Nouakchott for Christmas
Between August 2004 and April 2006 Luke Skinner and Anna Heywood cycled 29,169km from London to Cape Town raising money for Link Community Development, a UK-based charity working on education projects all over Africa. After 3600km of trouble-free cycling in Europe they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa for the Saharan section of their trip: 4500km from Fnideq (Morocco) to Dakar (Senegal), spending Christmas in Nouakchott in Mauritania.
The Rock of Gibraltar is such an unmistakable feature that even the geographically challenged cannot fail to recognize it. There was no mistaking, either, that its hulking silhouette was receding rapidly as we peered rather anxiously from the upstairs lounge of the Ceuta-bound ferry. Tearing our eyes from this last European landmark, we turned to try and make out the approaching North African coastline. With 3600km of cycling and four countries already under our (somewhat tightened) belts, we were feeling pleased with ourselves. Mild trepidation heightened, however, as we disembarked and headed for Fnideq, the entry point to Morocco.
We had left London on 1st August, our destination was a little way off... South Africa. The temptation to jump back on a ferry bound for Spain was suddenly very strong. What if we had bitten off more than we could chew? How would we cope with the unpaved roads, traffic, terrain, germs, not to mention the unfamiliar language, customs, religion and food? What if it was all just too hard or, perhaps worse, what if we could cope but it was just no fun? A mental procession of kicking camels, rabid dogs, hostile locals and pettifogging officials marched relentlessly through our minds as we saddled up on African soil for the first time...
Food over fear. We momentarily put worries to one side as we attempted to spend our remaining E4.49 in a supermarket – Ceuta is a tiny Spanish enclave, hence the use of the Euro. Adding up the prices of items as we went, we soon reached E3.67, but then followed a fruitless five minutes of aisle-pacing before Luke emerged triumphantly, clutching a bag of pain au chocolat. ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it! 82 cents’ he yelled, to the understandable consternation of the staff. Exuberance turned to embarrassment when we reached the till and discovered we were somehow seven cents short! A local man shoved some coppers our way to speed things along and, muttering thanks, we beat a hasty retreat.
At the border the pettifogging officials were far too busy investigating and unpacking lorries and cars to be concerned with small fry like cycle tourists. So, our passports stamped, we sailed through the barriers and began to thread our way through the mêlée. Decrepit, bright blue Mercedes taxis filled the potholed road, bumper to bumper and three lanes deep. In between, and far down the pecking order, came wheelbarrows, donkey carts, child-porters and... cyclists. We emerged unscathed onto the coast road, however, and even saw a few camels grazing by the roadside. We didn’t see another for hundreds of kilometres so suspect these are stationed here to impress upon the traveller that Europe is now far behind! After guzzling a glass of mint tea containing about three handfuls of sugar, we felt sufficiently revived to push on to Tetouan, where we stumbled into the hotel recommended in our Rough Guide.
That evening, we forayed out for a ramble in the medina and a couscous dinner – well, you can’t expect an entirely cliché-free first day in Morocco, can you. On our return, with the sunlight streaming in through our third-floor window, and the hubbub of the cafés far below, we heaved a sigh of relief. Our first day had passed without incident and suddenly we could relax and look ahead with eager anticipation once again. Fearing arrest by the Serious Crime Squad for illegal possession of pork in a Muslim country, Luke had gobbled his mortadella sandwiches with undue haste as soon as we arrived. In the process, the supermarket receipt fell to the floor and showed that we had been overcharged for the sliced meat by seven cents – the robbers! With faith in our mental arithmetic restored, we fell into an exhausted and contented sleep.
Perhaps we were a little over-the-top to worry about clandestine pork consumption, but by the end of our first week in Africa we were well aware of how seriously Moroccans take their religious duties. Unwittingly, we had arrived in the country a couple of days before Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, began. This, we thought, might cause problems. In the ten weeks since leaving London, we had developed our (already impressive) ability to consume a huge volume of food every day. How could we hope to cycle 1500km a month (our self-imposed target) if we had to go without food from sunrise to sunset? Mercifully, we soon found out that travellers and infidels do not have to observe the fast, so we were dually exempt.
