rory + stephs travels: Mauritania

We decided to follow the advise of various travellers who had been there before and to avoid the border crossing at Rosso. It is renown for being a painful experience and officials are said to be generally on the corrupt side. Instead we went via the Diama Dam about 40 km north of Saint Louis and hence also much closer than Rosso.

Because we thought this border crossing would be smooth and effortless we had taken our time with breakfast and a blog update that morning. It was about 11 am by the time we arrived at the Senegalese side of the border.

First stop customs. This took less than a minute as all we had to do was to return the temporary import documents for the bikes. The officials couldn't even be bothered to have a closer look at the bikes such as chassis and the likes. With customs done I headed over to the Police officer to get our Passports stamped before heading over to the Mauritanian side. This is where the (at this stage of the trip) unbelievable thing happened. The officer insisted I had to pay 10 Euro per person for the usual (!) registration of our details and stamping our Passports. Having crossed 9 borders previous to this one we hadn't once been asked for any money and it was quite obvious to us that this dude was looking to fill his pockets. Especially after I explained that I didn't understand and repeatedly asked him calm and politely what this fee was for. He came up with lame excuses and none of them offered a real explanation. At some stage he got louder saying I was complicating things and not showing him respect. Stay calm, stay calm. Rory eventually got in on the game and we both insisted that we had no money to give, which is somewhat true as we certainly didn't have any Euros on us. This whole thing went on for about an hour. We even asked the officer where we could pitch our tent as we were obviously not going anywhere. Eventually he gave in and made up stories of his generousity as he was going to pay the "fees"for both of us out of his own pocket. Thank you so much!

Good thing we had just saved ourselves 20 EUR as we were now faced with having to pay outrageous 8000 CFA (roughly 13 EUR) just to cross a silly 100 m long bridge across the dam. We had an amazing time in Senegal. Both people and country have been beautiful. Could have done without the last experience though. Or maybe that just rounded the collection of experiences of our trip up and made it complete :)

Crossing into Mauritania was easy. We even got invited to join the officials at their lunch break which looked like chicken that had been freshly killed and prepared inside their offices. Err, no, but thank you :) One of the customs officers upon realising that I am a woman offered a broad smile, thumbs up and tapped me on the shoulder. Nice first impressions of a very muslim country!