Mauritania

Over fall break (which happened to coincide with my 20th birthday) two of my classmates, Leslie and Cibyl, decided to go to Mauritania. I've been wanting to go for a while, I'm not sure why exactly but when I started doing research on it it just sounded phenominal, and it was. We drank tea CONSTANTLY, everyone offered it to us for free in their homes, and the towns we visited were fantastic, crumbling, abandoned old caravan metropolises surrounded by sand dunes filled with camels and scarabs, and we ate a lot of couscous and pancakes (a local delicacy apparently...) and camel liver (which was chewy but the sauce was good.) I turned 20 in the living room of a random Mauritanian guy named Sidi who invited us over for mint tea during the heat of the afternoon in a town called Atar in the Sahara. Perfect!

About a week before break, once I recovered(ish) from my illness (which lasted about two weeks and caused me to lose the weight of two infants, but ended up not being a parasite, alxamdulilaay) we went to the embassy and purchased a very expensive stamp in our passports, and for the first time in my life I filled out an official document that had no English whatsoever on the entire sheet, only French and Arabic. We took a sept places taxi (Peugeot 504s that carry 7 passengers (relatively) comfortably in three rows of seats) from the Gare Routière in Dakar (which is, in reality, a huge parking lot crammed full of buses, cars, taxis, vans, minibuses, people, livestock, and vendors) to Saint Louis, the pre-colonial capital of European power in West Africa.

We were only there long enough to spend the night, but at breakfast on Friday we met a 47-year-old American man who happened to be traveling to Mauritania that same day, so we pooled our resources and made it all the way to Nouakchott with him (four is a perfect number for taxis). He’s a totally cool guy, he’s been teaching at a high school in the bush in Alaska (a full day’s journey by boat or snowmobile from the nearest town with a road connection) and Mauritania was the 120th country he’s visited. The taxi ride to the border town of Rosso-Senegal was pretty easy, though the border itself was fairly ridiculous.

Senegal and Mauritania are separated by the Senegal River, once a very important trade route for goods and slaves, and the center of Fouta Toro, one of the earliest and most important pre-colonial states to embrace popular Islam in what is now Senegal. There are only two official crossings, both ferries, and the one closer to the coast was the one we chose. As soon as the taxi stopped at the ferry terminal the burocracy started. Our passport information was recorded in a big book, and we were herded by some self-appointed guides into the boat. It left just after we got on, we were jammed between trucks and goats and a group of guys who ended up shouting at each other the whole time, five minutes of floating and we were in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

Customs was ridiculous, most of the time was spent in a small room with a nervous-looking fat arab man slowly entering our information into a computer while a bored guard took pictures of the room on his cell phone, and at one point the door burst open and a man lept into the room and started singing loudly to the fat man behind the desk. Then our information was entered into a few more books and our passports were scanned and we "declared" how much money we were bringing into the country. Finally we got a taxi and after three false starts finally made it out of Rosso-Mauritania. Our driver went very, very fast, and blared a tape he had picked up on the way out of town, with some Youssou and some rap and a bunch of really bad sappy French pop. The countryside changed almost immediately, and so did the people. 15 minutes ouside of Rosso-Senegal people live in grass huts on marshy, green earth, but 15 minutes outside of Rosso-Mauritania people live in skin tents on sand. We saw our first camel after about 25 minutes of driving, and within an hour we were passing sand dunes and seeing mirages.

We stopped about every 15 minutes for police checks, which were to continue for the rest of our trip. They were a huge pain in the butt, mostly because, since we're Americans, our passports have to be scrutinized, and at every post they had to record our information in a big book. Fortunately due to Ramadan and the heat many of the officers were too fatigued to do their job in the afternoons, so we only had to stop when we were travelling in the morning.

There's so much to say about the trip, but I have to go to class. I made two photo albums about the trip, and they have a lot of information in the captions, so check them out, it's better to see them anyway. the links are:

Volume one:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2231629&l=343c3&id=823921

Volume two:
http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2231655&l=a774d&id=823921

Ba Beneen yoon