Following the trainline

We were heading for Atar, Mauritania. Initially south from Dakhlar. Mostly sticking to the coast road but with a short excursion out to Cap Barbas. Here, on the beach, we found a little clutch of motorhomes. As best I could tell the occupants were generally retired French couples doing a little fishing, running into town on their quad bikes and generally overwintering in a cheap, warm and pleasant place.

Next day we arrived at Guerguarat and the border crossing to Mauritania.  Getting out of Morocco was tedious but relatively painless. Crossing no-man’s land was a bit disturbing. Several kilometres of rubbish, abandoned and stripped cars, parked trucks and a surprisingly large number of people apparently living there. The road begins with tarmac but then becomes a rocky and very uneven track.

Arriving in the Mauritanian border compound the first thing that happened was that we were mobbed by fixers all vying to assist us. We chose the one that spoke the best English. He dragged us around various dingy, grubby offices where we had to queue with our passports and hand over money. €110 for a 30-day visa, €150 for a vehicle permit and insurance, €50 in fixer’s fees and a couple of bribes. The tedium level became elevated to a completely new height but fortunately, we avoided having Baloo searched. That really could have taken a long time.

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Four hours after leaving Morocco, we were in Mauritania and driving along the road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott. We only followed this a short way before turning off east to follow a track from the village of Bou Lanouar. Getting past the village was not straightforward. First and second attempts ended in narrow, sand filled streets. Possibly, just about wide enough for Baloo if the street had been flat and level. However, there was a metre of two of soft sand drifted unevenly between houses so we could easily have ended up bouncing off the mud walls or worse. Next attempt was stopped by a street that was wide enough but spanned by many electricity cables, which hung down to just a couple of metres off the ground. We have a pole we could have used to try to lift each cable up but this would have been very time consuming and we would have run the risk of damaging a cable or getting the truck entangled in a web of live power lines. Penultimate attempt, to the south of the village, found us in the rubbish dump. Most villages seem to do this. All the rubbish gets thrown in an area just away from the houses. Here it blows around and not only looks unsightly but also attracts flies. So far as driving is concerned the big danger is all the broken glass. Beyond the dump was some impassably uneven ground, the cab was filling with seriously irritating flies and some children had invented the very dangerous game of swinging off the motorcycle rack while we were trying to manoeuvre.

Eventually we found a narrow route between the village and the train line. The sand here was deep and we bogged down in it. I am getting to be a dab hand at changing the tyre pressures now. First, go round and remove the tyre pressure sensors that are also the valve caps and open the two little compartments between the back wheels. Then set the correct pressure on the gauges in the left hand compartment and take out the two air lines for the front wheels. The air lines for the rear wheels are already connected in the compartments so next I attach the front air lines to connectors near the front wheels and then go round connecting up the air lines to the tyres. Then I sit and wait. We exchanged waves with the driver of a passing train. If we are inflating the tyres the engine needs to be running. Either way, I just wait until the hissing stops and the tyres are inflated to whatever I set on the gauges initially. Pack all the lines away, replace the valve caps and we are good to go. With the tyres down to two bar, soft sand is just not a problem.  Select low range on the transfer box, lock up most of the differentials, engage the off-road gearbox and we are off.  Slow but steady.

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From here, we were going to follow the train line for about 400km. There is no road, just vague piste running parallel to the track. In places just a few metres away, elsewhere, several kilometres distant. The line links the iron-mining centre of Zouerate, deep in the desert, with the port of Nouadhibou. Trains on the railway are up to 2.5 km long, some of the longest and heaviest in the world. Three or four trains run each day. A few kilometres from Bou Lanouar there were no people, no signs of people and no flies. Just desert and the train line. Good place to stop for the night.

In the morning, we began our desert trek in earnest.  The first day was a steady plod. Following the railway line means there are no great navigation problems. The ground was mostly hard packed sand and rocks with the occasional drift of soft sand. Usually the track was quite visible. Next day, we arrived at the dunes of Azeffal. Here the shifting sands rapidly obliterate vehicle tracks so we needed to pick our own path. Tyres deflated and drive to all wheels make Baloo good in soft sand. We still had to choose a route carefully to avoid falling off the steep side of a dune. It all made for interesting driving and fortunately did not prove to be too difficult. By the evening we arrived by some small rocky hills which provided a properly desert backdrop to a great campsite.

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