MAURITANIA - Noukchott (2001)

Noukchott: 13.04.2001

We landed in Mauritania today at 3.00 pm local time via Madrid and Paris, a total travel time of 18 hours (hotel-to-hotel). Bits of sleep on flights have left the brain a bit woozy.

We had expected one of our customers to pick us up from the airport, but he did not appear. We spent some time waiting for him, plunged again into Africa from Europe -- children begging for frnacs, half the arcade shops closed and a bunch of dangerous-looking drivers soliciting us continuously. Finally, we called the hotel where he had booked us and they sent a pick-up.

Noukchott is a bare city. The whole country anyway has desert clime, being the western end of Sahara and the sand was everywhere. The roads are black strips on sandy stretches, buildings (usually sand-coloured) are far between with no pretensions at architecture and vegetation is very low. The men wear a traditional flowing robe and a head-dress that covers their mouth as well and they look ready to jump on to a camel and ride into a sandstorm. People from the northern part are fair and from the southern part dark. Also there is a fair lot of Senegalese and Mali people settled here who do most of the low-skilled jobs.........

After checking into the Mercure, which was a real let-down compared to the Mercure at Muscat or elsewhere, we tried to catch either of our two major customers but they were both uncatchable. So we had a free evening, so to say. We took a taxi around the city and I found that I had seldom seen a more depressing capital city. Absolute no life. We told the taxi-driver to go to the souq. Every souq he took us to was a cluster of some 10 kirana shops. We could not see any big brand outlets, let alone supermarkets. Finally we found a modern-styled Chinese joint (from the outside) and also went and had coffee and sandwiches in a mod cafe run by a French-origin Mauritanian, which was mainly filled with high-life Mauritanians, I think. The chicken-sandwich, by the way, was exactly like those made at Tarboosh in Qurm. Anyway, I'd hate to live here. Some sprinkling of whites with families were also visible, maybe settled here for generations........

The economy of Mauritania depends on fishing and they are a major exporter to European countries. There is also a bit of iron mining and export. Recently, oil has been discovered off-shore and Mauritanians are pretty upbeat about the future economy. There's tourism as well, for those who want to travel into the Sahara.

Today's tenperature was at 20 degC with a cloudy sky -- quite pleasant. People were using the hotel pool. but a couple of days ago it was 46 degC, we were told.


Tomorrow night we go back, after having visited the market during the day. For me, four flights (Noukchott-Paris-Zurich-Dubai-Muscat), a 20-hour travel coming up.


Noukchott: 14.04.2001

Well, today's entry is a small correction statement in that we saw a bit of the posh area of Noukchott, recently developed. The area has typical villa architecture but right at the edge of town, where the rear view would be miles and miles of sand dunes.

Noticed a few interesting things here:

1. Since the soil is very sandy, wherever they want to firm it up, like the driveway into some premises, they have spread thousands of sea-shells which have packed the sand under them (there is some ground below the sand) and give the same effect as that of a gravelled area, I suppose.


2. The other interesting thing was that the urinals in our hotel toilettes in the foyer are filled to the brim with ice-cubes! Haven't yet figured out exactly why.


3. Our big customer is building a big house for himself and his family. The 2-tiered house has 19 rooms, 7 of which are bath-rooms. Full of coloured tiles, including the ceiling, and dark-tinted walls. The dado and ceiling liners are in gold and silver. The place is a mild monstrosity.


4. There are white Mauritanians (ie, quite fair) and dark Mauritanians. Plus there are lots of people from Mali and Senegal doing manual and clerical jobs. We could see that only the white or fair Mauritanians were owners - possibly they carry the blood of the French occupiers who have handed down their properties along this fair line.

LINK TO NOUKCHOTT ALBUM

CANARY ISLANDS - Las Palmas/Tenerife/Playa de Ingleis (2001)

Las Palmas: 9.04.2001

We landed here yesterday at 10.30 pm and reached the Hotel Melias by around 11.00 pm. This hotel is in the northern commercial end of the island, whereas most of the tourist beaches, so to say, are on the south side. But our rooms on the 4th floor faced the sea and the roar was a steady background music.

