Banjul Challenge – Boujdour – 1/22/2023
Feb 27th, 2023 by rallyadmin
Up, out of bed and across the main street to a small hotel with a restaurant. And a sleeping restaurant owner. A local wakes him and tells him that there are a dozen or so people who want breakfast and that rouses him pretty quickly. He starts us off with tea and flat bread. He sends his boy off to the bakery for more flat bread and starts on omelets for everyone who wants one. There’s nothing like money to get the locals moving. Some thing really are universal. Into the cars and down the coast road.
It’s more of the same as late yesterday. The road runs down the coast with the coastal cliffs falling into the Atlantic on the right and sand dunes as far as the eye can see to the left. The prevailing wind off the ocean blows a fine mist of sand across the road making the road look like either the desert roads in Kazakhstan or the ice roads in the Arctic. Without checking the temperature it would be easy to mistake this for the Arctic desert rather than the African desert.
The road occasionally turns inland for some kilometers which makes the road just a canyon between the dunes on both side of the road. Every few miles there might be a payloader parked near the road paused from its job of moving the ever moving dunes off the road surface. I’m sure that in some sections of the road, it would only the a day a day or two for the dunes to swallow the road completely.
As we get closer to Mauritania the police checkpoints get closer together. Throughout Morocco there have been occasional police checkpoints that would almost always just wave us through without stopping us. Now that we are out of Morocco proper and into the Western Sahara, a disputed area, the police seem to be more frequent and they stop us more often to check our documents.
We carry copies of a document called a fische, a form that has out passport pictures and info printed on it in both English and French. We have probably 100 copies for each of us and at every stop we give a copy to the fische to the officer that stops us. They usually are quite friendly and chatty. “Where are you going?” “To the Gambia.” “Why are you going there?” “To fish.”
To fish? The first time Clemo said this I was stunned. It turns out that the officer are concerned that we are a race or rally and if we are we have to have permits. Of course, we don’t have permits (we barely have IDs) and when the police ask if we are a rally we tell them that we are a humanitarian group bringing aid to the poor in The Gambia. They seem to like that and the the fishing part, too. More smiles and an “Au revoir” as they wave us on.
After the first stop, Clemo reminds everyone that the road book clearly states the we are NOT A RALLY. We are a challenge and a humanitarian one, at that. DON”T EVER SAY RALLY OR RACE. After the first mistake or two and the long questioning from the police, everyone finally gets with the program and we have a common story.
But for the most part, the ride is boring ride south through the ever present dunes and blowing sand. Occasionally, there are camels and goats along the road which require that we pay some attention but after the first few camel photos, the charm wears off and it’s back to the boring road south.
After hours of driving we get to Boujdour in the middle of the afternoon. We find a small hotel which almost has enough room for all of us. And we move in. Due to the almost enough rooms problem there’s some doubling up on the available floor space and David, the Swede, moves in an extra mattress to our small room and takes up residency on a fair amount of the small floor space. It’ll all work out in the end.
Boujdour is a small but bustling city but there’s a distinct lack of bars or liquor stores. After dark we start out to find a restaurant which also seems to be in short supply. We do find a small one and get a decent dinner. Then back to the hotel and past the 2 local boys trying to unobtrusively smoke hash behind the small bush near the hotel door. (They aren’t easy to see but they are are easy to find. Just follow the aroma.)
Up to the room. And after a few surreptitious drinks, we clamber into whatever bed we have in the over-crowded room and it’s lights out. Tomorrow, more of the same.
Obi
