First visa

Time to enter Mauritania, which is also the first country that requires a visa. But first we had to get to the border, meaning exiting Morocco (which took about 1.5 hours for stamps, screening the truck etc.) and then passing through about 4km of no man’s land that looked more like a car cemetery. Apparently it’s not uncommon to drive a car here, tear it to pieces, and smuggle parts to avoiding import tax.

Once we reached the Mauritanian border it was time to get that visa. At €120 it’s one of the most expensive visas on the trip. Apart from the price it was pretty smooth though. They had modern passport scanners and even printed the visas with our photos on them. Pretty high-tech for being the middle of the desert, and also my first ever full-page visa! 2 hours of waiting for all the procedures and we were ready to go.

The plan of bush camping the whole way down to Nouakchott changed as we decided to stop for a night in Nouadhibou, the second largest city of Mauritania and only a short detour from our planned route. I got to try the traditional Mauritanian dish Mafé, a really tasty meat stew with lots of peanuts in it. We also went out to Cap Blanc to see the endangered Mediterranean monk seal, a species that only remains here, around Madeira, and in some areas of the Mediterranean Sea.

After two days drive an one night of bush camping we reached Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, where we stayed a couple of days. The weather is definitely getting warmer now with 35°C in the days and 20°C in the nights. Warmer weather also means mosquitos, lots of them, and the bites won’t appear until the day after. I counted 50 bites just on one foot so I guess it’s about time to start using mosquito repellent. We’re not in the malaria zone yet but it’s time to start with those pills any day now too. I’m definitely going to need them if I’m this popular with the mosquitos here.

The first day in Nouakchott we started out by exploring the city and its main sights, the grand mosque and the marketplace. The market is huge and sells all kinds of things, mostly clothes and fabric but also food, shoes, and random trinkets. I also tried some delicious bissap, a juice or ice tea made out of hibiscus flowers and really popular all over West Africa. Sadly the market is touristic enough to know that “white people have money” and there was quite a hassle in some parts of the market.

The main thing to see in Nouakchott is however in the outskirts of the city, the big fish market. The fish market is located on the beach and is supposed to be the busiest in Western Africa. And it was indeed busy. Fishing boats were constantly coming ashore to unload, most of them having been 30-60 km out at sea for a day or two. Just off the beach all the fishing families were selling the latest catch of snappers, mackerels, and plenty of other kinds of fish.

Another reason to stay in Nouakchott is to sort out visas for Mali and figure out the next leg of the route. The Mali visa was easy to get and so much cheaper than the Mauritanian one, only about €20. However, a few days ago there was an extremist attack at a UN-base not too far away from Timbuktu in Mali and only about 500km of desert away from our route in Mauritania on the way to the border. Because of that we decided to take another route via Senegal for a safer border crossing into Mali. There is only one issue with this new plan. Visas for Senegal need to be sorted out, or possibly confirmed that no one in the group needs one, at the Senegalese embassy. I was positive I would be fine without a visa, but with close to 10 different nationalities on the trip we wanted to be sure. With the weekend coming up we had to wait until Monday for this. A few more days in Nouakchott.

Nouakchott is not exciting enough for that many days though so some of us did a little weekend trip. More about that in the next post.