Today morning, on our first working day, we asked the hotel receptionist to arrange an interpreter for us, as the language spoken here was Spanish as well. We finally got Fernando, who also agreed to take us around in his car, for an additional consideration. He was a young chap below 30, a native of Mexico City, half-Spanish and half-Mexican, who had come here 1.5 years ago to do his MBA in night classes. We found later that his wife was the receptionist at our hotel, to whom Rashid had initially said that on phone Fernando did not sound very impressive, so could she look for someone else! But he finally became very enthusiastic about our selling and would sometimes do the selling himself, without waiting for Rashid to give the English input.

We went around the city fairly thoroughly during the day. Grand Canaria has a population of around 800,000 out of which 500,000 is in the capital Las Palmas. It is a small city but has all the trappings of a latest European town. The commercial areas are full of high-profile shops (including sex-shops) and the main roads are wide with walk-ways, like in Madrid. However, all the side roads are narrow and chock-full of parked cars. The amount of cars is quite high compared to the width of roads and the only way the authorities can keep the cars moving is to declare 70% of them as one-way. We would invariably find a parking space at least two blocks away and walk to our destinations. Most of the cars are European -- Volkswagen (lots of Germans here), Citroen, Renault etc -- and a bit of Japanese, mainly Toyota. But usually they are small and medium-sized cars, mostly the three-door variety, which is expected seeing the dearth of parking space on the roads. Card-paying underground parking areas are also available in spots........

This place is definitely warmer than Madrid, around 25-27 degC during the day, which would at the most go up to 28-29 degC, we were told. Still, with a cool breeze, walking around was no effort at all. Here also, roadside cafes abound, but we had lunch in a typical Spanish restaurant. Fernando recommended a menu of fish soup for starters (very nice, including molluscs) followed by a fish in mixed sauce ('charni' fish, fillet of), washed down with white wine (Spanish and very good) with bread on the side. People relax from 1.30 pm to 4.00 pm for lunch, so we also relaxed.

We went to some surrounding towns after lunch. Most of the towns are beside the sea and the highway hugs the coastline, though the beaches are few and far between in this northern part of the island where we were travelling. Even inside Las Palmas, we could catch glimpses of the beach at the end of alleys while walking down a street parallel to the coast.

We finished the day by 8.00 pm, with a lot of sunlight still left to go. There was a long esplanade or paved walkway behind our hotel bounding the beach with shops and restaurants, on which we walked for some time. The beach had lots of Europeans having their last dip and kids kicking football around. It was getting a bit chilly by now but it didn't seem to affect the goras. Even at 10.00 pm, we could see them playing around on the beach which was lit by floodlights throughout the night........

On the walkway, we had noticed a shop selling 'saris' and went to investigate. The owner was a Sindhi who had been here for 40 years and was a Spanish citizen now. He loved it here, he said; all the conveniences without the hustle. Around 2000 Indians lived here, 99% of whom were Sindhis. Otherwise people here were mostly Spanish of course, Germans, retired Brits, some Chinese and a dollop of people settled from Latin America. Very few blacks. He told us to seriously think about opening an auto shop here!

We had dinner at an 'Indian' restaurant run by Spanish folk. Mutton roll was very good and we also had chicken curry (this tasted funny) with rice. We were a bit tired, so decided to ditch the idea of hitting some night-club or other which is usually open after midnight. Tomorrow we were to go to Tenerife island by ferry-boat which would carry Fernando's car as well, since we found that it was difficult to get rent-a-cars there.

Tenerife: 10.04.2001

Today we visited the island of Tenefire, which is actually the biggest island, basically volcanic, and still having the dead volcano peak called Teide Mountain, a tourist attraction. Yesterday we had bought 3 tickets on the boat leaving at 8.30 am from a coastal town called Agaete, which was 40 mins away from Las Palmas and on the west coast, same side as Tenerife island. This would give us a shorter and cheaper crossing than going from Las Palmas, which is on the north-eastern side of Grans Canaria, all the way around.

