Mauritania

Essaouira prides itself on the fact that Jimi Hendrix visited in the 60s. Rumor has it he tried to buy the town. Rumor also has it that his Castles in the Sand was inspired by the remains of a fort on the beach (the album came out the year before he visited). No one ever points out that he was only in Morocco for a week and in Essaouira for probably no more than 3 days. I am willing to bet he spent most of that time high out of his mind at the hippie commune downwind. The commune is now back to being a regular town. No hippies here. Lots of windsurfers and kite surfers though.

We hit Essaouira and decided a few days in that we were going to skip the rest of Morocco and make for the border. Of course then we met a couple with a little kid from the States on the bus that lived in Agadir. they would have been interesting to hang out with since they were in Morocco to Witness.... I'm pretty sure of this because after we got off the bus in Agadir we prayed for our trip before they took off home and we got on another bus to Dakhla.

Dakhla is the furthest south you can go without a visa in your passport. Dakhla is windy and surprisingly enough not scorching hot. You'd expect a bit more heat from a Saharan city. The city sprawls out along the ocean and was a Spanish outpost until 1975 when the Mauritanians took it over. Four years later it became a Moroccan city. Coming into town tourists have to constantly show their passport. We had to make ten photocopies of our passport in Agadir to leave at each of the checkpoints before we got to the city.

The Sahara Hotel organized our ride to Mauritania with a fellow named Omar. The taxi stand consisted of two Mercedes' (the car of choice in all of Africa) parked near the police check point. I would have missed it on my own. Then we did what everyone does here, wait. It is expected. Everyone always talks as if they are going to leave at a specific hour but then you get there and end up waiting a few hours for more people to show up and fill up the car. We waited for two hours and finally had two more passengers, a man and a woman. The woman took it upon herself to feed us bread, yogurt and cookies while the driver squinted his way to the border.

The border is a formality, one which in my case led to people pointing out where I was born politely but with a definite intend to judge... at least that's what it felt like. It became a discussion topic among the driver and other passengers who whispered for a while.

The Mauritanian officals take a three hour lunch break that begins at noon and ended just as we got across the 4km of mined no-man's-land (an area strewn with shells of cars). Crossing the border is not where the formalities end. They end about 2km up the road at a hut on the side of the road with four army officials sifting through your bags. The army officials were all in their twenties and all very much asleep when we entered the hut. the guy looking through my belongings didn't really want to continue once he came across the shampoo bottle that had busted and smeared my clothes. After the search, we switched drivers here for Nouakchot.

Parts of the road across the Sahara are along the shimmery coast. For the most part though the ride is through the heat of the sand on a one lane highway. No air con and the wind felt like a huge hairdryer set to high blowing at you from all directions. Six more hours from the border to the capital. The city looked different from anything we were used to in Morocco. There are sandbanks that serve as sidewalks and most of the cars (although Mercedes') were basically junk on wheels. No street signs. Men in long lose blue or white robes and women in veils that looked like saris wrapped around their clothes. 11pm and the driver was angry at not being able to find the street we were looking for in the city centre. Finally we did find it but then he demanded a ridiculously high price for driving us there from the car park. The people from the Menata guesthouse came out to try and help us negotiate.

Nouakchot is calm and relaxed. The best burger outside London and North American can be had here (with an egg on it and plenty of mayo). The few sidewalks that exist are paved with seashells mixed into the concrete. The port de peche on the coast is an amazing sight of life and colour in and out of the water. Not much else to see in the capital as far as sights go. There are no banks that take traveller's cheques. The city has only two ATMs, one takes visa only and the one that takes all creditcards doesn't work yet, it may next month according to the security guard. The work week is from Sunday to Thursday. There are lots of poor people but also lots of shiny new SUVs. Slavery was officially outlawed in 1980 but there are probably still places where it exists. Alcohol is illegal but still available at high end places. They found oil off the coast of the capital (which is 5km inland). Mauritania is a US ally.

We are leaving tomorrow to be robbed at the southern border crossing of Rosso.