This story begins early this week when we had packed up our camp under the lighthouse at Cap Blanc and headed back to the city to refuel for the 400km trip to Dahkla in Morocco’s Western Sahara.

The border formalities on the Mauritanian side went smoothly but, once we had crossed the rocky 4km no-man’s-land between the two countries, we realised that the game had changed.

Sniffer dogs patrolled the carpark while we joined a bunch of nervous arab travellers thronging outside the passport control, handed in our documents and waited for the gruff border guards to shout our names.

Kingsley Holgate, who we travelled with in Benin, had been denied visas by the Moroccan embassy in Dakar so his son, Ross, had to fly back to Pretoria to get for the group. When I was back in Johannesburg in December I made sure to get mine in South Africa.

Lurks and Stone, however, were switching to their brand new British and German passports for Morocco because Europeans can enter the country freely. Incidently, so can all Africans except South Africans: we pay the price for our government’s support for the separatist Polisario in the Western Sahara.

The fact that the passports had no Mauritanian exit stamps meant that the South African passports had to be pulled out. This, of course, was too much for the border official who promptly disallowed us from entering the country.

Back to the carrefour for us!

Thankfully the Mauritanians let us back in on the new passports and we retreated back to Noudhibou to make a new plan.

We’re going to try again in the next day or two – wish us luck!

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Great Ideas from North Africa

We wrote a post a few months ago about cool things we saw on the trip. How about Rose and Michel from Belgium’s power solutions below?

That’s a wind-generator above their massive truck and a solar panel down below. Between the two they reckon they power everything they need: laptop, water pumps, chargers and a spare battery. Crazy stuff!