Carlos Perez Marin

JOURNAL

DAY 00

After change of plans, I’m in Chinguetti after 2 days waiting for the camel drivers. I had to skip the initial trip between Tichitt and Ouadane because one of the nomads (from the Nemadis tribe) who was coming, had to stay with his mother who had just had COVID. Thanks to Zaida, she found someone to take me from Chinguetti to Tichitt, but since the guide could not find quickly the 4 camels we needed, the fact that I was already in a bit of a hurry, since the artists of Caravane Ouadane will be in Ouadane on the 6th, and because the trip to Tichitt required 20 days, we decided to go to Tidjikja. For this trip, 2 camels and 13 days were enough. With me, there will be only one person, NEFAA. Although normally 3 people are always needed on this kind of trip, in case someone gets sick one person stays while the third one goes to get some help. This time, with the satellite phone that Zaida lent me, we can be just two. It will be like QAFILA OULA.

It’s a pity but in the desert, it’s the way it is, I know that one day I will come to Tichitt, especially after what Abdou (from the hostel where I am waiting for the departure) told me about the nomadic camps not far from Tichitt where he goes every year with his theatre group.

At least I can visit Chinguetti quietly, without tourists and see how they work the land in the palm grove.

And here I am, once again, on one of the caravan routes...

As usual, I asked myself the same question the days before departure:

What am I doing here?

I could be quietly at home, but from the start I felt privileged to be able to make a new "caravan". Moreover, the fact of doing it with only one guide, Nefaa, makes it more interesting, closer to what nomads usually do. We had two camels and they were not too loaded, a lot of water, no tent (Nefaa told me that even if it was windy there were other ways to protect ourselves...); maybe it's my luggage which was a bit excessive because of the food I bought in Nouakchott and which was for three people and 20 days, while now we were 2 and we expected to arrive in Tidjikja in 13 days. I told Nefaa that either we give the nomads we will cross what we don't need or he keeps everything else for himself and his family.

We left Chinguetti at 7:20 and practically walked through town across the river. It was a thrill to walk around the ancient city.

No wind, not too much heat (today the forecast predicted 32 °C), but we had to face the dunes. For a year I have been mentally preparing myself for this trip. My memories during Beyond Qafila Thania between M’hamid and Tissint, were not very good because of the sand and the dunes. For Mauritania I said to myself: you go there, it doesn't matter if you walk on pebbles, on stones or on sand. I had even looked on Google Maps and Bing and I had the impression there was sand but not a lot of dunes, and on top of that, small. Leaving the town we saw that, but an hour later, I split a sand sea with big waves, moreover, Nefaa explained to me that at some point we had to cross them. At least, I was able to enjoy the silence from the beginning, nothing compared to M’hamid and Merzouga. No traces of 4x4 or bivouacs.

After 2 hours of walking, we arrived in a kind of feija (geographical spaces similar to valleys that protect from the wind and therefore the sand, the passing of nomads -NA) but instead of having mountains on both sides, we had dunes. In the middle, rocks and stones, brown, white, black, gray... They were microlandscapes but a little sinister because of the dead talhas (Acacia tortilis). Sometimes it looked like a lake with small islands, but the water, represented by the sand, rose up the sides to give rise to mountains.

I was looking for a passage between the dunes, a gorge or foum, but (I found) nothing. And then Nefaa headed for the "mountains", climbing. A little higher, the view over the feija was magnificent, but we still had to climb. The image of Qafila Rabiaa's first day came to me, but it is true that here the height was not so high, on the other hand, walking on the sand was much harder. It was more like mountaineering and in addition, on snow. Fortunately Nefaa told me that after the dunes we were going to come across a small oasis, with some water. I thought we were going to cross nothing, neither trees nor oases, but indeed, at the top of the dunes, a small oasis with a few houses was just below. People lived there in mud constructions with double pitched roofs, plus "cabins".

We stopped in the shade of an acacia tree to rest and eat. It's Nefaa who wants to take care of the cooking and that's the good thing, he does it for himself, not for a tourist.

According to Nefaa we will always walk 4 hours in the morning, we will stop to have some rest and eat and then we will do between 1 and 2 hours more. This morning we did 13 km in 3h26 (in town in 3h30 you can do 17.5 km), a bit slow pace but crossing the sandy mountain range made us slow down. In short, I think we will do almost 25 km every day and if we do it during the 13 days planned, we should do a total of 325 km. For the return he will need 7 days, almost half of the time; I saw only one saddle on one of the camels and that's because he'll be riding a camel all the way back. I told him that we could have taken 2 saddles and gone further, also doing 13 days but until Tichitt, for that we would need a third beast (which was planned at the beginning). In any case, I could not have done the whole trip on a camel, after the experience of doing 22 km during the first trip to Ouadane, my buttocks were not going to resist it... But if at one point I  can't anymore, it is certain that I will not be ashamed to get on the camel, especially since I have trained to walk 22-24 km but in town, without dunes. We'll see...

After having to search for the camels for 40 minutes, we resumed walking at 16:10. We stopped 1h35 later, doing 5.84 km. In total 5h and almost 19 km. The last hours of walking are always the most difficult because of fatigue and especially the sun. In this qafila we had the south in front of us almost all the time, which is good at the end of the day.

This first day was magnificent. On the way we met 3 camels who accompanied us, but it was they who showed us the way. And then there was the river of sand!