At 8.00 am, the Agaete port was dim and chilly, with the sun waiting to rise and drive the clouds away. This was a fishing town, quite famous for its seafood restaurants. A large numbber of boats were bobbing around. Our car joined a queue of cars (one of six queues) and Fernando obtained the boarding cards........

This, incidentally, is no 'o-majhi-re' ferry. Run by Fred Olsen of Sweden, it carries 900 passengers on the upper deck and 250 cars, including loaded trucks, on the lower deck! When it finally appeared, we were staggered by the size of it! Made in catamaran style and very stable, it must have been 150-200 ft long and more than 40 ft high. We sat in the car and drove in (3 entry lanes) and drove up winding ramps directed by staff to a queued parking (ie we will drive off from here again). Then we went to the seating deck with rows and rows of aircraft-style seats (much wider cabin, of course), a restaurant and a small shopping arcade. From the time it landed, the cars inside drove out, we drove in and parked, sat upstairs and the ferry again took off -- it had taken less than 20 mins! Here, people run for carrying out routine tasks. Very very impressive.........

Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz also seemed to be built on the same lines as Las Palmas -- too much traffic and narrow side-roads. We picked up a map and yellow pages from a tourist information centre and found that our visits will take us right from north to south and from east to west. We visited four towns and had lunch at a tourist beach open-air cafe, constituting draft beer, mixed kebabs and grilled sea-perch.

Tenerife is also a well-known resort island, although we could not visit the tourist spots, which included a jungle theme park, the extinct volcano and off-the-coast points for wind-surfing and diving. These islands are an European attraction practically all the year round as the climate is always pleasant, daylight hours are long, and prices are cheap compared to the coastal spots on the Med. A lot of couples in the above-50 age-bracket could be seen toasting their bones in the warm sunshine.......

We returned to Agaete by ferry once again and then drove back to reach the hotel by 9.30 pm. It had been a long driving day for Fernando also, although he never complained. Today he had brought his wife's Citroen, a relatively new car, because he was trying to sell his 15 year old BMW and didn't want to clock up too high a mileage. A good chap, with very good English. By now, he was practically selling for us. In fact, when Rashid asked him to follow up with a couple of potential customers after we went back, he balked a little, saying that to be a selling agent (which he didn't really mind), we would need a different sort of arrangement! Anyway, after his MBA (one more year), he wanted to work here a little more for experience (maybe two years) and then go back to Mexico City and open a 'Tourism Consultancy'. He already has a printing press back there run by his sister. Quite enterprising.

Today we discovered that day-after-tomorrow (ie 12/4) everything will be closed here because from that day onward, 'Holy Week' (Easter) starts. So we lost one clear working day; a holiday sort of shoved down our throats! So we decided that tomorrow evening we will change our hotel to one in the south side of the island, which has all the tourist beaches. 'Playa de Ingleis' beach especially is very well-known. Since this was the tourist season, we anyway booked two rooms in a hotel associated to the one we were staying in now.

Since we were both very tired, we ordered sandwiches through room service and slept off.

Las Palmas: 11.04.2001

Today morning we checked out of our hotel in las Palmas by around 10.30 am and loaded our luggage on to Fernando's car. We worked during the morning, visiting the southern side customer last. After that we went to inspect the hotel we had booked by phone. It was an excellent hotel but at one end of the beach, quite private without any public action, which was not our cup of tea at all. So we drove down to the Playa de Ingleis and my, what a scene! It was a fairground, the beachfront chock-full of cafes and shops and the beach, as far as the eye could see, a forest of reclining seats and red-and-black golf umbrellas. People were sunbathing by the gallon (in terms of suntan lotion consumed)........

We took a walk along the shops and restaurants, jostling through the crowds, had some beer, bought some T-shirts and decided that the earlier hotel, 5-star or not, was a non-starter. However, it seemd doubtful whether we would get rooms anywhere near the beach. We tried our luck in the nearest big hotel (2700 rooms), which also would have been fully booked, were it not for 2 single rooms that had become available due to last-minute cancellations. We did a rugby-tackle into the rooms! Tourists had been walking almost a mile to get to this beach and here we were, hardly a couple of minutes away. Phew!

