It was a long 550km stage today from Dakar to Niokolo Koba national park. The road was tarmac all the way to the NP entrance, but in some places with such huge potholes, it was worse than offroad driving. Imagine 20-30cm deep holes covering the whole width of the road and trucks, cars, buses, donkeys, goats, bycicles trying to go around them in creative ways.

We have changed our minds about Senegal and Senegalese people today. The farther you are from the coast, the more friendly the people are, there is no harrassing and aggressive begging for cadeau here.

The national park we are in tonight is Senegal’s biggest with more than 900,000 hectares and lots of gazelles, monkeys, hippos, and crocodiles. Our guide Musa told us there are even lions and elephants, but “so few, you would have to stay for 2 years to spot them”. I tend to belive even two years would not be enough since the number of lions and elephants is zero, but this is my personal view only. We will see tomorrow, we are going on an animal watching trip at 7am.

We left at 5am today to get to the border and to Dakar as early as possible. Everything went well until we passed the Moroccan exit checkpoints and Senegalese border control. But then at Senegalese customs we were facing Africa at its best again: there was one single guy preparing the car documents, taking approx. 15 minutes per car. Extrapolate yourself how long that takes for 177 cars… We were lucky to have been one of the first cars, but some of the teams are probably still there waiting for the guy to manually copy all the data of driving licenses, car registrations, and passports into a checkered notebook.

The landscape in Southern Mauritania is changing very quickly from desert to savannah, and there is a huge fertile area at both sides of the Senegal river. The Senegalese seem to be much more open and accessible than the  Mauritanians, but also much more persistent in begging and requesting petit cadeau. We also had two harsh encounters with the police, once for not flashing the warning lights when stopped by the police (which would be OK, but the reaction of the cop when he saw that I successfully warned the other teams via CB radio clearly showed that he was only after short term money), the second time for overtaking in the city (which we were told is forbidden in Senegal, hehe). At the end we did not pay anything, but it took some time to discuss with the sly and arrogant guys.

Due to the brutal traffic around Dakar we only arrived in the evening there, just in time to have dinner with our colleague Xavier who has recently moved to Dakar. We are skipping the official camp today and spend the night at Xavier’s place, with private shower, coffee, etc.

Today supposed to be a rest day with only 150km to drive, but we missed the low tide and had to drive in deep sand on the beach, which, together with the week cooling of the Beast, was kind of exhausting (for the Beast and for us). In Nouakchott (the capital of Mauritania) our first goal was “car parts city”, a suburb of garages and used parts dealers. Of course all of them knew how to repair our coolant tank, or they knew somebody who knew, or they knew somebody who knew somebody else who knew where to get a spare part. It was a real African experience. Finally a young boy was showing us a backyard out of town with some rusty skeletons of Nissan Patrols, and one of them still had the tank. Then came the price negotiation, which took equally long. We managed to reduce the price to ~17 Euros plus a t-shirt, two torches, some ballpoint pens, and we also traded in our compressed air horn (Michal is really sad about that, his favorite pastime was to blow it inside the car, but the rest of the team is happy to survive the trip without serious hearing damage).

There was not too much time left to have a look at Nouakchott, we found a street market and spent most of the time around that place.

Chippendale No. 2: WE ARE SORRY, THIS PICTURE HAS BEEN AUTOMATICALLY REMOVED BY PARENTAL CONTROL