In fact, Ramadan proved to be a fantastic time to travel through Morocco. While we weren’t up to a full-on fast, our attempts to get into the spirit of Ramadan were very well received. It really wasn’t too hard to respect the rules even though we needed regular, and not infrequent food stops! In many ways it was a boon to be on a bike – we could stop in the middle of nowhere and sit behind a tree to eat our lunch, and invariably we would arrive in a town at dusk just as everyone was sitting down to their bowl of harira – a delicious, thick soup. From our appetite every evening it probably appeared that we had been fasting like good Muslims all day! We were given honey-covered pastries, dates and glasses of milk, plied with mint tea, invited to dinner, and presented with still-warm home-made bread in various towns and villages throughout the land. All through the holy month, from Fes to Khenifra to Casablanca to Marrakesh, the hospitality never wavered and calorie-starved tempers never seemed to fray. All the more amazing in the touristic towns, where insensitive visitors gobbled and smoked at any hour while tolerant Moroccans cooked, and served and observed...
During the lengthy period of preparation that precedes a long cycle tour, you have ample opportunity to pore over maps and study that moth-eaten school atlas. Somehow, certain land borders, geographical features or latitudes stick in the mind as ‘key points’. For both of us, the ferry crossings – first the Channel and then the Straits – were significant points of no return but for Anna, it was mountains. Surmounting Port D’Envalira, 2408m high and just inside Andorra, had become established in her mind as a make or break moment. Despite wobbly legs, she made it, and yet it was a similar scenario with the Tizi’n’Test pass in the High Atlas. On a frosty morning in November we left our room (hotel might be stretching it a bit) in the little village of Ijoukak and started the climb. Stands of fruit and walnut trees gave way gradually to pine as we climbed higher. Sheer rock walls rose up dauntingly on one side (and fell away even more dauntingly on the other) and patches of snow appeared on the road. Despite the strenuous climb and the warm sunlight, goose pimples appeared on Anna’s skin. She had been having premonitions about cliff-edge plunges and friable road surfaces giving way. It was something of a personal epiphany for her, then, when at 2.30pm we reached the pass in one piece. To have dragged yourself up a mountain by pedal power alone, wondering all the while who the hell has filled your panniers with concrete, is the most fantastic feeling. Looking across valley after valley, to the smooth, snow-blanketed peaks that form the highest points of the High Atlas range, we felt as though we were on top of the world. The descent was something else, a white-knuckle ride that drops you 1600m in the space of just over an hour. As we whizzed round the bends, we were vaguely aware of a few reddish insects overhead – feeble harbingers of the coming hordes, as it turned out...
We met countless examples of the kindness and hospitality of the Moroccan people (and later, the people of many other countries), whether being invited into their homes, asked to share their dinner, or offered cold drinks or sweet tea as we passed through their villages. Halfway through our longest day so far, having left Goulimine early in the morning, we were again brought face to face with this genuine kindness. Anna had been startled by a dog emerging from the sandy scrub some distance from the road and giving chase. While trying simultaneously to speed up in order to escape and give the hound a blast of the ‘Dog Dazer’ to send it packing, she lost control of the bike, careered across the road, clipped Luke’s back wheel and – well, went flying. Within minutes, by the time Luke had come to a stop and dumped his bike by the side of the road, the first helpers had arrived. The road couldn’t be described as busy – there had rarely been more than one car in sight at any time, but seeing the accident every single passing vehicle either slowed down to ask if we were OK or stopped to offer assistance. Very soon, a small group had collected Anna’s bike and various débris (Dog Dazer, waterbottle and headlight were scattered across the road along with her panniers, some ripped, others intact), brought Luke’s bike back and helped us to the verge. Anna, badly shaken by the experience, just wanted to be left alone, while Luke was reluctant to miss a potential lift until her condition had been established. Fortunately one of the passers-by was a pharmacist who offered tubes of painkilling gel gratefully received and some indeterminate tablets that Anna politely declined. It gradually became clear that although very sore, with cuts, grazes, and a bruised shoulder, Anna was in no immediate danger and probably needed rest more than anything; after accepting some bottled water from another Good Samaritan, we thanked everyone, turned down numerous offers of assistance, and settled quietly by the roadside to allow Anna to get over the shock. Two hours later we continued on our way, and although Anna remembers it vividly as the most painful 60 kilometres of the whole trip, made it to Tan Tan soon after dark – for a few days R&R in a welcoming hotel.
We came closer to accepting a lift a few days later. Another early start saw us leaving Tan Tan as the sun rose and heading south on the first stage of the desert crossing. Almost as soon as the reddish tint left the sky though, we began to notice a few grasshopper-type insects surrounding the few scrubby bushes lining the road. They looked like the insects we’d seen as we descended from the High Atlas a few weeks previously, and we assumed that they were the remnants of the locust plagues in Mauritania which we’d heard about from home. Little did we know that we’d soon be in the thick of that very plague!
