Although our flight from Banjul (Gambia) to Nouakchott (capital of Mauritania) is not until 10 am, we were told to be at the airport at 7 am. This necessitates an early morning (6:30 am) departure from our hotel. The random taxi driver I hired last night is a no-show. Bugger. Christi and I decide to wait until sunrise (about 7 am) and then flag down a taxi on the street. Miraculously our original taxi arrives at 7 am. The driver apologizes profusely, blaming the delay on a flat battery. Indeed he has to free-wheel his taxi down hill into the Leybato hotel to get the engine running.
We arrive to an empty airport. I mean there is no one around. The only Mauritania Airways flight to Nouakchott listed on the departure board leaves at 11:30 am (our ticket states 10 am) and it has a different flight number to the one on our tickets. What is going on? Have we been scammed again? An apologetic Mauritania Airways agent eventually appears and says the airport information monitors are all wrong. The flight, partially full, departs a respectable 30 minutes late. And it’s a ridiculously short 40-minute flight to Dakar (food and drinks served) compared to the 9-hours it took from Dakar to Fajara by public transport. We are asked to remain onboard because the new passengers will board immediately and we will depart soon thereafter.
That all sounds good, but the Dakar ground staff are clearly not paying attention as our luggage is removed from the hold of the plane and taken to baggage claim. I watch these events unfold with mounting alarm and jump out of my seat to confront a flight attendant. In my mediocre French and with much wild hand gesticulating, I convey that something is wrong. She finally gets the message and dashes off to retrieve our bags and I then have to go down on to the tarmac to confirm that indeed these are our bags. Can you imagine landing in Nouakchott without bags. The chances of us ever seeing them again would be zero. (Note, in November 2010 the airline was banned from European airspace by the European Commission due to persistant deficiencies in its operations and maintenance. The airline went out of business a month later. Gee what a surprise!)
Our 60-min flight to Nouakchott is quite impressive as we approach the city from the Sahara desert. A vast sandy expanse of nothingness eventually coalesces into a series of nondescript low-rise buildings and eventually the airport. Nouakchott does have a great, if little-known tag line: “Where the Sahara meets the Atlantic’. Christi and I are a little nervous as we de-plane, because we have been warned by the British Foreign Office and the US State Department not to come here as three Spanish aid workers have been kidnapped recently (Note one was released the day before we arrived, while the other two were not released until August of 2010 after a multi-million dollar ransom had been paid. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the kidnappings). Immigration formalities are straight forward, however, and taxi drivers are falling over themselves to help us. The loss of Western dollars and euros is clearly already biting in Mauritania. Our taxi driver has a tough time finding the cheap, crummy, flea-bitten hotel that we have picked at random from the Lonely Planet guide and eventually he drops us at the 4-star Tfeila hotel (formerly a Novotel). Of course we would like to stay here, but we simply don’t have the money to splurge at the moment. The staff helps us find something more in our price range (US$40 per night rather than US$180 per night for the cheapest room at Tfeila). Our hotel is called Maison d’hote (literally ‘Bed and Breakfast’). The room is rustic (i.e. negligible furniture) and comes with a ceiling fan and bathroom, but no mosquito net. The B&B is centrally located so we drop our bags and explore the area a little. We do receive quite a few curious stares and a few people stop to talk, but they are the most bizarre conversations. As we tramp around the exterior of the Mosquee Saudique (we’re not allowed in) with its grand minarets and exquisite carved geometric decoration we are approached by two men who say they are from the Gambian High Comission and wonder whether we want to purchase 6 kg of gold! We decline. Later another local approaches us asking where we are from. Nervously we reply Britain and America. It transpires he used to live in Kentucky with his brother who was killed in a bizarre work-related incident: he drowned in a vat of fermenting whisky!
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching tale of broken hearts and broken test tubes.
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