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West Africa, Malta and the Balkans in 1999

MAURITANIA

Bec
2004-09-18 19:25:59

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Nouâdhibou
At Guerguarat in Morocco I left the Huraults who needed my seat for the guide they had hired and joined a British group travelling in a five ton Bedford truck. They did not hire a guide for they had decided to join a group a Germans ferrying trucks to Gambia and to rely on GPS devices (global positioning system), to find the way across the desert to Nouakchott.

After innumerable police checks and lengthy border formalities, we finally we got to Nouâdhibou late in the afternoon and found a guarded camping ground for our first night in Mauritania.

Here are the seven of us just before moving out after a hearty breakfast : Lee Thomas & Ian Townsend in front and in the back, Steve Hibbert (owner of the truck), Peter Faulstroh, Emma Hibbert, Abdalaii (the campsite manager), myself and Nicky Dabbs.

Mauritanian Desert
This endless train bringing iron ore from Zouérat 700 kms away was a bizarre sight in the middle of nowhere as it thundered by, raising a cloud of dust on its way to the port of Nouâdhibou.

I was delighted by the prospect of renewing the experience of a long trip through the trackless desert which I had enjoyed when visiting remote drilling sites in the Algerian Sahara more than 30 years earlier.

On the left, approaching the rig that drilled the discovery well at Nezla shortly before the oil gushed there in 1965 and on the right, the crew's camp seen from the top of the rig.

Vast unlimited expanses have always fascinated me. The open sea, the empty desert and the frozen whiteness of the far arctic share a beauty devoid of distractions akin to the emptiness of meditation. The contemplation of vast empty spaces is hypnotic and can bring on a state of trance where the conscious and unconscious meet.

A GPS is a remarkable instrument. It costs only a couple of hundred dollars, it's no larger than a cellular phone ...