As the day went on, though, things became more obvious. The few insects by the roadside became clouds overhead, the reddish coating to the bushes became a red slush, as insects crushed by passing vehicles covered the road. Pretty soon, vehicles began stopping as they saw us – southbound vehicles to offer lifts, northbound drivers to warn us that things became worse further on. Estimates for the size of the cloud ranged from a few dozen kilometres in length to over a thousand, and the prospect of riding through the plague for days on end didn’t appeal. When a Moroccan lorry driver offered to load the bikes onto his cab and take us to Laayoune, we were certainly tempted. Stubborness prevailed though, and we pressed on. And as the day went on, the plague did indeed get worse. The carpet of crushed insects on the road became thicker, the clouds in the sky became denser, and to add insult to injury a headwind picked up, reducing our speed to about 12kph and ensuring that we would be on the road for hours. As vehicles passed us, they threw up clouds of dead and half-dead insects from the road and sprayed them in our faces. In the strong wind the locusts couldn’t make headway in the air, but were crawling along the ground and took flight as we approached, inevitably being blown into our bodies, and exposed arms and faces. We wrapped cloth across our mouths to avoid the horrific prospect of inadvertently eating one, and hunched down in the saddles to avoid direct hits. Around midday we stopped to have our passports checked by a group of bemused policemen who invited us into their hut to shelter and drink tea. Inside, things were better, but occasionally a locust would make it through a gap in the roof and drop onto someone’s head. Before long it was time to press on.
It’s hard to describe how mentally exhausting it was. By the time we reached our overnight stop shortly after dark, we’d lost count of the number of locusts we’d flicked off our bikes, panniers and ourselves. We had stopped several times to eat, but always pressed on within minutes as we couldn’t stand having the insects crawling over us and our food. Equally, though, we had to stop and rest every couple of kilometres to recover from the strain of being bombarded by the hordes. By then, the road was inches deep in dead bodies, and the metallic odour of crushed corpses was added to by those which had died after landing on our spokes, or been carried along the chain and crushed among the sprockets. Our clothes were spattered with red pigment, and it would take hours to remove all traces from our bikes. It truly was a disgusting experience we hope will never be repeated – yet we both agree we’re somehow glad we didn’t take that lift ...
Perhaps we had become unconsciously attuned to Islam by the time we reached the little nation of Guinea Bissau, with just under 9400km on the odometer. It certainly seemed like a long time since we had seen pigs – and yet here they were in abundance! Luke’s thoughts turned to bacon butties, while Anna’s vegetarianism precluded such daydreams. Anna’s vegetarianism has, in fact, precluded quite a few things, like goat stew, mutton tagine, camel brochettes, chicken soup... In North and West Africa (not to mention Spain), a vegetarian is a phenomenon to be regarded with a mixture of disdain and pity. More often than not restaurateurs will offer chicken, then fish, before finally accepting that these are not suitable and exclaiming in frustration, ‘Eh bien, vous êtes vegetal’. It might be wise, if you are a veggie and bound for Africa, to cultivate a taste for omelettes (ubiquitous and usually deep fried), as well as an ability to turn a blind eye to chicken stock and, well, small bits of meat in ‘vegetarian’ dishes. Of course, on the bright side, this lack of suitable main meals gives you licence to binge on coriander and onion pancakes (Morocco), bean fritters (Senegal), sugar-encrusted doughnuts (Guinea Bissau) and fried plantain (Mali) and a myriad of other high-calorie roadside foods. Throughout the region we found cheap and delicious fruit – bananas, mangoes, papayas, apples, oranges, dates, figs and pomegranates, although our appetite for the latter waned considerably after we found one infested with tiny maggots. Extra protein for the veggie, eh? The lack of veggie fodder makes the good meals all the more memorable though. We ate delicious crudités in desert-bound Nouadhibou, found pizza from a wood oven in the highlands of Guinea, were amazed by a beautiful vegetable stew in a sleepy backwater in The Gambia and gulped down icy gazpacho in hot and dusty Segou in Mali.
Western Sahara is a vast swathe of the Sahara Desert, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean. This territory is occupied by Morocco and inland the Mauritanian border area sees heavy troop deployment, banditry and guerilla warfare. Following improvements in the security situation, we had hoped to take an inland route from Laayoune to Bir Moghrein and thence to Chinguetti, deep in the desert interior. As we arrived in Laayoune we noticed a plethora of shiny, UN 4x4 vehicles – never a good indicator of peace! Then, investigating the possibility with the Ministry of Tourism, we got the feeling no one was very keen on our planned itinerary, and we were informed that the military would certainly not issue the necessary laissez-passer without putting up a fight. Then a parcel from Anna’s sister, containing French maps of the border area, was ‘lost in transit’. We thought perhaps someone was trying to tell us something. Fighting the military in a garrison town, figuratively or otherwise, didn’t appeal, and so we reluctantly admitted defeat and took the coast road.
