Deep into the Sahara, on a Mauritanian adventure

Call me slow, but it takes me a while to understand that we are embarking on a journey into the Sahara.

We landed at 2.30am in Nouakchott and, after barrelling through the unlit streets of the Mauritanian capital, we snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before, at 7am and still disoriented, we are once more rattling through the dust of the somnolent city. Then we hit the coast, driving onto a wide beach, our senses dazzled by white light bouncing off the Atlantic foam and assaulted by the smell of salt and the shushing of the ocean. We have arrived. But where?

My map says Mauritania. Wedged between Senegal and the disputed territory of Western Sahara on Africa’s north-west coast, four times the size of Britain but with only 5mn people, it is coloured in cartographer’s yellow, sharp against the blue of the Atlantic.

That’s more or less how it appears in real life. Sand to the right, ocean to the left. Our mini-convoy of two Toyota Hilux pick-ups drives at speed up the empty beach, with one set of tyres in the ocean and the other on the compacted sand, seabirds following in our wake. There is something elemental about being where the Sahara runs into the ocean and the ocean into the cavernous sky.

Streams of crabs scuttle out of the water. Boats see-saw on the swell, black cormorants perched like ghostly sailors on their curved hulls. A squadron of pelicans takes off from a sandy spit, flapping low across the water in single-file formation.

Up the coastline, we come to a scattering of clapboard houses with rusting corrugated roofs. The Imraguen, whose name comes from a Berber word meaning “people who fish while walking on the sea”, have been here since the Middle Ages, using dolphins to locate shoals of red mullet in the shallow coastal waters. Traditionally, the Imraguen beat the water with sticks, sending a sonic wave to excite the dolphins, inducing them to drive the mullet towards the shore and into the fishermen’s nets.

When we visit, there are rows of mullet strung up to dry, twinkling in the sun. A man, wrapped entirely in black, shows us orange bottarga — hardened salted fish roe — drying from wooden rafters like a string of holiday decorations. Life is spare. Even the scrawny cat loitering near a crate of fishheads looks hardened by grit and salt.

We turn right from the beach onto higher, softer sand. The ocean, for so long half our vista, recedes, then vanishes altogether. The horizon fills with sand. Within minutes we are stuck and the engine coughs to a halt. Abdoullah Moustapha Houmeide and Amada Diaw, the Mauritanian crew in the front vehicle, dig around the tyres in a whirr of hands and dust. We reverse, rev the engine and then gun over the dune.

It is only after this minor incident — to be repeated innumerable times — that it sinks in: we will spend the next week in the Sahara. The only water we will see from now on, I imagine, is sloshing in the tanks at the back of our pick-up.

Our guides are Rocco and Tommaso Ravà, Italian brothers whose veins run with sand. They grew up in the Sahara with their parents, who packed everything up in the mid-1970s and moved to Niger. From their base in Agadez, they led expeditions through Mauritania, Algeria and Chad.

“My parents were nomads,” says Rocco, who learnt to ride a camel aged six and who had crashed a Land Rover by the time he was 10. As well as Italian, the brothers grew up speaking Chadian Arabic and a smattering of desert languages, from the Toubou of the Tibesti Mountains to the Tamasheq of Tuareg nomads in Niger and Mali.

Their mother homeschooled them. “Lessons lasted two minutes before we ran off into the dunes,” says Rocco. The brothers spent a few months each year at school in Italy. Once, when a schoolmate destroyed Rocco’s Lego, he returned to class the following morning with a Tuareg knife. Revenge was averted by suspension.

Rocco’s first tutorial goes like this. The Sahara is 9mn sq km, roughly the size of China. “The icon is the dune — bullshit!” he snorts. Early western explorers were so taken by fields of dunes that their accounts exaggerated their ubiquity.

In fact, only about a quarter of the Sahara is the pure fine sand of the imagination. The rest is plains of gravel called “reg”, rocky “hamada” plateaus, bulky mountain ranges, salt pans, dry river beds and palm oases. Pasture, not water, is the nomads’ preoccupation. “If they have to be 80 kilometres from water but next to grassland, they’ll choose the grass.”

The expedition has been organised by Will Bolsover, founder of Natural World Safaris, as a no-frills “recce” to test the itinerary’s suitability for his clients, amid a sense of growing interest in the country among travellers. Much of the Sahara is unstable but since late 2021, the UK’s Foreign Office has been gradually softening its warnings against travel to Mauritania — today a large swath, including almost all the coast and the vast majority of our itinerary, is rated “green” (meaning simply “see our advice before travelling”). I must say that, in the hands of the Ravà brothers, who between them have more than 40 years’ experience in the desert, I feel entirely safe. Getting there is becoming easier too: both Royal Air Maroc and Mauritania Airlines are increasing the frequency of flights between Nouakchott and Casablanca, where there are connections to Madrid, Paris, London and Dubai.

That first evening, we camp beneath a crescent-shaped dune to match any cliché. As the sun dips, I clamber up to watch both desert and sky light up in streaks of orange, then red, then purple.

In what becomes a familiar routine, the team sets up camp the moment we arrive, erecting a Bedouin-style tent for cooking and unfolding a heavy dining table and chairs. There are modern tents for Will and me and a green plastic kettle of water for washing.

