The Derka Derka Sand Witches

Nouackchott, Mauritania. For the life of me I can't image why, in the sun drenched desert, where temperatures routinely hit quadrouple digits, the local populace insists on burying themselves beneath several layers of clothing. Long pants, long shirts, a turban, and a billowing robe are draped across the runway models of Mauritania. Given the intense heat, it is a tad perplexing. The best I can figure is that the blistering sun has reduced their brains to tapioca. Come mid-day, when the sun hits its peak, I've debated peeling off my skin as if it were just another shirt. I think the robes might be religious in nature, but Hell, choose another religion - something more appropriate for the climate, like the Church of Club Med, where you are encouraged to wear shorts and they serve pina colodas during Communion.


Mauritania was actually a bit of wash for us. You see, one of the problems with this official Islamic Republic, besides the sandy tasting food and the I Heart Osama t-shirts, is that they are officially required to hate us. At our first stop in country, at the port city of Nouadibou, a Senegalese man pointedly warned us not to discuss our nationality. They hate us, he said emphatically. Americans had always been tolerated out here but a mistakenly released copy of Team America, World Police may have pushed them over the edge. We definitely took his advice to heart. It was kind of nice being Canadian for a change. I miss my dog-sled and my hockey sticks but at least I have good health converage.



Nouadibou itself held little interest, with the exception of the one place we could find alcohol - a Chinese restaurant, run by Portugese speaking Koreans, who were watching a subtitled, English-language version of Garfield, The Movie. After that scary scene we decided to get out of Dodge. The longest train in the world, a mind-boggling 2.7km of locomotive, slowly works its way east from Nouadibou, deep into the Sahara, termintating at a iron-ore mine some 500km away. Hundreds of open top cars transport iron from the mine to the port, save two, which are reserved for the 600 passengers that fight for a small spot on the open floor. You are allowed to ride in the cargo cars for free. For eighteen hours you can inhale a steady stream of iron-flaked dust, which later allows you to cough up all manner of useful hardware. Need a screw? Haaaacckkk!!!. Still, this may be preferable to the crowded passenger cab, spending the better part of a day with your face jammed into someone's armpit at an awkward angle. We waited at the train station - a small, covered, concrete slab at the edge of the desert - for hours on end. This was what they call Africa Time, a zone where the concept of time doesn't really exist. The train comes when the train comes, or it doesn't come at all.



Now I want to remind those of you reading this - especially my mother - that I am alive and well, safe and sound, and have obviously survived the foolish incident which I will now relate. It can be mind-numbing, these hours in the dry desert heat; the brain stews, crucial details evaporate. I'll admit I didn't walk far, and I mostly stuck to some rocks that were protruding from the sand, but I kinda, maybe, sorta took a few hundred steps through the unmarked mine field that is directly west of the train tracks. If it makes anyone feel better, the view was incredible. But as it turned out, they may have been the least of our problems. Due to a long story I haven't the time to tell, we ended up skipping on the train, and essentially skipping the rest of Mauritania. We headed to the capitol of Nouackchott the next day, then south through the desert, to the border with Senegal. The ride was beautiful, we stopped frequently to help out broken down cars and to face Mecca and pray. The sun was setting, a new day would soon come.

A Crew of Jew

The Road To Mauritania. Some people like to wake up and attack the day; my decidedly more languid approach involves feebly poking at it with a stick. My stomach has been feeling kind of queasy of late; a not uncommon condition for me, due to what one might describe as an intolerant, or rather, racist stomach. The digestables we commonly refer to as food or "essential nutrients" just don't particularly agree with me. Whole grains herald an uncomfortable distension, legumes presage the most unpleasant of pains, and a sampling of dairy tends to induce small villages to flee in terror. In short, I often don't feel particularly well. This worried me a bit as we were about to board our transport, a bathroomless bus that would take us on our 27 hour journey to Dahkla, the final port city in Morocco.


