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Somehow we got the idea to do more hitch-hiking. I've done a lot in the past and it worked pretty good with the two of use, so we thought it would be a good idea to base an entire trip on it. So for a destination I thought hitch-hiking around the Sahara sounded like a pretty good idea. I had never been to Africa, but have seen plenty of desert. Somehow deserts were a part of every trip I have ever done, but never the mother of all deserts. We started by joining my parents for part of their way south to Southern France. An opportunity to spend some time with them as I've been overseas for most of the time I have been out of home.
Mum and Dad and the dog.
A typical French town
We were dropped of just outside Toulouse and managed to get our first ride within 5 minutes. I don't think we waiter for more than 20 minutes on this entire trip.
It took us three rides to get to the outskirts of Barcelona where we hung our hammocks in the trees next to a service station. The next day we took a ride into town.
Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia
Camp Nou. A palace of football.
Getting out of a large town such as Barcelona proved tricky. Getting picked up on suburban on-ramps even trickier.
We headed straight for Madrid.
Royal Palace
We took a train to the outskirts this time.
The train station is more like a jungle.
We managed to get to Cadiz pretty quickly. They must have had some sort of festival on as we arrived. A bit surreal.
You see a lot of these littered around the countryside.
Cadiz is a gorgeous little town. A complete surprise to us.
Cadiz Cathedral
The edge of the old town. The longest oldest continuously-inhabited city in the Iberian Peninsula.
We thought we would have to take the ferry from Gibraltar. Not that I would need and excuse to visit that place.
The gated entry. Originally the only way in other than by sea.
The streets of Gibraltar. Another surreal place. A lot of poms with Spanish first names, and bobbies on the streets with a Spanish flavour.
We were advised that the ferry's now only leave from Algeciras which is only about 20 minutes walk.
Africa in the distance.
We didn't hang around Tanger for more than a night. This trips wasn't going to be about hanging about.
Snail soup anyone?
Mackers in Casablanca. We arrived only a few days after the bombing of an internet cafe. The bloke was browsing an extremist Islamist site just before and was told not to by the owner. Extremism is not excepted in the vast majority of the Muslim world either, contrary to popular belief.
We made our way to Marrakesh and found the beauty of the Atlas mountains staggering.
The coffee is great in Morocco.
We traded our backpacks for roll bags in Spain. It was going to be a road trip, right?
We were picked up by a French engineer working on roads project who drove us to the coast of Essaouira where he lived. He was super nice and let us stay at his house and dropped us off at the beach and picked us up and everything. He had some interesting pets as well.
A desolate desert town somewhere in the Western Sahara.
Couldn't wait to get out of there.
There are a few of these about.
In Dakhla we met a friendly local who helped both us and his French mates out to cross the border with Mauritania. Us, because there is no transport across this treacherous bit of the desert covered in soft sand dunes. And his mate because along this bit with no road you need all the hands on your deck you can find. The Frenchies were with 2 cars on their way to Burkina Faso. Interestingly we heard that 2 days ago there was an attempted coup in Mauritania with some tanks rolling into the capital. Luckily for us the government didn't get overthrown, and managed to stabilize things quickly.
The border post of Morocco.
No man's land.
The Mauritanian border post.
A bloke's place along the way.
We were dropped of in Nouadhibou just over the border. We read about this mining train which also gets used for free transport. It would take us to a town in the middle of the desert where we would be able to find transport further south.
Mining train track.
Mining train.
Iron ore train carts.
Re-fuelling station.
After 18 hours spent on one of those carts.
The end of the line. Not our intended station as we missed our stop in the night.
We didn't really have any idea where we were, only that we weren't where we wanted to be. On top of that we couldn't understand why the few local fellas were climbing from cart to cart all the way to the last cart. We simply climbed out of our cart and dragged our bags through the sand. Those bags aren't as good once the pavement ends. Anyway, at the end of the train we noticed a sign. It said: 'Danger! Mines' !!!!! We freaked out a bit having just walked and dragged our bags through a mine field. But not much we can do about that now.
Luckily for us there were some cars waiting to pick up stragglers. So we jumped on it and found it drove us to a place with some white people hanging around. Turnout they were professional people like geologist and engineers involved in the mine. They were actually on their way out of there to the capitol of Nouakchott. We started talking to one of them who turned out to be a Kiwi. He kindly helped us getting on the booked out plane. Money talks right.
Our plane out of there waiting on the desert runway.
The street of Nouakchott, some would say taken over by the deserts sand.
No tanks but plenty of donkeys.
Obviously there wasn't much of a reason to hang around, so we quickly made our way to Saint-Louis in Senegal. Officially Mars needed a visa because of her Australian passport, but amazingly after a bit of bickering with the immigration officer, they let her in illegally without a visa or even a stamp in her passport! Oh the troubles that laid ahead getting back out of the country.
Saint-Louis
Actually, we left Senegal pretty easily. A bit of arguing and they let us through. That didn't mean that the Gambians were going to accept us without a neighbouring country's exit stamp. But for the small fee of 3 coca-cola's for his colleagues he was willing to stamp us into the former English colony of The Gambia. Bordered in it's entirety by Senegal with a bit of coast on the Atlantic Ocean.
The beaches of The Gambia.
Our travel plans had to be abandoned here. We gave it a good shot, but the humidity meant that we simply couldn't carry sufficient water for us to cope with our bodies shedding this water. It was oozing out of our skin.
