The best stage of the Bamako 2013 yet! 350 kilometers (including a few extra due to getting lost) on dirt tracks and across the savannah as the crow flies. No GPS coordinates, we had to find places and people by their name. That was a lot of fun with locals who don’t speak any language but that of their own tribe and who sometimes don’t even know the name of the village they live in. Nevertheless we collected almost all the points and should catch up a little bit in the race ranking now.

We saw rabbits, squirrels, lots of birds, and even more cattle. I was surprised how many cows there are in Senegal.

Tomorrow we will enter the Niokolo Koba national park, we hope to see some bigger mammals there.

Despite bribing Mauritanian border control, customs, as well as the captain of the ferry, it took us 8 hours to exit from Mauritania, cross the Senegal river, and to enter into Senegal.

Our passports were collected and taken to ??? (no idea where and for what) several times by strange looking not really trustworthy guys, once they were returned by throwing them on the ground. Pick your own. We all found ours except Milos. After some discussion we learned that his passport was not accidentially taken by somebody else, but there was something wrong with it. We had to go to the border control officer who explained us that his visa was not valid. He asked where Milos got it (this he could have read from the visa too) and then explained that he has never seen such a visa before and that he suspected it was a fake. Finally he released us, we did not even have to give him cadeau. Lesson learned: you can enter Mauritania with a “fake” visa without any problem, but leaving it is difficult.

By that time we had been waiting for 4 hours and I was charging laptop, GPS, cameras etc. while the engine was not running. When our ferry arrived (of course one of the two ferries was out of order), cars from 3 queues started to chase the few places on it, but Baby Beast’s battery was empty. If jump starting a car was an olympic discipline, we’d be gold medalists now, in around 30 seconds we found the banana box with the jump leads, started the engine, and returned everything into the trunk.

The mess continued on the other side of the river. The ferry has not reached the port yet, children jumped over and started to agressively ask for cadeau. We had to pay 20 EUR per car for a piece of paper with the car’s registration number and the name of the registration holder on it (handwritten) and then queue in front of a building to get our passports. Inside the building there were 3 border control guys sitting at a table. On one side of the table there was a big pile of passports. On the other side there as a big black book. One of the guys was drawing lines into the book with a ruler. The second guy handed him our passports one by one and they copied all our personal data into the black book. The 3rd guy was watching the scene but did not do anything meaningful. The whole procedure took around 1 minute per passport. We were 300 people there…

Some of the teams did not get their handwritten car papers, they were told to wait until tomorrow.
Once we had our passports and car papers back, at 9pm, we were allowed to leave. We paid for parking (!!!) and then the gates were opened. Nobody checked our passports nor the car papers. We could have entered Senegal without documents or could have smuggled anybody into the country. Crazy.

The only positive experience of the border crossing was one young boy from Mali who got stuck at the border because he did not have enough money for the Mauritanian visa. He did not ask for cadeau (like the other 100 boys around) but offered to wash our car for 1000CFA (=1.5 EUR). Baby Beast is shining like new now, and I gave the boy 2000CFA for his perfect service.

The camp was another 100km away, along a narrow potholed road with plenty of unlit objects (garbage, broken down cars, donkeys, and last but not least all the children of the villages). Welcome to sub-saharan Africa!

We are waiting for the ferry to take us across the Senegal river. The capacity of the ferry is around 10 cars and one trip takes around one hour. Guess how long we will wait here…
In the meantime the first car that did the racing route arrived. That must have been the hardest Budapest-Bamako stage ever. Hundreds of kilometers of sand dunes followed by a dry riverbed where the teams had to build their own bridges from rocks to cross.
One Czech team had to abandon a 100,000 EUR Porsche Cayenne in the dunes.

We had a pleasant drive from Nouakchott to the Senegalese border today, and since there was no army “protecting” us, we could even make a short detour into the dunes. Baby Beast is behaving well in sand, if the tires are deflated to around 0.8 bars, it is a lot of fun to jump over the dunes.

Except from slightly 😉 misaligned front wheels, a cracked windscreen, and the loss of synchronization of the second gear, everything is OK.

In contrast, Pajero is seriously sick, its frame is cracked, the fuel pump is leaking (covering the whole engine in a thick layer of diesel and sand), and the clutch we replaced in Zagora is slipping again. The next town to get it repaired is Tambacounda, 400km on dirt roads. Cross your fingers that we make it there.

Hooray, the queue has moved by 10 meters. From here we can see the river already. The Senegal is a slowly moving 1km wide river, the water is surprisingly more green than brown. Nice to see water, trees, and birds again. We will be enjoying this sight for several hours now….