The road to Mauritania is a long and difficult one. Over 500 kilometers of desert stretches south across the Western Sahara to the Mauritanian border. It is barren, cracked, and dry; a sandy skin that no industrial strength moisturizing cream can cure. Since the ride was so long, and the bathroom so nonexistent, I feared a repeat of an earlier disaster. This time I vowed to drink as little water as possible, to slowly dehydrate, to make myself into the equivalent of human beef jerky. This is not the best of ideas. As we headed south, the greenery of Morocco slowly started to disappear. The desert here is not the sandy dune seas of, well, Dune, but rather, the limitless expanse of scrub-brush flatland in Tremors. Both movies have monster worms which erupt from the ground and devour people like pork rinds, but I am sorry to report that I didn't see any. Still, the desert is mysterious. South of Agadir we drove past groves of small, leafy, trees no more than twice the height of a man. There, amongst the shimmering leaves, alighting atop the narrow branches, precariously balanced, like some exotic fruit, stood, unbelievably, incomprehensibly, a dozen or so live goats. We passed many of these trees, so heavily laden with goats as to make one wonder if the trees hadn't popped straight out from the ground fully formed, instantly lifting surprised herds into the sky. Tis true. To you wretched rogues and doubting dullards who question the validity of such an audacious claim, who believe my tales to be embellished or exaggerated, I say get bent, the Magical Goat Trees of Morocco exist. Though one has to wonder what happens come Fall, when, presumably, the fully ripened goats fall from their perch onto the hard desert floor. There are very few hospitals in this part of the world and I suspect they have precious little time for twisted horns and sprained udders.



As it turned out, the bus ride was easy. We glided along the coast with reclining seats and plenty of leg room, we made frequent stops for food, and I had managed to dehydrate myself to the point of delirium. Before we knew it we were in Dahkla. On the edge of nowhere, between the endless desert and the expansive sea, this large port town was incredibly quiet. The roads were lifeless, the buildings weather-beaten, and it had an eerily abandoned feel. We ambled about, this way and that, until we accidentally - and I stress the accidentally part - wandered onto a military air field. I took us a while to figure out why the men near the small wooden shack in the distance were avidly waving their arms and blowing on a loud whistle. Unfortunately we had walked quite a ways since stepping over the knee-high pile of rocks that apparently constituted their "security perimeter". We had already turned around, but we were still fifty yards from the barrier when the uniformed soldiers in the six-wheel convoy truck came roaring down the street at us. Somehow we managed to cross back over just before they intercepted us. God knows what would have happened if we were still inside but - since there was a bit of a language barrier - the soldier in charge pantomimed getting gunned down with the type of two-handed, mounted machine gun that Arnold Schwarzenegger will likely to use on his constituency we he loses the next election.



That evening, an even more unlikely event transpired - we met three young, pot-smoking, American Jews. Well, one was British, but that makes my preceding triplicate sentence structure more complicated. These young men lived together in a kibbutz in Israel and were also travelling through Mauritania. We decided the cheapest way to go was together so we could split the fair. We arranged for a ride - which is story enough for another whole tale - and in the morning got transported a short distance to a security checkpoint. There were an incredible amount of security stops on this trip, so much so that I debated stapling my Passport directly to my forehead. At the security checkpoint we transferred to another vehicle - a large dilapidated van. Our valiant steed was a sight: rust throughout; the side windows gone, covered in plywood; the interior inlaid with the same thin, oft splintered wood, behind which lay a perplexing layer of Styrofoam; a heavy sliding door which would tend to unlatch itself in the middle of the bumpy ride. If this wasn't enough, the spacious rear - on the floor of which we were seated - was stuffed with jugs, heavy sacks, boxes, and other transportables that forced the five of us towards the front, against a two-by-two hole in the plywood that allowed us to peer into the cab. None of this mattered however, since the car was jacked up, the front passenger-side tire no where to be found. We waited an eternity to a spare to arrive, along with five others, which were loaded in the back, one per passenger, like some sort of desert life-preserver. I can honestly say I think I now have a good idea of what it's like to be smuggled from Mexico, sans the delicious supply of tortilla chips. The ride was tough: it was cramped, dark, and dusty; it took incredibly long, with frequent police checks for illegal sand transport; and we were literally the last car to cross the Moroccan border, the police closing it immediately behind us. It was a great adventure.