We checked in and parked our bags and promptly changed into T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Till now, in our formal office-wear, we had appeared to be unbalanced people or waitors! We sat in one of the many beach-side cafes, drinking draft beer and watching the activities on the beach. People were totally committed to enjoying themselves, although crowd-level was quite high. Rows and rows of horizontal bodies, on deck-chairs or mats/towels on the sand, bodies glistening with lotion, eyes shut against the sun, praying to God that their skins will tan and not simply blister.

By the time we finished lunch and released Fernando, it was 6.00 pm, but still sunny. Rashid went and took a dip in the sea. I could see him immersing himself six inches at a time and realised that the water was cold. I didn't go in........

In the meanwhile, couples were getting generally entwined on the beach, sort of warmingup to a night of action. Least bothered, as usual, regarding others around. Nonetheless, they would claim their particular sun-chair, or lay their mat/towel on an available strip of sand and then expect that nobody should violate that space.

We returned to our rooms at 9.00 pm and finished off half-a-bottle of scotch while watching BBC. All other channels seemed to be in Spanish or German. We went down for dinner to one of the cafes. For lunch we had had a typical Spanish dish called 'paella', basically yellow rice mixed with vegetables, fish and chicken (their version of biriyani).For dinner Rashid had a kebab while I had a steak in pepper sauce. Even their sauces are hardly spicy, let alone food. I thought Spanish cooking would be spicy -- or is it Mexican I am thinking about?

The biggest dinner crowd was at an open-air restaurant with a live band, with a couple of girls belting out popular numbers in Spanish. But most of the tourist crowd would have preferred a dinner indoor, I think, what with children falling asleep and couples not wanting to disrupt proceedings.

One thing was for sure. We were the only brown-skins in the whole circus!

Playa de Ingleis: 12.04.2001

Being a holiday (!!), we stirred around 9.00 am. Breakfast at this hotel was a huge spread and although I had resolved to have a light breakfast, I ended up having sausages and bacon and cold cuts to my heart's content.

We prepared to hit the beach and started a long walk, aiming towards the end of Playa de Ingleis beach and on to the adjoining Mas Palmas beach, a goodish 4 km away. The beach was already heavily crowded with all sun-chairs anlready booked and masses of people walking along the beach in both directions. Inside the melee, people were managing to build sand-castles and play beach football and raquetball. They groups were mostly families on a holiday. We were told later that in this crowd, Spaniards were more as the Easter holidays were longer in Spain. In any case, the airfare from Germany to here was the same as from Madrid to here (which is a domestic flight) -- around $ 160/- only. No wonder European tourists find this a cheap destination.

As usual the amount of skin on display would have covered Calcutta, I think. Around the middle stretch between Playa de Ingleis beach and Mas Palmas beach is the nudist area. This meant that nudists were restricted to this area, but that area was open to all. People without a stitch on were walking around quite casually, amongst normally dressed people too! For them, it's perhaps an expression of freedom; they don't think of it as odd. As a matter of fact, we saw as many old couples amongst the nudists as young people. There were nudist families building sand castles and bathing in the sea together. I wanted to take Rashid's picture against this background but he did not want to be committed to paper. Then he finally agreed to click me, stood facing another direction, then suddenly twisted around and took my snap, like a sharpshooter! God knows whether he got me at all........

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We were pretty tired after the 4-hour walk and took dips in the sea in turn, since there was no place to leave our stuff. Eaven at 2.00 pm, the water was coldish but quite refreshing after some time. A lot of water-sports were going on -- speedboats, towing, para-sailing etc. I enquired with the sports operator regarding the para-sailing (something I had long wanted to do but but missed in both Sun City and Mauritius) and found it was around $40/- for a 10-min air-borne time. Once in a lifetime, I thought, and forked up. He fitted me out with a life-jacket and called up the speedboat to send a rubber dinghy across. The dinghy (speed-raft which goes bumpity-bump over the waves at top speed) took me out to the speedboat and I got in. A German boy was about to go up, watched admiringly by his two sisters. While he was up, the helper fitted a harness onto me, which was a set of two slings below my thighs.

