Impressions of Mauritania

We camped out with three other PBC groups at the beach, and today the others want to drive together the 200 km paved road to Nouakchott to take a day of rest there. Mario and I decide to venture out on our own and take off early. We want to skip the day of rest in Nouakchott and head straight for the border to Senegal in hopes to spend more time in Senegal.

As we drive towards Nouakchott we are able to collect some impressions of this country. Mauritania is very simple, mostly consisting of barren desert inhabited by nomadic families, some fishing villages along the coast line, and a strip of fertile land this side of the Senegal River. The country is three times the size of Germany, with only about 1/30 the population. The number of paved roads can be counted on one hand, and there is only a single railway line linking the iron mining centre of Zouerate with the port of Nouadhibou.

It seems like Mauritanians have just recently moved from a nomadic life to settling down in villages and cities. Huts are very simple, often built out of scrap building materials. There are no streets in the villages, and the spaces between houses are littered with garbage: Plastic bags, rotting fish heads, dead goats, and such. The people don´t seem to be particularly bothered by this, and their demeanor is one of complacency. Even though tourists pass through some of these villages regularly, nobody is interested in selling them anything, not even some of the abundant fish the fishermen pull out of the sea. They seem to be contempt with their very simple ways, and not interested in changing their living conditions, as if it would be a breach to their culture.

The road to Nouakchott is excellent, and we are there in two hours time. We enter the Mauritanian capital from the North, and here we find quite a veritable city of 800,000 inhabitants, some of which living in stone houses with electricity and running water. Nouakchott has an air field, a hospital, and even foreign embassies. The gas station we pull over at even has regular fuel for our car, a rare commodity in a country where everything is Diesel. Even the adjacent super market is stocked well. Inside town we actually manage to find an Internet cafe, a small, windowless shack with six computers, flat-screen monitors, and an ADSL line. Half an hour of surfing cost 10 Ouguiya, about 3 cents.

Nouakchott also has a poor side, actually most of Nouakchott is very poor by our standards. Starting at the town center, the whole rest of the city is made up of small huts and shacks built with scrap wood. The streets are not paved, and the main mode of transportation in the capital city is with donkey carts. We pass a sheep market as we leave town, and then we enter a vast field of garbage. The whole south of Nouakchott consists of one big garbage field. A strange sight to drive half an hour through this dump site, but the locals don´t seem to mind. We keep on driving to head to the border to Senegal.

tags: Plymouth-Banjul, Aachen, Rallye, Paris-Dakar, Africa, Mauretania