Laura Zera

Stories to Connect Cultures

Atar to Nouakchott: A Mauritanian Minibus Odyssey

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I was in Mauritania last week, part of my Marrakech-to-Dakar backpacking route (current location: Saint-Louis, Senegal). Public transport in Mauritania was never all that great (I’m being generous), but two journeys were particularly special. Here, I do an anatomy of one of those trips, which took me from the town of Atar, in the Adrar region, to the capital city of Nouakchott.

The distance between the two points is 438 kilometers, which is 1,314 in Africa-travel kilometers. Following is a breakdown of how I passed eight hours in transit.

 

Window that doesn’t open? Check. Temperature? About 88 degrees F.
Window that doesn’t close? Check. Unfortunately, it was in the back, and I was told to move and sit with the women in the row behind the driver so as to not mix with the dudes.
Tail light that gets pulled off at one of about eight police checkpoints? Check. Just shove that sucker under the seat. Maybe one day it will get put back on.
Cracked windshield? Check. Apparently they can’t get windshields in Mauritania, they have to go to Senegal. True story. I didn’t see a windshield in any vehicle that wasn’t cracked.
Shit ton of sand and dust? Check. The inside of my nose was black at the end.
Le petit-déjeuner under the driver’s seat? Check.
Sunroof? Check. Actually, it’s the sliding door. It sort of closed? Not really. It also rattled a lot.
Engine block directly under the lump to the left of my legroom? Throwing 95-degree heat? Check and check.
Health app on iPhone completely fucked up by the bumpiness of the ride? Check. I climbed just one flight of stairs that day.
Whizzing by camels in the wild? Check.
Old woman with rock? Check. I offered her a hand down at the end of our journey and she refused, taking a man’s hand instead. She did not approve of the removal of my layers down to my t-shirt.
Front tire blown at 70 mph, 90 minutes into the trip? Check. The funny thing is that I took a photo of the bald tire before we left, and predicted a blow-out. I even checked the other nearby mini-buses to see if any of them had better tires, which was a nyet.
Spare tire as smooth as a baby’s butt? Check. I reiterated this to the driver several times. Thankfully, he stopped at the one town on the route and got a better used tire. Apparently they don’t have new tires in Mauritania, either.
Worth the trip out to the desert in the first place? Check. It was all to see Chinguetti, a Berber town founded in the 13th century as the center of trans-Saharan trade routes,
A street in Chinguetti, Mauritania
The wise and funny curator at the ancient library in Chinguetti. It holds some incredibly old books of math, literature, science and astrology, as Chinguetti was also a place of Islamic scholarship. Sadly, a thief broke in about three years ago and stole the oldest book in the collection, which was the Koran.