Mauritania … Atar …Nouakchott – Fri 13th

Good nights sleep at a Dutch ex-pats camp site in the town of Atar. Rather worryingly found a scorpion under our tent in the morning! Enjoyed a slightly later start and found time to look in Atar. Richard found a watch and had great fun haggling down from 27 euros to 5 euros. I found a traditional Mauritian dress and few other things. We then took a very long 495km road to Nouakchott which had some beautiful scenery.

We travelled with a Dutch and Belgium team for the day. Due to bad fuel the Dutch team ran no faster than 50mph. Despite this we did complete most of the route before dark, but got delayed when a local scrap who offered to repair our tyre and promptly took in his old Renault 4 van with no light and didn’t return for 45 mins. In the end Richard when and searched for the guy on foot and had great fun hitching a lift back in this decrepit vehicle. We got lost getting out of town, but the icing on the cake was when the Belgium team vanished from the back of the group at a police check point. Despite other teams passing nobody had seen the car. Due to the political unrest there is high risk of high jacking of westerners in this area of Mauritania. I worrying half hour of slowly back tracking our route we spotted two very scared Belgiums and their car, pulled off onto a track in the darkness. Their alternator had failed and they were stuck in deep sand. Whilst I entertained the locals who had congregated with an odd conversation about Rooney, Beckham and Rap music, Richard and the Dutch did a quick alternator change with the spare that we had on board and got all the locals to push the car back onto the road

With much relief we arrived at a bush camp which was heavily guarded by Mauritanian army solders carrying machine guns. The site was also filled with wildlife including several tyres of prey mantis, which kept us company during dinner. Once again we saw some scorpions. One crawled under our tent, whilst we screamed at this dark brown menacing creature. It was the largest we had seen to date and was promptly stamped on by Brigitte one of the trail team. Despite this we slept well and set off early the next morning with our Italian friends who had finally made it out the desert a day late.