No man’s land

Before entering no man’s land we hired a tuareg, Ahmed. He is in the car in front of us showing us the way. The landmine zone is not like the Minesweeper game, where you have to jump here and there, there’s a stone road leading through it. The many burnt out cars on the side of the road remind me of Mad Max. We get across it no problems in 1 hour at a 10 km/h average. I saw some camels in there in the sand, I don’t understand, do they know as well where the landmines are? Is this landmine story is the imagination of the tuaregs or the Mauritanian ministry’s installation? According to the news every now and then someone blows up in here.

Ahmed did a good job, we gave him a good tip, we change money at him, and he even gets clothes. Some cars followed us, even those who wanted to overtake us at the border. None thanks it, obviously.

The Mauritanian border is closed, of course. They swapped the legendary cooling hut ot a tool hut, in which they are sleeping. According to Aravind the country developed a lot in the last two years, there is hardly any soldier without shoes, and many of them are wearing shoes instead of slippers. We make the biggest mistake of the whole trip at the Mauritanian border. We start to cook. Meanwhile 10 cars overtake us, and then cars come from the sides as well. Just like the Ukrainian border. We try to proceed, but everyone is stuck. Neither forward, nor backwards. I go to the front with the passports. A dude collects them and sends me away. For some unbelievable reason, they finish with ours first. They might have thought we have a very important Indian guest on the bus. In front of the customs, we bump into Aravind’s friend, Abdulay. Abdulay helps us sort out the customs, we onlz need a stamp on our papers, which we have to queue for in front of a hut. There are 50 other in undescriptable order in front of the hut, trying to get hold of some papers through the window, just like when banana arrived to the Skala in Szekesfehervar in 1982. One guy in slippers might really like me, as he throws our papers out from the queue. The friend helps in here too, we are done in a record time, and we even had something to eat.

One of the tyres blew up in noman’s land though. After a short discussion next to the road, 3 local truck drivers try to convince us that they would go until the end with such a tyre, but Gyula wants to change it, so work.

Meanwhile I talk to Abdulay. He is half Mauritanian, half Gambian, but his family lives here. He came back from South Africa recently, where he wanted to get a work as a guide. He says that some time back his cousin was the local marshall. Aravind says that last year he was walking around with his brother’s papers. He shows me an ID, with his photo on it more or less as I assume. Mauritania is an interesting place. We need around 200 papers to enter and they stop us for the passanger list, insurance and passport control in every 5 kilometers, although the locals hardly have any papers, or if they do have, it’s just as official and serious as a library card.

I ask how much a bier is. There’s alcohol ban in Mauritania, bier can be found maximum in the back rooms of Chinese shops. Abdulay say a 0.33 Heineken is 1000 ouguiya, and the exchange rate is between 330 and 360 for a Euro, that’s bloody expensive. No, he says a bier is 6 Euros. 1000 ougiya? 1 Euro is 335 here on the border, which makes a bier 3 Euros. No, 6 Euros he says. I run out of arguments and reasoning at this point. Not even arguments, as numbers are quite exact figures, we can’t even argue on such a trivia. We’ll rather pay in ouguiya for biers. Anyway, we have booze. Others Cbed us that they will junk their alcohol before the border. We told them that we’d take it through for them, but none asked. We tried to hide our alcohol (didn’t make a big effort though). The remaining 4 liters of palinka will be renamed as windscreen wiper liquid. Unicum is medicine for caughing, there’s the cross on it. If the officer tries it warm and survives, he’ll definitely will think so too. Wines and the other leftovers go under the beds. The bier tap is a more difficult task, we put put a bag on it, the same we carry the clothes for aid in. We got away with both easily. Moroccans make a bit of fuss, but a bottle of wine made us VIP guests. The Mauritanians didn’t even come in the bus.