Mauritania 2 – vacuum cleaning

We need to skip today’s B2 beach party, as we can’t approach the site through the sand, so heading towards Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. The route is tough, we can hardly see of the dust and sand. If we close the windows, we boil alive. If we open them, in a minute everything gets full of sand. The situation is even worse back at the beds, the blankets on the ground level get covered in 1 cm thick sand in 1 minute. The wind blows the sand across the road, a good metal video could be shot in here easily. We see the world’s longest train which carries iron to Nouabhibou. It has 300 carriages and makes an extraordinary noise. There 2 passenger carriages attached to it, no buffet carriage.

We stop to have lunch, and 10 single mums approach us with their kids to beg. They are not shy, they sit down on the stairs of the bus to feed their babies. We’re in trouble. If we give them presents, we’ll strengthen bad habits and fuck up all the cars behind us. If not, we’ll have a bad conscience. It’s tough.

By the afternoon we reach Nouakchott, the coty of winds. We meet the Norwegians, who pulled the English in their Polski Fiat all day today. Of course we stop for shopping for one and a half hours and we wait till it gets dark. In Nouakchott there’s no public lights, and Tuti wants to practice driving on curvy narrow streets in the night, because he heard that night bus drivers get a nice compensation at BKV. Not only streetlights, but there’s no current at all between 6pm and 8am. We pass the dark, lonely streets. All the houses look the same, and the whole town looks as it was made by Sim City and forgot to add current to it. We have no idea where the locals are. They either sit at home in the dark, or went somewhere else. We found out that Nouakchott was really planned by Sim City. When Mauritania became independent, they figured that there’s not a single town in the whole country, so they quickly built one in the widest spot of the country. They did it in order to hide the poverty under the crossing dust and sand.

Abduliya takes us to the hotel. He literally navigated us to the garden of the hotel, and it took Tuti 1.5 hours to navigate our bus out of it. Aravind bribed us free parking plus free accommodation for the English and Norwegians. He’s really pissed off, as he was pushed by others at the reception to who WE showed the way to the hotel. Dinner in the evening, then the beach.