Mauritania: No Man’s Land and Nouadhibou

Leaving Morocco (Western Sahara) was confusing enough with multiple booths, forms & checks of the vehicle, but once we passed that test the absolute madness started.

It’s hard to describe what is going on at the Morocco-Mauritania border and even harder to understand why it needs to be so utterly chaotic.

Once you leave the Moroccan side there’s a 3km stretch of ‘no-mans land’ between Morocco and Mauritania which is no nation’s responsibility, so there is no track to follow to get to the Mauritania border/customs.

We started following a lorry up ahead but then changed our minds as it seemed to head off away from the border post we could see in the distance.

Then we drove past a Lada vehicle with a big, fully-packed trailer and TeamWork Africa emblazoned across it stuck in the sand and revving away.

We decided we had to stop to help them as luckily we had sand ladders which Andrew, Lenny’s previous owner, had wisely invested in and explained to us how to use.

We were pretty nervous about getting out of Lenny in no man’s land, with ‘fixers’ rapidly arriving to let us all know that they could show us the route and do all the border formalities for us.

With the sand ladders under their wheels, the guys managed to get unstuck and we ended up spending the rest of the morning with them as we went through the ridiculous steps involved in getting visas for us and temporary export approval and Mauritanian insurance for Lenny.

The two German guys explained they were travelling to Liberia with donations, including a hand-driven washing machine and a solar fruit drier which they’d had custom made.

We arrived at the Moroccan border at 10 and finally got out on the Mauritanian side at 1.30 to drive the short distance to Noadhibou, the 2nd largest town in Mauritania.

Nouadhibou, like Dakhla is on a long thin spit of land, with the Moroccan/Mauritania border weirdly running along the middle like the male urinary tract.

We were so relieved to make it and find our huge Hotel Al Jazira, and again it seemed we were the only guests. There must have been so much investment and sadly facilities are so underused.

We were confused by why the image above our mirror seemed to be the wrong way round until we realised it was for showing the direction to pray towards Mecca.

The longest train in the world (3 kms) finishes in Nouadhibou, transporting iron ore from 400miles inland to be shipped on from the seaport. We were lucky enough to see the train passing both ways through the desert, heading out empty to collect the ore and returning full of iron ore.