Category Archives: Mauritania

I like a nice cup of tea in the morning…

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Making the tea in the desert. Sahara Desert, Mauritania, West Africa

Making the tea in the desert. Sahara Desert, Mauritania, West Africa

This is a photograph taken in the morning with my hired cameleer and guide making breakfast and pouring tea.

This was a week long camel trek between two remote towns in the Mauritanian desert. A very relaxing experience….and the tea was delicious…If anyone is looking for a relaxing couple of weeks…fly to Atar in Mauritania from Paris and get to chinguetti…from there just hire a guide and a couple of camels and walk back to Atar…..Travel writers try to make this kind of thing sound arduous and difficult…but it is really pleasant and relaxing.

My guide baked the bread that you can see by burying it in the sand under hot coals and leaving it over night… in the morning, perfect bread!

Bike on a camel. Sahara desert, Mauritania.

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Bicycle strapped to the back of a camel. Sahara Desert, Mauritania, West Africa

Bicycle strapped to the back of a camel. Sahara Desert, Mauritania, West Africa

After a one way visit to Chinguetti by bicycle, I hired three camels and a guide so that I could walk back across the sand dunes of the Sahara.

Chinguetti is an ancient desert trading city that once was. Today it is a fading town, beating back the desert sands as best it can. It was also a place for pilgrims to stop and gather on their way to Mecca.

The old trade routes were almost entirely shut down during the period of European colonisation as the Europeans effectively shut the internal trade routes and replaced them with their own routes via roads and railways, which all pointed to the coast.

So today its the tourist trade that keeps the traditional old routes alive. I am actually on a well worn trade route, that has been used for many centuries for the transportation of tradeable goods.