Nouakchott. Mack and I arrive just before midnight and quickly find a nice place called Auberge Sahara (my first encounter with an auberge; very similar to what we call hostel). The owner's wife checked us in. We had to get the big room with 7 other people in it, I run to the bed and fall fast asleep under the mosquito net. Mack takes a shower and declines one of the beds opting to sleep in the comfort of his cargo compartment of his truck/van. I sleep very soundly and wake up around 10:00 to shower and gather myself for my next move. Mack was already up and ready to push on. We exchange emails and a firm handshakes and he drives away. OK now I just need to find a way to get from here to the Senegal border. Easy right? No!
Mauritania is a country without one single ATM, not a one, nada, nowhere in sight. If you ain't gots no cash, then you flat on yo' ....well you know up a creek and all that. All the money that I had, I paid for the auberge and went to food and gas. How the heck am I stuck out here in the middle of the desert (literally) with no means to get anywhere? My Moroccan SIM card doesn't work out here, Mauritania has no place I can buy a new one, besides I don't have money to get one if it did. What to do? Pray is what I did. "Lord please send me an angel of protection, I need the resources to get to the border, please help."
Enter Tiago, a Portuguese living in France with his girlfriend Ellacho. I approach them and ask them did they know how to get to the border from here. They said they were getting a car to take them to the border in an hour for free because they had sold the owner a car for cash and the promise to take them to the border and they would ask if I could hitch a ride. Sidi, the owner, was getting someone else to drive them and said he would charge me 20 Euro to go, plus he was also taking 3 other Frenchmen to the border so it may be a tight squeeze. I told Tiago I had no money, and that I didn't know that the entire country hadn't any ATM's. They agreed to spot me the fare and anything else I needed until we arrived in Senegal. Extremely grateful and cheerful all 7 of us squeeze into this station wagon 7 hours to the border. This time of course I am not complaining about the overcrowding situation and proceed to kill my NBA career dreams by cramming my knees into my chest for hours.
We finally make it to the border and the driver turned out to be a shady character making several side deals with the checkpoint personnel to extort cash out of us, even threatening at one point to turn around if we didn't pay (we called his bluff to his grief). But we do make it to the border and the driver dumps us off and drives away. Middle of the night, bugs crawling all over me, our destination miles from here. And he leaves us. The border people ask for a little compensation too and once we paid they were all smiles and happy. It turned a bit ugly when it was time to go. Of course we were at a disadvantage being that it was the middle of the night. They brought a few cars to pick us up and take us to St. Louis the nearest town for us to get a hotel and rest the night, but they wanted some outrageous per person fee to do so. I am completely silent while all of this is going on because I don't' understand a word, just the tone. The three Frenchmen relent and scurry off into the night, while the three of us are left sitting. Tiago hangs his head in shame saying that they wont speak to him anymore and that maybe he shouldn't have been so stubborn in his position. Now we have no way to get to St. Louis and we are stuck here in the middle of nowhere.
I say a prayer and then say to Tiago not to worry because positive always wins over anything negative. Let us remain positive and we will get out of here real soon. Man, the power of prayer and positive thinking! Like clockwork a Frenchman on his way to Dakar through St. Louis pulls into the border agrees to take us door-to-door and make sure we were OK. We make the 32 KM quickly and check into an auberge for the night.
I spend a couple of days in St. Louis before saying farewell to my new friends and head south 5 hours to Dakar. While in Dakar, I stretch out a couple days before heading to the village of Bambey to volunteer at a school. I use the time to explore this city. I meet a guy who willingly takes me around to all the important places of the city, including the museums and political buildings. We then go over to Goree Island, one of West Africa's major ports during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I have been to such slave dungeons before and it is never easy to be in a place that was the source of so much pain and human suffering. The next day my guide invites me to go to Lac Rose a red colored lake on the outskirts of the city. I agree and he introduces me to his friend that lives in Germany and brings students each year to Senegal to learn from its culture. Malek was a very nice Senegalese man who had limitless conversation and curiosity about me and my goals in Africa. Turns out, he knows of another way in Bambey that I can help out and he was bringing his students there in a few days to do the same. He paid for everyone's lunch and we ate dinner that night at his home in the small village of Rusfisque. During dinner I interacted with the 10 German students he brought and we had great chats about life and the state of the world. I read them poetry and they all wanted my autograph as though I were a famous poet or something (maybe I am and don't know it yet).
Senegal is the fourth country that I have entered into on this journey to South Africa and unfortunately it may be my last. It is amazing to me that no matter how grand your goals are, how much you prepare or how strong your will and determination, the smallest, tiniest, little things can bring your journey, any journey to a complete stop.....
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