Km count: 0
Poulet yassa count: 1 (YUM – hopefully to be continued in Mali and then Senegal)
Refusal of entry to Mauritania: 1 (Tom)
Minutes stayed at Mauritanian hip-hop concert: 40
After sorting out our visas in the morning, we met back at the campsite with the guide, Sidi who had suggested that we try some Mauritanian food for lunch at one of his favourite places. After a short taxi ride, we arrived on a residential street and went into one of the houses. The lady who lives there, who is half Senegalese and half Mauritanian, runs a small informal restaurant from her kitchen and welcomes her neighbours and other local people into her living room to enjoy her food.
Jon and Andy at the 'restaurant'
Arriving there early as we did, we opted to sit on the floor for our meal and immediately made of choice between the dishes on offer – tiedboudjienne (fried fish with spices and tomato sauce with rice) or yassa poulet (chicken with onions in a thick gravy with rice). I had read about both dishes, which are commonly found in Senegal and opted for the yassa poulet at the bargain price of 500 UM (£1.50). While waiting we sipped bissap and baobab juices, made from fruits and seeds of local trees and plants. The bissap is similar to the hibiscus water that you find in Central America and was my personal favourite! When the food eventually came it was delicious – probably the best we have had on the trip. More than anything it was a welcome break from the camp food that we have been having and really great to try some local dishes rather than the veggie chillis and pastas that we have been making ourselves. By the time we went to leave, there was a queue of people, some of whom had brought their own bowls waiting for their orders.
In the afternoon, we headed 5km away to the coast to see the much-vaunted fish market. By the time we arrived (4pm) it was a hive of activity with fishing boats returning to shore and stalls filling up with fresh catches. The varying techniques of getting the boats to and from the sea all seemed extremely time consuming and hard physical labour – some involved pivoting the boat on alternate sides to gradually inch it up the sand, others used logs to roll the boats and chanted or sung as they pushed.
Pushing boats back onto the beach
As a country, the Mauritanian population is a mixture of Arabic and black Africans, both of which contain several tribes. Walking around the streets of Nouakchott, and indeed Nouadhibou a couple of days ago, you can see that Mauritania is like a transition country between the Arabic North Africa that we saw in Morocco and Western Sahara and the predominantly black Sub-Saharan Africa that we will expect to see in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. However, at the fish market, there was no such diversity – the workforce seemed to be, without exception, made up of black Africans. Whether this was just a coincidence or representative of the fact that the society remains hierarchical in nature with black Mauritanians treated as second-class citizens, I don’t know. But the fish market was the first place that I really noticed it.
On Thursday evening we had decided to go along to a free event that was being held as part of Nouakchott’s annual Arts Festival. At around 9:30pm when we had finished our mountains of cous cous for dinner, we headed off in taxis to the hip hop concert which was held on the outskirts of town in a large field. There is currently an imposed curfew of 12 midnight in effect in Nouakchott while the president is out of the country and for this reason, and to avoid spending the night in jail, we were planning to leave the concert in plenty of time to return to the campsite by 11:45pm.
The venue was quite full, given that the city is not huge. Unsurprisingly we drew quite substantial attention from the crowd, partly because we were a group of 6 girls (plus Sidi and Jon) and our arrival had probably increased the number of girls at the concert by 100%. Also, although we were dressed conservatively by our standards, we were definitely the only girls in the place who so much as moved to the music. So within 10 minutes we were absolutely surrounded with people who were mostly just curious about us and stood there staring, not saying a word. Then when a couple more gregarious of them heard that we could speak French the “Are you married?”, “ Will you give me your address?” questions started, a few teenage boys started throwing rocks at the backs of a few of the girls and it became a little bit more uncomfortable. Its worth pointing out that we really weren’t doing anything in particular to draw attention to ourselves – apart from being who we are – and we certainly weren’t trying out our Dirty Dancing moves. The fact is that we aroused curiosity from members of the audience who probably don’t see tourists all that much and especially at their local events. Anyway, we didn’t allow it to escalate into anything more problematic and Sidi and Jon quickly shepherded us towards the back of the crowd so that we could escape the more probing questions and make our way home in time for the curfew.
After another 3 rounds of Mauritanian tea (I’m beginning to really like it!) we eventually got to bed round 2am (I did tell you it was a long process!) and had a good sleep before our early start to head South towards the Malian border and National Parks.
PS: Tom, our leader was supposed to arrive back with us today in Nouakchott. We had even sent him a wish list of things we’d like to have from home (baby wipes, chorizo and some books). Unfortunately we got news this afternoon that he landed in Nouakchott only to be turned away for having no visa. These visas are really doing us no favours so far… Hopefully he’ll be with us in the next 5 days or so as we head towards Bamako, the Malian capital city to meet our guide Matt for the second half of the trip. We await news from Tom about when we can expect to finally see him again!