In the morning I reflected on the landscape, with the valleys or feijas “built” with sand. It was a topography or rather a geography of sand. Regardless, before stopping to sleep we followed the course of a river of sand, white sand, bounded by larger, orange-coloured dunes. During this walk on the banks of the river, I kept thinking, "is this a geography or a world where everything was made of sand?". Sometimes I felt like I was in a virtual world, like a video game. This leads me to another hypothesis:

am I on another planet?

I also thought about the friends I will meet in Ouadane, how am I going to explain this feeling of being in another world? How many of them are going to want to have this experience in the coming year? I already knew it but today I saw it, the desert of Mauritania is a real desert and not because of an image closer to the idea of ​​a desert where there is only sand, there are a lot of other things, even if it's still sand...

Nefaa decided to stop us before we got to 20-22 km, but according to him, this area has talhas (6 or 7), plants that like camels and we are surrounded by hills of sand. From here there will be no food for the camels, at least for the next few kilometres.

While Nefaa shows me how to bake bread (tomorrow I will do it, he told me), night is falling and I am impatient to see the stars, despite the moon which is still big enough to spoil me the evening. It will be inevitable to think of my friends Laila, Ahmed and Driss and look for the Plough...

It's amazing, the Milky Way appeared even before the light disappeared from the horizon.

I told myself that the 3 nights spent at Chinguetti would help me to adapt, especially, to the night climate,  since I slept in the hut, but sleeping in the middle of the desert, it is completely different. As usual, I made a mistake and put on too many clothes, as a result, I was hot and didn't sleep well. We went to bed when the moon rose, when we could no longer see the stars, but so far I've seen 4 shooting stars, plus the Milky Way.

I woke up several times and saw the effect of the moon, the same colour and tone for the sand and for the sky, if it wasn't for the plants, it seemed like I was in a ball (without gravity -AN). The most interesting thing was when I opened my eyes, lying on  my side, because the plants marked the horizon but this time vertically.

For breakfast I only had cookies with tea. Nefaa finished yesterday's dinner, which I didn't like too much. He bakes very good bread and then he puts everything in a kind of soup with water and the pieces of dried camel meat which he had in a bag that looks more like earth and wood. Tonight I'm going to save some bread for breakfast...

We started at 7:20 and Nefaa told me that after 2h the dunes will be finished.

The first part was sand, gentle slopes with some rocks and talhas. 1h30 later, the dunes  started to break apart, leaving black terrain between them. The contrast was very beautiful. There was black gravel on the sand but also black pebbles, and beige, as if someone had arranged them as an art installation. The same goes for dune plants and their roots. Sometimes they seemed like traps, sometimes installations made on the sand thanks to the movement caused by the wind (I thought of Mahdaoui's work with the wind and the sheet in the oasis during Caravane Tighmert 2016). Then the dunes disappeared and we were walking only on gravel, with stones (since the morning) a little strange, with vacuum, as if they came from a volcano. I took 2 and watched them, from time to time, waiting for an insect to come out of a hole or for the pebbles to come to life... if we were ever in a sci-fi movie.

We saw for the first time mountains, those that host the network of oases of Adrar, mountains where there is water. Nefaa told me that today and tomorrow we will not see wells, we will have to approach the mountains precisely. For this reason he told me that normally the caravans do not leave Ouadane or Chinguetti directly to Oualata, because the wells are near Tichitt. The path that was the most frequented was ours, heading towards Tidjikja and before arriving there, heading towards Tichitt and then Oualata.

Because of the wells, and having to wait until the 4th day, Nefaa took almost 80 l (of water) with us. We could almost do the whole trip without needing more, because normally I drink 4 l per day (well water but with a filter). That’s a big change, not drinking mineral water allows me to drink whenever I want, without worrying about ending it (mineral water).

About the water, I don't know why when I was tired after 3 hours of walking, I thought about my training course in Benitez (Ceuta), next to the strait, and then also, at Las Canteras beach, in Las Palmas, where I would like to swim before taking my flight back to Malaga. By the way, I struggled to finish the 4th hour this morning...

Relationship between physics, math and geology; 5 dunes, of the same size and shape and separated the same distance.

After 3h, there were no more dunes but no more trees, I didn't know where we were going to stop for lunch. After 3h30, a depression in the terrain showed us a “forest” of talhas long before the mountains. Nefaa was able to locate a fairly large talha, with shade, but he was 1-2 km away.

Once again, Nefaa was right, when leaving (16:09) he told me that we were going to sleep in a place not too far but not too close (finally in 1h20), a place with talhas (acacias) where camels could eat.

We were tired but we did 13 min per km instead of 16 like yesterday. At least it was not hot, we had a breeze, clouds were hiding the sun, the terrain was flat and there was only gravel (with a bit of sand and rocks). Despite the ease, my ankles were very sensitive when putting my feet between the stones and I had to be very careful.

Tomorrow, it is possible that we will pass between 2 mountains in a geography closer to the one I knew in Morocco.

We'll see what we do with the food. With the three days of waiting in Chinguetti we had to throw away half of the vegetables and I am afraid that the last days we will eat only dried camel meat. However, if we ever find nomads, we will be able to buy and eat a goat, but since the beginning we have seen no one, nor heard of cars or motorcycles, which is a real luxury.

Credit videos, pictures, texts and drawings: Carlos Perez Marin

Cameras: iPhone XS Max and Leica M6 (Ilford FPE Plus 125)