There is a small platform at the back of the boat on which the flier lands and takes off from. The parachute is attached to the boat with rope that is wound on a winch mounted at the forward end of the platform. After the flier is fitted to the harness, with the rope fully wound up and the parachute very close to the boat, the flier is clipped on, the boat picks up speed and the winch slowly pays out the rope, like feeding string to a kite (it is also called para-kiting) till the whole length of 250 metres is released. The view from the top is breathtakingly beautiful and the sight of the small boat down below, holding your lifeline so to speak, gives a very peculiar feeling. Just the sun and the orange parachute above, the blue sea all around and a long white beach at one edge.

The boatmen once slowed down the boat and the parachute dropped down till my legs and backside were skimming the water. Then it speeded up again and I was whisked up high once more. Finally the winch slowly pulled the rope in so that I gradually came close to the boat slowly from the air and did a feathertouch landing. A superb experience.

We had lunch after this (Rashid - sardines and rice, which he did not like; I - grilled breast of chicken), sent off an e-mail and went up to our rooms to try and sleep for a couple of hours since our flight was at 3.00 am and would not allow much sleep........

We did a final wandering around at 9.00 pm and enetered a bar for an hour. By 11.00 pm we retrned to the hotel to have a sandwich but discovered that they close their kitchen by 9.30 pm. We were kindly advised to go down to the beachfront and have dinner there, like all other decent tourists. Anyway, since our taxi was expected at midnight, we shelved our dinner plans for the airport.

LINK TO CANARY ISLANDS ALBUM

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SPAIN - Madrid (2001)

Madrid: 8.04.2001

This time around the touring load was lower -- just two countries, Canary Islands and Mauritius -- and we would be through in 8 days. But the routing was pretty convoluted: Muscat - Zurich - Madrid - Grand Canary, and each of the following legs equally wobbly! However, the silver lining was that we had around 8 hours of free time ar Madrid and would be able to take a peek at the same city.

I had boarded the Zurich flight from Muscat at midnight. The same flight, stopping at Dubai, picked up my colleague Rashid. Swissair seems to be a good airline; good plane and staff. In any case, I am never able to sleep much on flights. My co-passengers were practically all white, mostly Swiss and some Germans. My neighbour was a German who had come to troubleshoot for a firm in Muscat that had bought his machinery. In the end, he has not been paid for his visit, so he was quite unhappy. On top of that, he had left his coat in the departure lounge. Temperature in Zurich was said to be 4 degC and he had to go on to Stuttgart by train, so he was a fairly tense man overall.

When we landed at Zurich at 6.30 am, it was just dawn. The sky was overcast, it was drizzling and the temperature was actually 4 degC. My friend gave one last shiver and ran out of the exit.

We freshened up here and boarded the flight to Madrid at 8.30 am. I was trying to send home an e-mail from a free internet kiosk, but the hotmail box had expired and by the time I realised that and created a new one, it was time to go.........

We landed at Madrid at 10.30 am with a bracing 14 degC. From the air the countryside looked beautiful, like a painted scene. The fields, mostly polygons, are separated by white roads are either uniformly green or dusty white. The ploughing or hoeing marks on the green fields look exactly like brush-strokes on canvas.

The day was very sunny and the air slightly chilly -- an excellent combination. Our continuing flight to Canary would be in the domestic sector, so we went out through immigration and decided to leave our bags in the cloak-room. The cloakroom girl was very helpful in suggesting that the best course of action for us would be to take the bus to the centre of the city (Columbus Square) and maybe walk around the place and have lunch somewhere. So we took the bus, a huge spanking new luxury coach with luggage racks and all, better than any taxi that we could have imagined, and got dropped at Columbus Square........

Madrid is a city where the old architecture is still preserved well and also in use. Columbus Square has a huge pillar with the statue of Columbus on top and a couple of massive stone blocks with writings commemorating the discovery of America. The avenues are wide, lined with flowers and trees, and the pedestrian walking areas (pavements and promenades) are very generously allotted. Shops line the streets but were closed on account of it being a Sunday. From the main road, small side-roads (all one-way) lead off at regular inetervals, lined by tall old-fashioned buildings with huge doors and small wrought-iron railing verandahs. It's very quiet in the side streets and with very few people around today, it seemed quite possible that suddenly a Spanish gentlemen dressed in all his finery will just walk around the corner!

