Articles > Rocky Road to Banjul

The queue on the Western Sahara side of the Mauritanian border is five hours long. Two guys from Cornwall wash and wring out their clothes and drape them round their van to dry. I chat to a young couple from Sheffield who’ve travelled and slept in their 2cv for six weeks. Our passports and car documents are being painstakingly processed. There is no cafe, no toilet. People disappear periodically behind a dilapidated wall, watching carefully where they tread.

Suddenly my name is called and I retrieve my papers. There is nothing to keep me here, no one to wait for. I pull out of the queue and head for the border post. The guard checks the stamps and waves me through. ‘Where do I go?’ I ask. Ahead there are no road markings - no road even, just sand. ‘Straight on for four kilometres,’ he says. Mines are scattered across this no-man’s land, remnants of a border war in the 1970s. If I follow other tyre tracks, I’ll be fine, I tell myself.

Only the sound of my engine fills the silence. Around me are rocks, small dunes and the shells of burnt-out cars. Then there are two sets of tyre tracks – one to the left, one to the right. I veer right, into soft sand. In front of me is a dip, where I fear I’ll get stuck as the sand looks thick and loose. I come to a stop and the silence is absolute.

Over a sand dune to the right a man comes running and waving. Instinctively I wind up the window. He knocks on it. ‘Let me in,’ he says. ‘This is four-wheel drive route. I will show you correct way.’ ‘That’s OK, I’ll try the other track,’ I say, and begin to reverse. He runs alongside me, asking to be let in. Ahead a battered car appears and bears down on me. It is a friend of the first man, who gets out and runs alongside him, both pleading with me to stop and let them be my guides. I accelerate backwards to the fork and they give up, vanishing as mysteriously as they appeared.

Slowly I set off in the other direction, dodging jagged grey rocks. They become bigger and more frequent and I have to drive over them. I fear the underside of the car will be ripped apart as the car tosses from side to side. In the mirror I glimpse the 2cv in the distance. I stop, relieved, and wait for the Sheffield couple to overtake so I can follow them. The 2cv clambers confidently over the boulders like a giant insect.

With the Mauritanian border post in sight, the ruts between the rocks become so deep that I loose my nerve and stop. The 2cv is home and dry, but seeing my difficulty, the young man runs back and, on all fours so he can judge the clearance, talks me through the last 50 yards.

We hand in our passports, resigned to another long wait, during which the Cornish guys, in clean clothes, drive up from an entirely different direction, where the road, they said, was quite passable.

After the queue for the passport check, there’s the visa check, the car document check, the queue to change money, the queue to buy insurance and the queue to have your car searched. The offices are made of rough planks lined with cardboard boxes, although one is a small caravan with a British reg, probably abandoned on the rough road.

The customs officer looks grim as he lines up the bottles of wine and beer I bought in Morocco. ‘All for you?’ he asks with disgust. I nod, wondering at the penalty. Alcohol is illegal here. After a long wait, during which I brazen out his ill humour and don’t offer a bribe, he tells me to repack them and I’m free to go.

I spend the night in Nouadhibou, a dusty, windswept slum town. Men in billowing blue robes glide through the dust like ghosts in the wind. Cars are falling apart and have gaping rusty sockets instead of headlights. Few boast number plates. When I get out to enquire where to stay, two people ask to buy my car.

Before I take the new tarmac road through the desert the next morning, the hotel owner warns me of bandits. I decide not to believe him. It’s 470 kilometres to the capital, Nouakchott. ‘Is there anywhere to stop off on the way?’ I ask the garage attendant as I fill up with petrol. ‘Plenty of places,’ he says.

I imagined small villages. All I see through the sandstorm that begins almost as soon as I enter the desert are occasional Bedouin tents with hand-painted wooden signs offering camel’s milk. Wraiths of sand swirl across the tarmac, threatening to reclaim it. The few cars that pass are crammed with heavily turbaned heads. Silhouettes of camels sway in the fog. To pass the time I calculate whether I am likely to run out of petrol. There are jerry cans in the boot but I wonder if I have the strength to lift them unaided and juggle a funnel at the same time.

Smouldering rubbish heaps tell me I have reached the outskirts of the capital. It is grimmer than Nouadhibou. I book into a hostel and clear out the car. I am about to put stale bread in a bin when the owner stops me. ‘We don’t throw bread away,’ he explains. ‘We give it to the animals with milk.’

