, polluted, stinking town.
Unfortunately Nouakchott feels very much like that last line to me – it’s a very new city so there’s no heritage here, but it doesn’t have the wealth of a Middle Eastern city, so it’s ended up as a big, sprawling city with the dust and sand still blowing through as if it were a village in the Sahara.
I had been going to try and pick up a SIM card today, but the reports of those in the group who have them, and the complete chaos in the Mauritel office put me off, so this will be the last post before Senegal – I have plans to get a SIM card there on Thursday by taking a detour into the town of St Louis. We pass through the outskirts, but it’s only about a 10km detour to go in, and apparently there’s an old French Quarter which is quite interesting in the city as well.
I did manage to find one oasis in the city in the form of ‘le coin du cafe’ which is run by a Cypriot chap, and provides great coffee, great food a very enjoyable atmosphere, and great WiFi – even better, it’s not that far from the hotel where we’re camped!
As you can tell I’ve been pretty busy getting blog posts done, and that’s taken quite a bit of the day.
A few chores as well, shuffling things round for the next six day stretch which will get us in to Dakar and the halfway point of the trip – it seems to be going by rather quickly.
As I said yesterday the roads get rougher from tomorrow, so the distances are getting shorter, but I’m expecting that the riding times are going to be getting longer – particularly tomorrow with 130km, of which 90 are on bad roads.
The weather is looking somewhat cooperative, though it’s really starting to get pretty hot. For here in Nouakchott it looks like this
And as we roll into Dakar at the end of the week
We also have another border crossing this week – let’s hope things aren’t quite as slow and confused as they were this week – that said, we also have to get the ferry across the river as part of that process, so it could end up being worse!
Now it’s bed time, so I need to get back to my tent, get things sorted, and get to sleep ready for 0600 tomorrow morning – catch you all from Senegal!
Riding data
Because I’ve not been able to get my Garmin to connect, I’ve not got the latest stats – I’ll update things here when I do.