Sand to the left, ocean to the right, tarmac before and behind, we often get asked if it wasn’t monotonous. Unexpectedly, maybe, our days through the Western Sahara and into Mauritania stand out as some of the best of the expedition. In the desert there are fewer distractions, the landscape is uncompromisingly vast, the merest change in the weather immediately apparent (including rain, yes in the Sahara), the light is somehow clearer, the air purer. We were on a major (though not always surfaced) highway the whole way so were hardly blazing a trail through a virgin dunescape, but even so water sources were infrequent and life seemed to be stripped of inessentials.
At times like this we wondered how lone cycle tourers cope with the physical and mental challenges of such an environment. A stiff headwind blew for days and we took turns to ‘break wind’, two pairs of hands made pitching and striking camp quicker; when one of us had a stomach bug or felt exhausted, the other took charge. It’s not that we set out to test our relationship to destruction, but 1800km of desert puts most ‘teambuilding exercises’ into perspective.
One of the many advantages of unsupported cycle touring is that you realize how little you really need to survive. By Day 130 (our journal was starting to read a little like a Big Brother log book) we had given up on shampoo and shower-gel, deciding that we might as well simplify things a little. Soap for us and ‘Omo’ (West African shorthand for noxious detergent in powder form) for clothes, bikes, cooking utensils... The downside of this downsizing is that you can’t carry lots of weighty tomes, and we found we really missed reading, both being bookworms. Our shortwave radio, a present from Anna’s sister, provided some relief. It’s strangely comforting to hear the words, ‘This is the BBC’, when you’re sitting in a freezing youth hostel in the High Atlas or lying awake on a hot, humid night somewhere in Burkina Faso. Getting away from it all is, you might think, the aim of a 20-month trip through Africa, but sometimes you crave that link with home. Never more so, in Luke’s case, than when the Six Nations was in full swing and the Welsh were on the ascendant. Despite fairly scant coverage of the tournament on the beeb (cricket and football gobbling up most airtime), we could get the scores each weekend.
Demands for pens, money and sweets are never far away. Tellingly, it was never the poorest people who were the most vociferous. We often enjoyed incredible hospitality from impoverished hosts who would have been affronted had we offered money. Yet the villages on which aid money had obviously been lavished and in the more well-to-do areas (all things being relative, we’re not talking Porsches and indoor swimming pools, of course), the demands for hand-outs were far greater. Sometimes we were mobbed by forty children at once, other times pestered for hours by a determined individual. In Morocco, the phrase was economical ‘Bonjour bonbon’, in The Gambia even the greeting was superfluous and they just shouted ‘give me minty’! From Mauritania onwards we constantly heard ‘toubab, toubab’ (perhaps the best translation is ‘whitey’) and it was a relief to reach Guinea Bissau simply because the word was different – ‘branco’.
It was at times difficult to keep an open mind, a smile on our faces and to refrain from being rude, hostile or dismissive. We discovered that moo-ing or baa-ing at kids as we rode by had the twin benefits of making us and them laugh! Poking fun at ourselves or appearing foolish often diffused a ‘give me, give me’ situation. Once the kids had forgotten we were toubabs (and thus walking ATMs in their eyes) they usually forgot all about needing a pen, and became shyly inquisitive about our bikes. Favourite bits of the bikes included the pedals – so tiny! – especially if we obliged by clicking our cleats in and out, and in and out, and in and out and... enough! Earnest murmurings among the boys as they struggled to calculate the number of gears were matched by equally intense mental struggles on our part as we tried to work out the Arabic, Wolof or Mandinka word for ‘27’ to put them out of their misery! Finally, everyone passed round the Dog Dazer and had a go at pressing the button, shrieking with delight as a red light appeared and a tinny whine could be heard. Such entertainment from such simple things! Locals were probably equally bemused by our fascination with birds, trees and architecture that were exotic to us but to them perfectly ordinary.
By the time we rolled into Nouakchott on Christmas Eve 2004, five months after leaving London, we had overcome a crash, a plague of locusts, sand too deep to ride over, a snapped tent pole and a dozen other minor disasters. Christmas Day was a unique experience, with a morning stroll along the beach (and a dip in the Atlantic for Luke) followed by a lunch of fresh pastries to compensate for missing out on the traditional festive food. We had kept at bay a feeling of sadness – brought on by being so far from home at Christmas – by tuning in to the service from Kings’ on the BBC World Service, singing carols as we rode along and conjuring up our ideal Christmas dinners. Just as well there was no one around to hear us!
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