I befriend the owner, who I thought was an old man but who turns out to be in his late forties, younger than me. He tells me Nouakchott means ‘place of the winds’ and that we are now in the season of the Harmattan, which makes it windier still. It is a poor city, the average annual income is €250, but prices are often as high as Paris. He tells me they have found oil here, but doubts this will improve things for the majority. Three quarters of Mauritania is desert and almost everything has to be imported. Recurring droughts have brought nomads here, forced into shantytowns. I ask him about the rusted hulks of cars driving around. No papers or licences are needed, he tells me.

My room has tie-dyed green curtains on a collapsing rail and a bird nest behind the cracked windowpane. I fill out a form for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea saying I have exported the car. I walk to the post office through streets littered with bits of animal fur and bones. Plastic bags gather in mounds. I post the form through a hole in the wall marked ‘etranger’ and wonder if it will ever arrive.

On the road to Rosso, the border with Senegal, the sand turns redder and there are a few trees. Villages look typically African. Women carry bundles on their heads and some are not veiled. I brake regularly for pigs, long-horned cattle and young camels.

Diama, just north of St Louis, is a quieter place to cross into Senegal than Rosso, I’ve been told. I turn right, following a lake, and hit the worst road yet - a series of potholes linked by a filigree of baked mud. Occasionally the surface becomes like corrugated iron, best taken at an optimal speed that allows the car to almost glide over the small bumps, but risking heavier damage when the potholes suddenly open out again.

I lurch into one and am thrown into the passenger seat, hitting my head off the roof. The car bounces right out and continues as if nothing has happened, but I am shaken. I can’t believe no damage has been done.

I’m in a nature reserve, filled with pelicans, flamingos and migrating birds alighting on water and greenery for the first time since crossing the Sahara, but I cannot lift my eyes from the road.

Senegal bans the import of cars over five years old. A customs officer accompanies those in transit to make sure they leave. Cars doing the Plymouth-Banjul challenge, of which I am part, have been bought for less than €500 and are nearer 20 years old. My VW Scirocco is 17. I link up with other cars doing the challenge and we cross the border in convoy. Formalities take five hours. After a further two hours it is dark and we are still waiting for the customs escort. A couple of cars break loose and I and a dozen others follow. Driving through St Louis in pitch blackness, we narrowly miss pedestrians and donkeys. After a couple of cumbersome u-turns we find the campsite. The four cars that waited for the official escort are already there.

The campsite has laid on food for us and we drink our first legal beers since Morocco. The next day a surly customs official arrives to escort us to the border. He has no car and, as I am the only driver on my own, he sits himself down next to me. We set off leading the convoy. After a few kilometres we’ve lost everybody. The customs official looks worried. In addition, he isn’t sure of the way and we have to stop to ask. I lost my map of West Africa somewhere in Spain and have not been able to buy one since.

Darkness is falling as we near the ugly, sprawling town of Kaolack, still hours from Banjul. On a corner, street children huddle round a fire. Packs of stray dogs prowl between smoking piles of household waste.

The official has radioed through to his colleagues here telling them not to allow the other cars to pass. Some got through before the call came and are on their way to the Gambian border and the rickety ferry that will take them to Banjul. The others wait glumly by the customs post. One car is being towed; its roof has caved in and the back window is gone.

The road ahead into Gambia looks rough. Buses bristling with people rumble through from the opposite direction, sheep tied to the roof racks along with luggage.

My passenger goes into the office. I follow him. His boss is carefully writing out details of all the cars in a logbook. It is a slow process. Volkswagen is written out in full each time. I say I want to go back into Kaolack and find somewhere to stay the night.

The boss ignores me. His underling tells me I must stay with him and lead the convoy into Banjul. ‘It’s too late, I say. I don’t want to drive any more and the road looks bad.’ ‘Then we must impound your car and you must take a taxi into town.’

‘Impound the car?’ I say. ‘I’ve been with you all day and the other cars have been roaming freely. Why can’t I be trusted to drive the car to a hotel?’

He ignores me. I go back to the car to empty a jerry can into the tank, not sure of the distance ahead. The petrol explodes out of the can hitting me in the face and breaking my glasses, which fall to the ground. I’m doused in petrol and half blind.

Having wiped myself down and found my spare glasses, I get in the car and reverse out of the line. ‘Where are you going?’ asks the driver in front. ‘To find a hotel,’ I reply. He gestures towards the few flickering lights of Kaolack. ‘Back to THAT?’ he says.

Passing the customs office I notice the escort’s bag still in the car. I run in with it and dump it on the desk next to the logbook, causing both men to look up. I rev the car and head back into Kaolack.

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