I've had an extremely action-packed two weeks! As soon as finals were over and graded, I headed north to Atar, the biggest city in Mauritania's most touristy area (which isn't saying much...this is Mauritania, after all...but I did see quite a few French people wandering about). Atar's nice - it has lots of stone buildings and really big mansions, since that's where all the former president's buddies live. And, I'm told where most of the aid money given to the Mauritanian government goes...
After hanging out in Atar for a day, my friend Jeremy and I headed to Wedan, an old trading city where our language teacher from this summer lives. The ride's supposed to take 5 hours in the back of a pickup. After 7 hours and 5 flat tires we were still about 100 k from Wedan. Because of all the waiting I had time to finish
On the Road (by Jack Kerouak), which was quite inspirational given the circumstances! Finally some kind soul in a very fast truck gave us a ride the rest of the way in.
Wedan is gorgeous! It's on top of a hill and everything's built of beautiful stone, and in the surrounding valley there are tons of palm trees. We had fun exploring the 12th century ruins, which are pretty extensive. I even got to see a 1000 year old Koranic manuscript! There was a "museum" of sorts, but it was very small and badly organized and a rip off. Oh well. We also had a good time visiting Rajil and hanging out with some NGO guys who were in Wedan doing cultural impact research for Mobil. There's possibly going to be some oil wells going in up there, and Mobil doesn't want everyone mad at them.
After a couple of days we hitched a very comfortable ride with our new friends, who were headed for Chinguetti. The transportation out of Chinguetti is much more regular and reliable than Wedan, and we wanted to get back to Atar in some sort of timely fashion. I really want to take time to explore Chinguetti sometime, but there were no volunteers in town, so we just had lunch and then headed back to Atar. Ten miles out we had a flat and contemplated mutiny (the torturous ride in was a bit to fresh in our minds for comfort), but our driver assured us that everything would be fine from then on out - and surprisingly enough we reached Atar without further incident.
Compared to other Mauritanian cities, Atar is pretty clean, and we made it even cleaner on Saturday by doing a big trash pick-up. We even got some Mauritanians to work, too! Lots of volunteers came up for the festivities, and on Sunday we had a half marathon, and I got to watch the runners sweat and hand out baggies of water. Sunday afternoon we took a truck out to Tirjit, the most beautiful place in Mauritania. It's an open-water oasis (unlike Wedan, for example - it's an oasis, but that just means the water table's high enough for things to grow), and there are streams running everywhere and gorgeous warm pools of water, all under huge palms in a rocky canyon. It was amazing. We spent the night there, then headed back.
In the morning I promptly took off on another adventure. Several of us wanted to ride the iron ore train from Choum (a little town in the middle of nowhere) to Nouadhibou, Mauritania's big port city. To do so meant we had to take a 4 or 5 hour ride (in the middle of the blazing day) out to Choum. The truck ride was far worse than the train itself, despite rumours to the contrary. We'd been told the train ride is horrid - 14 hours of sitting on rocks, covered in coal dust. At night it gets really, really cold. All of this is true, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. We actually had a really good time (though I had to wash my clothes 5 times to even get out the worst of the coal dust).
Nouadhibou, where we arrived in the morning, is great! It's cool and windy and somehow a nicer city than Nouakchott. Thanks to the generosity of a volunteer there, we had a place to crash, so we all trooped to his apartment and took showers and recouperated a bit. In the afternoon we went down to the port and bought fish for a really delicious home-made dinner. The next morning we went down to the tip of the peninsula and explored the beautiful beach there. It's a lot like an Oregon beach - rocks and cliffs and even a great big seal hanging around just off shore. It was wonderful, and I have a terrible sunburn!
After that, back to Nouakchott, where I'm currently trying to catch up on emailing, quarterly reports, and getting tickets to visit Mom and Dad this summer. It's been a fun couple of weeks, but I'm exhausted just writing about it. :)
