Plymouth to Dakar Challenge : Team Spitting Llamas

Day 16 - Beach(MR) to Nouakchott(MR)

Posted by Aaron on January 18, 2008 11:23 AM

Corde and I get up early as usual while the rest of Team Dither are still in bed. We watch Team Speed get up in their normal organized manor and head off down the beach. It is time to fill and test the radiator – It is still leaking, but only at a constant drip, no longer at a flood. As the water tanks are still on the roof, Corde feeds a line from the water tank, straight down to the radiator to keep it constantly filling. Given the heat, we are a little worried that our now reduced radiator and fan might not be able to keep the engine cool. We get all of our cars down from the soft sand, and quickly realize that the Radweld does its trick and all the small leaks sealing up with the hot engine.

After some more procrastination and dithering we head down beach. It is a really nice run along the beach at low tide and the sand hard, we slowed down to navigate around some rocks, forcing us to drive into the ocean for a bit but was no problems. We stopped to watch the Saharan sand dunes being blown into the sea which was quite amazing, just imagining how much sand has been blown in there over the last 10,000 years. We passed a few very modest fishing boats and fishing villages along the beach that really brought home how hard life is for a lot of people. Getting back off the hard wet sand to the road was an ordeal in itself. Almost all of the cars got stuck in the very deep soft sand over the 200 meters we had to navigate and required team work and a very handy Range Rover to pull us through it.

Back on the main road we pumped all our tires again and started on the road again towards Nouakchott – the capital of Mauritania. On the road to the city, we passed mile after mile of rubbish, just littering the sky line, with little piles burning every so often. Naturally there were people scavenging in the rubbish, making it a sobering journey. The Capital had barely any tar sealed roads, no obvious nice areas and the poverty was very apparent.

We found our hotel, everyone was staying the night and set up our sleeping bags in large tents. Poor Rusty is limping in, but now even her battery is dying. Everyone is on top form, no one is sick and we are really enjoying ourselves, but looking forward to a restful day or two at Zebrabar in Senegal to come.

See more photos of Day 16