Off to Mauritania (Stage 17)

The hotel was good, but sleeping was a little harder – there were some pretty bright lights that came on in the atrium, and the curtains of our room weren’t up to the job at all.

It was also ‘the’ place to be in town for the men of the town who came to drink their tea and use the internet so there was lots of chat till rather late.

And then people started crashing doors open from just after 0600, so I was standing round in the car park waiting for coffee to be ready well before necessary at 0715.

Based on the ‘plan’ which required us into lunch by 1030 we set off at a pretty good speed, sitting at around 32 – 33 km/h. We took a photo break at around 35km, before pushing on at which point I ate my banana – I still find eating a decent breakfast a challenge, so end up grazing through the morning on a banana, sandwiches, etc, whatever I can stash in my camelbac from breakfast J.

We’d noticed that there wasn’t much oncoming traffic through the first couple of hours and figured it was because there was nothing other than the border ahead of us and it wasn’t open yet. They started shortly before we got to lunch and the first oncoming truck was incredibly kind and slowed right down for us. The next ones not so much and it was a real sand-blasting again based on the wind direction and strength.

Australian Kevin had been having issues with his bottom bracket yesterday and Doug had ‘taken a look’ but not replaced it with the spare Kevin had. Unfortunately he’d not fixed the problem, but actually made things worse which meant Kevin was worried about damaging other components on his bike with the wobbly chain ring.

We got into lunch right on time for the ‘plan’, arriving at 1028, with a moving average of 32.4 km/h, and an overall average of 29.5 km/h which for 81 km we were pretty happy with.

We’d planned to have a pretty quick lunch anyway, but the number of trucks was increasing and they were sending clouds of sand and dust into lunch which wasn’t pleasant at all!

On the good-news-for-the-plan front we heard at lunch that there wasn’t a lunch break at the border after all and that it’s open from 0830 to 1800 – that might make things go a bit more smoothly (we naively thought).

It wasn’t so far to the border, and getting out of Morocco proved to be extremely easy – we spoke briefly with a soldier who told us to bypass the trucks and head to the right where we found Phil and Hamdi as expected. We filled in the form (what happens to all those forms?) handed that and our passports through the window and received our exit stamp.

The next two soldiers didn’t want to talk to us, and the last only wanted to make sure that we had an exit stamp, and we were out of Morocco and into no-mans-land.

Initially the road was paved and there was a huge line of trucks waiting to cross into Morocco, and dozens of stripped and abandoned vehicles.

After a couple of km the pavement ran out, and it was just a maze of rocks, sand, tracks and blown tyres. Max had done what he could to flag a route through but it was really about finding the best path we could whilst heading for the immigration buildings we could see in the distance.

Into the Mauritania immigration complex and the chaos began – Tom was there as expected, but wasn’t sure what the story was – apparently we needed to register with the man in the office at the end, but he wasn’t interested in talking to us. Some milling round, then Max arrived and a convoluted discussion in French ensued.

The upshot was that man wasn’t interested in talking to us one-at-a-time, and we needed to go and get our visa from the next building first. By now there were about eight of us in, plus about as many local people all trying to get us to change money, buy cigarettes or SIM cards from them, so the whole lot of us traipsed over to the other building.

Where we discovered that the visa office was firmly closed! We must wait we were told – maybe for half an hour. There were also about a dozen local people also waiting there.

After about 20 minutes the door opened and closed as someone left, at which point we were told we needed to form two lines, one for men, the other for women. The chap came back and came along the line collecting the passports of those of us who were there waiting – that seemed like progress of a sort. The door closed again.

A few local people came and went, during which time a lot of other riders had come in and were joining our ever-lengthening queue – thankfully we were in the shade and out of the wind.

The door opened, and those of us who had handed in our passports had our names called and were lined up inside waiting to have our photos and fingerprints taken. The process had just begun when the dinner truck arrived – we got shuffled back out into the compound, while both the crew and the riders who were taking the truck got lined up in place of us – sigh…

We figured out that it was taking nine minutes per person for the ‘process’ – with 50 odd people in our group to go that was going to take eight hours! We’d been there for two and a half hours at the point at which those of us who had been there first started to get into the visa office.

We soon discovered why it was taking so long – there was one guy, with one computer who was basically doing everything with a crazy array of ‘machines’ – the process went something like this

swipe the machine-readable section of our passport
do something on the computer
scan our fingerprints – left four fingers, right four fingers, both thumbs
do something else
take our photo
print part of the visa with one printer
scan the photo page of our passport with a standard scanner
take the printed visa from one printer, and load it into another
print our photo onto the visa label
peal off the visa and stick it in our passport.
throw our passport to the other guy who worked there, who mostly spent his time watching videos on his phone, but stopped briefly to take our €55 and hand back our passports.

No freaking wonder it was taking so long! The guy who was doing this was super nice, and doing his best, but the who process and the technology really were working against him. As I was about to leave he asked Max how many there were to go, at which point Max pointed at a stack of about 30 passports – the poor guy looked like he was about to quit!

Visa in passport and we were one step closer to freedom – next stop was the police who had to go through the ‘scanning the passport’ thing all over again, and then put an entry stamp on our visa before or final stop with a guy who just scanned our passport, clicked a few buttons on his Arabic screen and handed back our passport – hoorah!

The money changers had been offering an ok rate to change Euros but a pretty poor rate for USD so we stopped in the bank as soon as we were out of the immigration compound – while the rate may have been better, it too was a lengthy process – a successful process, but seriously over-complicated.

Just over four hours after we’d arrived we abandoned Mateo, who was still trying to get money changed, and got back on our bikes for the 25km to camp.

For a few km the wind stayed over our shoulder and we were making pretty reasonable progress, but then the road swung more to the east and put us directly into the wind – that was not fun at all!

Although it did swing back for a time, we eventually got to the next junction and turned right directly back into the wind – though we only had just under 10km to go into the wind today, tomorrow we’ve got nearly 30 directly into it and something like 90 with it off to one side – think that’s going to be a tough day!

In to camp and there are some small ‘huts’ which we’re able to sleep in, rather than putting up our tents – even though we were some of the first riders in most of the spaces had been spoken for by those who had ridden the truck – we managed to find a space, though we are closest to the road which does rather mean a sand cloud comes in each time a truck goes by.

Soup, water, out of riding kit, a wash, and then some writing as we waited for dinner. With the help of our new local support person Mohamed, Sharita had kindly arranged for some local people to bring cold drinks to camp – they were a little pricey, but worth it to have a cold drink in the middle of a hot afternoon in the desert.

Dinner was vegetarian for all again to night, but quite a bit better than the last time that happened as it was a bean ‘chilli’ and rice – chilli in name only, but there’s still plenty of tabasco so I spiced mine up some.

Just as we were about to eat the empty ore train returning to the mine came by – at times this is almost the longest train in the world, though tonight it was a relatively modest length.

After dinner a tortoise wandered in to camp – according to the local people who were there it’s wild, and lives in the area. According to Dehon, one of the crew, it’s female – apparently male tortoise have a depression in their under-shell – I’m not entirely sure I believe him, and without an internet connection it’s hard to confirm.

We’ve now ‘changed times’ and are back on UTC again, which means that we actually had dinner at 1700 tonight, and though it’s just got dark it’s only 1930 here, but despite that we’re all ready for bed so have repaired to our hut.

Australian Kevin’s already asleep, Mateo’s reading, Canadian Kevin’s watching a movie on his iPad, and I’ve been completing this, which gets you up to date and means it’s time for me to sleep!