Road from Atar to Nouakchoot
We left the campsite as 8:00 a.m. heading towards Nouakchott, the capital city, for a visa run. We arrived at around 5:00 p.m. it was one of those, what we call a truck day. Just bouncing along and looking out at the endless Sahara desert while the sun is scorching away overhead.
I had a word with the driver yesterday about the music and mercifully today there was no music. The contrast was huge. I really enjoyed today, just bouncing along, taking in some of the unusual sights, nodding off, being bounced awake, nothing off again, chatting with my neighbour, nodding off again.
One of our trip mates used an expression yesterday ‘it takes a village’. They were referring to how we cooperatively work together on the trip to get events done. This is a good way to describe how we made lunch when we stopped in the desert at about 1pm-ish. Everybody cooperated and we had an excellent lunch prepared in about 10 minutes. We used some leftover pasta and chopped up some peppers and carrots and other vegetables and used some tuna and boiled eggs to make a delicious lunch. We stood in the shade of the truck or being sheltered by a thorn tree while we had this.
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I am not being as careful as I know I should be about sun protection. Whenever I put on sunblock it immediately gets covered with sand. This creates a very annoying experience and is quite itchy. It also seems to stop me from sweating properly. So I’m not applying sunblock as often as I should. Their result of this is that I have a red nose now. I thought maybe I could get a job as Santa because of my white beard and my red nose and my largish, though shrinking, paunch. On the other hand, maybe I’ll take a bit more care in future.
When we arrived at around 5:00 p.m., the usual village actively took place. We had all the bags of the truck along with sleeping mats etc. We also had the kitchen set up for the evening meal. All this happened in about 10 minutes.
I then went up to see the room I had booked. It was okay. Huge and lots of marble and a gigantic bed and a sofa. And air conditioning. But best of all was the shower. It was brilliant. It had a huge overhead cascade type shower head as well as a conventional one. It was a power shower and there was lots of hot water. I must have stood under it for 20 minutes, blasting the desert off my skin.
Then at 7:00 I rambled back to the truck and had the evening meal. It was pasta with a sort of ratatouille sauce. As hunger is a very good sauce, it was delicious.
I hung around for a while it drinking tea and chatting and helping put the kitchen away and tidy up. Then I rambled back to my room and went to sleep almost immediately because I was so tired.
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