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Mauritania 2002/2003 - A Parakiting
Extravaganza
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for bigger and better adventures we set off to Atar
via Choum on a rarely used piste. As we were to
find, a route described as “rarely used”,
exists only as a concept on a map, and doesn’t
really exist on the ground. The piste follows the
tracks of an ore train for some 450km before swinging
south to eventually reach Attar in another 150km.
Most people apparently put their vehicles on the
train as far as Choum rather than try and drive
the route due to the isolation, lack of fuel and
tracks to follow but from the map it promised large
areas of flat sandy desert - just what we were looking
for... |
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After two days of driving over
small dunes and rocky plains on our own, we had
covered little over 200km. In all this baking wilderness
we found a fantastic venue (N21.13.30 W016.03.22)
about 50km to the west of a settlement called Bou
Lanouar. The rocky flats we had been driving along
had given way to a plain covered in small pebbles
and very little else. Through 360° the horizon
was as flat and featureless as I have seen anywhere,
there was not a cloud in the sky and the temp was
in the low 40’s. It was absolutely perfect.
The wind blew steadily with few gusts from the east,
starting just after dawn at around 15/20kph, then
rising to about 30kph just before sunset.
You can go for miles out here in a buggy, only changing
direction when you start to cramp in the bucket
seat. Small horrifically spiky bushes and the occasional
football sized rock make the flying"interesting"
and you soon get the knack of making really quick
turns without spilling out of the buggy. The biggest
hazard you’ll face is being run over by your
support vehicle while they merrily snap away on
the camera. Other sites along this desolate desert
piste further east toward Choum we visited –
the Gleyb Bakhwage (N21.56.34 W14.20.21) and Seguolan
Lakhdar (N21.09.35 W13.17.14) – proved to be
equally good.
After 650km and using 240
litres of fuel we eventually reached Attar and
the graded road to Chinguetti and Ouadane and
(the seventh holiest and the oldest town in the
Sahara respectively) for a bit of tourism and
yet more scary off road driving. The tiny settlement
of Ouadane is 200km or so from the state capital
of Atar and the end of the road geographically.
East of here there isn’t very much apart
from sand dunes for over a million and a half
square kilometres. No roads, wells or villages
make this the Sahara’s largest empty quarter,
covering a land area large enough to lose the
state of Alaska in with room to spare.
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The prospect
of buggying on the edge of such a huge sand sea
was irresistible. Unfortunately it also proved virtually
impossible due to so much sand being blown around
by the wind. If it got windy enough to drag a buggy
through the powder soft sand, it was too foul to
go out in.
The heat made your goggles fill with sweat and you
had to tie a big scarf round your face so you could
breathe but added to the greatly to the discomfort.
Localised winds round dunes made buggy travel epical,
with the wind dropping without a warning. |
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One minute it would be
windy with little visibility and you would be moving
- fast. The next, dead in the sand with your kite
on the ground. This leaves you with a collapsed
kite and a buggy to drag out from behind whatever
dune you had ended up round the back of in 45°
of heat. Alternatively you would fly up a dune at
the rate of knots, blinded by sand, dust and sweat
only to find a 30m slip face on the other side as
you crested the thing..... Big, Big Alarming Air!
As the area was so interesting, we carried on exploring
around Atar and the Adrar plateau for nearly a fortnight
before we ran back to the coast with just a few
days left on our visas. We crossed the border and
drove back up north into Western Sahara again to
explore the various salt pans we had seen near Dakhla.
On the trip down they had seemed wild and remote,
miles from anywhere, now they seemed tame and easy
going, a mere 30 or 40km from some sort of civilisation.
As a kiting venue they proved to be some of the
best I have found in either Morocco or Western Sahara.
(You can also get there in a 2 wheel drive on a
Moroccan tourist visa and without the hassle of
a full desert trip which has to be a big advantage.)
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The Ozone Little Devil 3 and 4.5m kites proved ideal
here on the perfectly flat surface, providing hours
of fun with two wheeled turns on every tack. Out
of all the venues we found in Western Sahara, the
best stand out as the Glyb Al Gharday and the Jwa
Chemounna about 30 and 40k from Dakhla respectably.
Further up the coast between Laayoune and Tarfaya
are a number of huge salt pans that are still being
worked at their southern ends which also proved
to be equally good.
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All in all, we covered
nearly 11,000 miles, of which only 6500 were either
on tarmac or graded roads and used a little over
4000 litres of petrol in six weeks. We crossed the
Sahara twice, got stuck in the sand 16 times, spent
42 nights by candle light (the internal lights on
the Land Rover failed before leaving Briton) and
ate far too many packets of noodles. We also got
to go kiting and try out the Ozone LD range of kites
(thanks to our sponsors!) in some of the most remote
and dramatic parts of the Sahara I have ever managed
to get to.
As I sit here and type this out, as a record of the trip and
hopefully inspiration for someone else's jaunt, I'm listening
to the driving February rain hitting the windows of my cottage
in Snowdonia....all I want to do is get back out there and feel
the wind on my face and the dust in my hair again. |
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