There were some museums -- historical and art -- within walking distance but we decided that we had no time to spend inside buildings. Each place deserves a couple of hours and in a city with 50-60 art galleries and 20 odd museums, we might as well not try. We were wondering what to do in this time available (very few people speak English, so getting local advice was next to impossible!) when we suddenly saw a double-decker with an open top, driving slowly along, the upper deck occupied by a few passengers gazing around. Bingo! This was the thing for us -- see the main sights in the city in a short time, on a sunny day with a cool breeze blowing.

It took some half-an-hour to work out where the nearest stop was ("Por favor, no comprehendo" all over the place), which was the other side of the Square. Traffic here is very organised and jaywalkers are likely to get run over. Three-lane high-speed roads, pedestrian crossings with go-no-go -- all the shine of a European capital. So we worked our way around the square to the bus stop and boarded the top of an open-top double-decker. This fleet of buses keep going around on a fixed route with stops. We did not want to get down, but people would usually get off at some place they wanted to see and again get onto another such bus that came along, on the same ticket and any time during the day. A good system.
On a Sunday morning at 1.00 pm, the bus stop was not crowded. Here the sun rises at 8.00 am and sets at 9.00 pm, so lunch is usually at around 3.00 pm. We could see that all the roadside cafes with tables and chairs spread out in the sun were still waiting for customers to come and order their coffee or tortilla or whatever. Anyway we got on paying 1600 pesos ($8/-) per head and sat high up, enjoying the breeze. We had been handed a city map with marked stops and there were headphones with every seat through which a guide's voice, matched with the movement of the bus, was available in the language of your choice. We passed the National Library, art museums, churches, the Royal Palace, Botanical Gardens and some more ten sites I have lost track of. Beautiful architecture, not only at these points, but at the street-corners and roundabouts, in arches and doorways, in pillars and water-spouts. Very very impressive. And a very clean city.
We went hunting for lunch for something typically Spanish, but were finally scared off, even from the relatively harmless 'paella' (which is a rice dish with vegetable garnishing and either chicken or shrimps on top). Finally we dived into a 'safe' Chinese joint. However, the chow-mein was like pasta and the shrimps were with shells and the tastes definitely onion-and-garlic-ish. Not much Chinese about the place apart from the waiter, who was also Madrid-born in all likelihood.

By this time (in fact while we were on the bus-top itself), we could see the 'Sunday-enjoyer' crowds on the streets, which seemed to include everybody. The roadside cafes were full of warbling couples, families were pushing prams around on the sunny sidewalks, young twosomes were smooching on benches and children were skateboarding all over the place. We also found people asleep in public parks and one girl stretched out on a sunlit bench, mildly snoring away. Making out on the grassy slopes also seemed to be quite common and a universally accepted thing. Clearly it was a h-o-l-i-d-a-y and these people were not the ones to spend it at home.

Madrid is as hep as any European metro in dress and style. However, the favourite of women with good figures (which seemd to be most of them) seemd to be skin-tight nylon tights and short tops, or fairly mini skirts. Very colourful dressing too. Full of the joy of life. A lot of men pierce their ears. Some piratical blood, maybe.

By 4.30 pm, we ran out of steam. The first-level sightseeing was over, and there was not enough time (nor energy) to get into museums and palaces. We vaguely remembered that there was a flight somewhere around 5.00 pm to Canary, which, if caught, will gain us 3 hours. We caught a bus back to the airport, collected our luggage, huffed and puffed through miles (literally!) of corridors and found the flight trundling to the runway. Anyway, we spent 3 hours unwinding in the business class lounge, to find which it took us half-an-hour in the first place.

I made a quick call home, found that booze was free in the business class lounge and organised a glass of Irish whiskey while setting out to catch up on my journal.

LINK TO MADRID ALBUM

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