2800 miles - continued

Typing this on the road so please excuse any typos (I've already seen a few in previous entries!) I'll continue from where I was before.

A big argument is not what you want in the middle of the desert. Although Bamba only had issues with the Portuguese team, it was basically my problem to resolve - since I was the one to agree the journey, rough route, and price with him, he sees me as the group lead and so it was down to me to solve the dispute. Since the desert isn't a good place to fall out with each other, I put everything "on hold" until we reached town, and I took the GPS from the Portuguese team, turned it off, and carried it in the Patrol to partially placate the guide. We moved off after wasting the best part of an hour on that little discussion.

Frankly I can't remember a lot about the rest of the afternoon - the terrain was better with only some faffing about tyre pressures (all our pumps and compressors are now broken bar the one carried by the Nomad'ers, which now has to inflate 20 tyres instead of just 4). We came to a group of four dunes which had to be crossed - we'd had deep / soft sand on the flat before, but not on hills, and everyone got stuck several times, bar the Patrol and the Transit. Eventually we crested the last dune and saw the sea glimmering in the sunshine - a very welcome sight indeed.

Finally we hit a dirt track which felt nearly as good as a paved road by this point, and pelted along that for half an hour or more. We paid our fees for the National Park at the warden's office by the park exit, and marvelled at the huge whale skeleton there, before we got swamped by kids asking for stuff. Their mothers even came along to supervise them hassling us! Wynn turned up with a bag of sweets and made thirty young friends, he had a great time trying to keep track of the new faces vs. those who were coming back for a second attempt!

Unfortunately despite our best efforts we'd missed the afternoon tide and had to set up camp for the evening. Bamba took us to a community campsite on the sea-side of town, where the women set about preparing one of the big tents for us. Trouble was, no-one had asked us, and we wanted to camp somewhere a big more isolated down the coast! There was clearly an incentive for the guide / park to put is in the community campsite, and they made it quite difficult for us to leave. In the end I drove back to the park warden's office with Nelson (one of the Portuguese) to ask for permission to camp outside the official campsite. After some friendly banter we were told that we could camp so long as we were more than 7km outside the village, and we went back to collect the others and head south.

I suspect that Bamba was not happy with the decision we made, and he took us to a flat space just outside the town which was pretty grotty, surrounded by local houses and their trash, and definitely not 7km away! We had a debate about moving further along the coast - he told us that it was not possible without 4x4s. As we were discussing, the park warden showed up in his Landcruiser and told us that we were not 7km away and that we would have to move further down the coast! Very amusing indeed.

Anyway, he drove us another 2km out of town and then told us to set up camp, before asking for "cadeaux"... we ignored him and went for a swim!

The sea was lovely, cold without being freezing, and a great opportunity to get rid of all that sand. We watched the sun set over the water as we floated around. Our sand-free state didn't last long, however, because on the way back to the tents the Renault boys took the wrong route and got stuck in the sand, followed immediately by the Transit. We were bouncing along nicely and passed them, but made the mistake of stopping to help dig them out, and got ourselves in deep as well. The Renault came out pretty easily but the Transit was in down to the rear axle and had to be dug / towed out by the warden's Toyota (at a cost of 10 Euros...) The Patrol was also in down to the leaf springs and differentials, so we spent a long time digging it out. Eventually we freed her with a few guys pushing, and headed back to our campsite, covered in sand again.

Dinner - rice with tomatoes - and lots of fun trying to reinflate everyone's tyres with the single remaining compressor. Time for a quick look at the stars and then bedtime in prep for our 0430 start the next day!

0430 was indeed painful, but not as bad as it could have been. We picked Bamba up outside the village about half-five (he'd spent the night up there) and headed for the beach - the plan being to drive along the firm sand near the water towards Nouakchott. Trouble was, there was no track to get onto the beach over the dunes, so Bamba picked a route and marked it out with water bottles for us to blast through. Surprise surprise, we then the first hour of the trip digging the lower cars out of the sand, again... only this time in the dark, which didn't make it any more exciting!

With the delay, w were in danger of being trapped between the dunes and the rising tide. We drove as close to the sea as we dared in the dark, disturbing huge flocks of sleeping seagulls and trying to avoid the waves. We were porbably too close on occasion, with a couple of waves breaking over the side of the car (our wipers truly are rubbish). On the other hand, the Lavvies were too far up on the soft sand near the dunes and in danger of getting bogged down - in the end we overtook them and they followed our tracks at the back of the group as we drove along between 30 and 50mph with the beach getting ever-narrower. After about an hour, with the rising sun and barely five metres of driveable beach remaining, Bamba guided us off the beach into a small village from where we could pick up a track back towards the tarmac. The Escort got stuck, again, but after some more digging and pushing we all made it onto the track where we stopped to clear the car windows, fuel up from jerry cans, repair another Escort tyre, and make tea and coffee. The cafetiere was pressed into service for the first time of the trip and we used about a third of a packet of ground coffee making up for our early start!

During our stop I took the opportunity to speak with Bamba and try to resolve our "GPS issue". He had previously offered three choices - we could pay him 5 times the regular guiding fee as a kind of precaution against future loss of earnings, the Portuguese could go with him to the Gendarmerie on arrival in Nouakchott to agree a resolution (we suspected that this would not go well for Nelson and Jose), or they could leave our group then and there (and by extension, die somewhere in the Sahara). Now everyone had cooled off a bit and Nelson had taken the time to make an apology, we were in a better bargaining position. We confirmed that his problem was not with the English (or Spaniard) in the group, whom he said were polite and worked hard and "did what they were told"! He told us that he had been to the small Gendarmerie in the village last night and the officer there had discussed the issue by radio with the Nouakchott station, concluding that they would send two officers to our campsite when we arrived in Nouakchott to collect the Portuguese and accompany them to the station. Not what we were hoping for! Fortunately we talked him round, and in the end he agreed to let the matter drop. What can I say, it was a good opportunity to practice my French!