Though this is meant to be a basic trip — several notches below the level of comfort NWS guests will receive — it is surprisingly cosseted. Our sleeping bags are cushioned by a mattress and meals are first rate: that night we have Italian sausage, homemade vegetable soup and grilled sea bream with Mauritanian hot sauce to keep things lively. I’m here in March, when daytime temperatures are in the mid-20s, though at night I sleep in a woolly hat. The summer months of May to October, when the thermometer can creep up into the 40s, are probably best avoided.

After breakfast, we walk. I stop to take notes and fall behind. When I look up, I scan 360 degrees: scrubby desert in all directions. The others have disappeared. I confess to a moment of panic.

Reunited with the vehicles, we follow a track along an old camel route. At times we slalom as if in the Dakar Rally to avoid getting stuck. Gradually the landscape takes on a tumbleweedy, Midwestern feel.

We are driving parallel to a railway track that runs more than 700km from iron-ore mines in Zouérat to the port of Nouadhibou on the Atlantic coast. Riding the iron-ore train, perched on the black ore, became a brief Instagram sensation, but authorities recently banned it.

Still we want to see the train, which with its 210 wagons is one of the world’s longest. Abdoullah radios through to say it is approaching. We scramble out and squat by the rails, which run like slivers of mercury to the horizon. Silence. A small black dot appears, growing in size until, after many minutes, a yellow locomotive thunders upon us, blaring its horn. A procession of grey wagons grinds, rattles and squeaks past in a blur of dust and steel that lasts several minutes. Rough maths (not mine) suggests the train is 2km long.

We drive on towards Ben Amera, a domed monolith of hulking granite some 600 metres tall. It is second in size only to Australia’s Uluru, with a cracked lower portion that forces us to scrabble over loose rock at the start of our 90-minute ascent in sweltering heat. At the summit, we are rewarded with a God’s-eye vista of the desert, and later spot the train again, crawling like a mechanical caterpillar. As the sun sets, the pyramidal shadow of Ben Amera is projected onto the illuminated sand.

That night, the wind picks up, sending sand fluttering down like snow. Somehow it penetrates the tent, dusting my hair and sleeping bag. Next day, we briefly rejoin a tarmac road, an incongruous sight out here, even if there’s not a single other vehicle to break the spell.

We stop at the town of Choum, where children wanting gifts call after us: “Monsieur, cadeau”. Men wear billowing robes with scarves wrapped around their faces, a style that protects them against sandstorms and the prying eyes of strangers. Tuareg even eat under their all-covering headwear, hiding their mouths from anyone but close associates.

Most of the desert towns have a single dusty street and a biblical feel, with adobe houses and slow-moving donkey carts. In the market, the sand is studded with discarded sheep tails. Hand-painted butchers’ signs depict camels and humpbacked zebu. A tethered goat waits patiently by a blackened barbecue grill.

We pass through a region of canyons and pink ridges, descending to Chinguetti, a medieval trading centre founded in AD777. It is surrounded by a sea of massive dunes. Successive generations have erected defences against an encroaching desert that threatens to smother the town in sand.

We break our routine by staying the night in an auberge of pink stone. There are hot showers and clean sheets, and Senegalese honey with freshly baked bread in the morning. It’s luxurious, but strangely I miss my tent.

In one of Chinguetti’s medieval libraries, Saif Ould Ahmed Mahomed, a caretaker in cream-coloured gloves, pulls out old leather-bound books and spins tall stories. Sitting on the floor, he conjures history and spouts poetry. He tells us tales of a backgammon-style game played by nomads using camel poo as counters — “dry poo” he clarifies — and of a gruesome practice of force-feeding young women for marriage to satisfy a cult of obesity. Sensing our disgust, he retorts that westerners do the same, only voluntarily. “You call it McDonald’s.” He doesn’t bring up slavery, but Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish it — in 1981.

The vehicles climb from Chinguetti into a rocky mountain range, and then down into a white sand valley where we spend a morning walking barefoot over the dunes’ graceful curves. It seems almost sacrilegious to leave footprints in their gently waved surface, but Rocco says they will be gone with the first gust of wind. Footprints in hard-gravel “reg”, by contrast, can remain for decades.

We stop for lunch in an oasis lush with date palms and bubbling with running water, and take a dip in a brackish pond pecking with fish.

We settle back into our routine. I’ve come to understand the effort it takes to keep our caravan on the road — from fixing eggs to fixing flat tyres. There’s a hypnotism about being constantly on the move.

We have one final task: find the last surviving crocodiles of the Sahara in the Guelta of Matmata, a remote oasis. It’s a long drive that ends with a precarious lurch over blackened boulders. Now on foot, we descend through sand and rocks towards the “guelta”, a large natural pool sheltered by steep cliffs. There, lounging at the water’s edge are half a dozen crocodiles, smaller than their Nile cousins, but just as prehistorically intimidating.

We camp above the guelta. To me it feels like the end of the earth. But by morning — and not for the first time — a lone woman trader has wordlessly arrived and spread her beads and bowls on a mat. In the desert, says Rocco, news of strangers travels fast.

On our ninth day, we drive back into Nouakchott, having completed a 1,500km circuit. The beach is crowded with carts and horses and throngs of jostling people, more than we have seen in days.

There’s an expectant buzz as fishing boats, shaped like large canoes and painted in reds and blues, are slapped by the waves one after the other onto the shore, where they disgorge their catch. Our journey into the Sahara is over. We have ended where we started. By the sea.

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