Day breaks and Andrew is not a happy camper, he didn't enjoy his first night under canvas. During the night there had been some weird whining, howling, slavering type noises, "Pete, there's a wild animal out there!". "Naah, it's the wind." I replied. Daylight proves him right, there is a pack of wild dogs lurking in the dunes around the convoy, at least they haven't eaten biker George.
After a quick brew we strike camp in the hope that things will start moving when the border opens at 09:00. A Moroccan border official then nearly starts another International Incident and nearly gets us all lynched when he calls our convoy forward and says he wants to transit us through first. The Senegalese contingent (understandably) go nuts and a shouty mob soon forms. Why should the Europeans go first?
They start a sit-in protest and lay down in the middle of the road. We are accused of bribing the official and of being arrogant white people trying to force our way through.
Luckily two chaps in the front row have seen that we had nothing to do with it, it was the official who had called us forward and they tell their mates, so they mob the official instead who disappears in a sea of very angry people.
The queue has started moving now so on the basis that there's only one official against a large number of people who it might not be in our best interests to piss off, we decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and rejoin the queue.
They start a sit-in protest and lay down in the middle of the road. We are accused of bribing the official and of being arrogant white people trying to force our way through.
Luckily two chaps in the front row have seen that we had nothing to do with it, it was the official who had called us forward and they tell their mates, so they mob the official instead who disappears in a sea of very angry people.
The queue has started moving now so on the basis that there's only one official against a large number of people who it might not be in our best interests to piss off, we decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and rejoin the queue.
Time goes by and eventually we roll into the Moroccan border compound to undergo the byzantine, kafka-esque and illogical border formalities. A chap in a blue uniform checks the passports. Then you park, get out and go to a window where a chap in a grey uniform checks your passports and a pink form and stamps them. We then move a few yards forward and another chap in a grey uniform checks the passports and the vehicle registration document. Move a few yards forward and a chap in a green uniform checks your passport and sends you to stand in a big queue in the baking sun at a window where another bloke writes your passport details, car registration and chassis number in a big ledger. (When he turns over the page he has to draw a whole bunch of vertical lines by hand with a ruler.) Finally a last guy in a green uniform checks your passport yet again, and finally we are allowed to leave Morocco at 15:00, 25 hours after having joined the queue, but there's still no-man's land and the minefield ahead.
The tarmac stops at the very edge of the border compound. Guides stand offering to show you the way through, but we decide that it can't be that hard as there is a defined track, so we head off and are soon jolting and bouncing over incredibly rough terrain with clangs and boings as Phoebe repeatedly bottoms out. Just how good was that suspension repair in Dakhla? A few seriously buttock-clenching bumps and thumps lead us to conclude that Moroccan garagistes know their stuff as everything holds together.
Different tracks snake off in all directions and battered car wrecks litter the landscape. Fly-tipping or landmines? (Some of them look like they've been blown up, so possibly the latter). I had asked a local chap in the queue the night before the best way through and he'd said to keep to the left as the tracks to the right went into soft sand, so we keep going to the left and after a few kilometers (don't know how many as we were both rigid in our seats concentrating on the track ahead) we sigh a huge sigh of relief as we finally sight the Mauritanian border compound where out guide Sidi is waiting for us.
Sidi has smoothed the path with the border controls so the formalities are resasonably painless, but we have to wait a further 3 hours for all teams to make it through no-man's land as the Mauritanian authorities have our security in mind and we will travel with an armed escort in convoy. So night is falling as we head off with 19 cars, a lorry, two motorbikes and two landcruisers of the Gendarmerie Nationale.
We are heading for a desert camp for the night and it's 22:00 by the time we pull up at a police roadblock in a nondescript and pitch-black section of desert. Andrew, who after the privitations of last night has been having visions of a comfortable bed and refreshing cool drinks moans "Oh God, Pete, please tell me this isn't it." Oh, but it is.
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