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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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