Wheelers stuck in the sand, Wheelers and dealers at the Senegalese border

Posted Sunday, February 18, 2007, 7:04 PM by Lonely Planet

Days 10-15: The Wheelers make their way through Mauritania reaching the Senegalese border on the Plymouth to Banjul rally.



Monday 12 to Saturday 17 February

We've not really been out of touch right through Mauritania, but we never hung around long enough to work things out at local internet cafes (there were quite a few of them). At Dakhla, our final stop in Morocco (in what used to be the old colonial era Spanish Sahara) we met up with most of the other crews. Unhappily, the American team's big yellow school bus (we'd joked about hitching a ride with them if our trusty Mitsubishi broke down) is towed in and it appears the bus is dead.

From Dakhla we crossed into Mauritania without problems and teamed up with three other cars (a beautiful little Renault 4 steered by two clockmakers, a gaudy yellow Nissan Sunny coupe and a militarily precise - the crew are both ex-RAF - Volvo station wagon) to cross the desert. In fact, you can take the new road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott, but that's wimping out, we go for the real deal, across the sandy wastes and down the beach with incoming waves lapping at our wheels.



It's a buzz although the first day I'm the champion at getting stuck in the sand. Fortunately I redeem myself on day two when I'm the champion at not getting stuck in the sand. I've mastered the Mitsu sand technique: run into deep sand flat out, with the poor little car's little 1.3 litre 18-year-old, 225,000km engine running at maximum revs and with luck you sail out the other side. Towards the end of the beach we have to round a rocky promontory by actually driving into the sea and skittering out the other side of the rocks with everything still going. The Mitsu even manages that OK.



An overnight pause in Nouakchott and then it's down to the Senegalese border, an experience which puts a bad taste in everybody's mouth. First we skip the Rosso border (hassles, bribe demands, delays) by driving 100km down a dirt road to a smaller border. Even there we have to go through nine different checkpoints in about 200m, emerging US$200 poorer having paid off (usually in bribes) customs officials, police officials, border officials and on and on both exiting Mauritania and arriving in Senegal.

Fortunately we evade the police roadblocks between the border and our campsite at Zebrabar, nearly every other car is stopped and fined for various made-up offences. One car gets gonged for US$25 for not signalling as they pulled in when the police stopped them to check if they really had two reflective triangles on board. Most cars in Senegal don't have an indicator to their name, let alone a reflective triangle.

- Tony Wheeler

Track progress and view a map of the route here.

Labels: Africa, Plymouth to Banjul Challenge 2007

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