Tuesday 15 January 2008

3000 miles - the road to Aleg

We left the Auberge at about 9, fuelled up at the BP garage, and reinflated everyone's tyres at the Michelin place across the street. This was followed by an entertaining discussion in which the Michelin guy demanded 6 Euros for filling the tyres with air and Nelson refused to give him more than 3. That resolved, we headed to the supermarket and bought bread and tinned mushrooms and doggy apples. The Nomad'ers went off to find a print shop (!) as they had run out of fiches to hand out at the checkpoints, while the rest of us lazed around in the parking lot. We finally left Nouakchott at about 10, headed for Kiffa via Aleg.

Almost immediately we ran into some other Plymouth-Bamako cars by the roadside. They'd stopped because a wheel bearing had failed on their Sierra XR4ii - and we didn't have a socket big enough to helhp them out, so we continued onwards while they went back to Nouakchott for repairs.

About an hour out of town, we got a red light on the dash - the parking brake warning light. We pulled over, checked the parking brake wasn't binding, and drove on with thoughts of disconnecting the warning bulb or perhaps colouring the dashboard in with black pen to hide it. We found out two days later that we should have paid a bit more attention to the poor car at this point!

The road was tarmac-ed, boring and long, broken only by Donkey Crossings (a bit like Zebra Crossings but with less warning). Aleg turned out to be dusty and busy and not a great place to stop except for the requisite (and expensive) fuel. We rolled a few km out of town and stopped for a bite for lunch next to a police checkpoint, mindful of the events of Christmas Eve that had seen four French tourists shot in a robbery while they picnicked by the roadside. We ate quite quickly!

PS.- Gracias Mum por el embutido que compraste para nosotros. Todavia estamos viviendo del chorizo. Nos salva la pausa del mediodia y esta buenisimo.

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