Dahkla difficulties ...

Having been dropped at the police post I asked around for a van that was going south. It was 9am and starting to get warm; Mohammed went into town in his van with two ladies who needed something ... all was to be revealed!

The guys offered each of us a place for 400Dh each, I said no it was over the going rate and put my pack down. The price was lowered to 300Dh each and I put my pack by the van but told them I still wasn't happy with the price and if I found a better option I'd be off. I stood on the side of the road seeing if there were many European registered vehicles around to catch a lift south with. I was immediately spied upon by the police officer sitting in his van opposite registering all foreigners .. he took our passports to add to his list and then called me over. I was waiting for what I had heard ALL night from the 7 police posts that we had been past - where do you live, what do you do, where are you going??? etc, etc .. Oh no! I got a marriage proposal instead, this is quite normal and with politeness easy to divert - USUALLY! So by turning him down he then started on the topic of westerners sleeping around with a variety of partners whether or not they were married; I wandered back to the vans whilst he was mid-sentence.

I then caught sight of a bearded guy about 300m further up the road towards the campsite. After 30mins or so he wandered towards us and in heavily accented French (a thick Turin twang) asked me where I was off to then whether he could join us. Great! I had further bargaining power and offered the guys an extra passenger in the form of Gianni for a price less than 300Dh; we agreed on 250Dh. By this time Mohammed had come back with the two ladies, a friend and a mountain of goods which at the time I took scant notice of; but all the goods where taken off the top of Mohammed's van and out of it and put into the back of a Mauritanian van.

As all this was going on a taxi from town turned up with a non-French speaker inside. It turned out to be Brendan, an Aussie guy who was also wanting to head south and had been told that for the price of 400Dh he could have a front seat .. which got me thinking - what did 250Dh buy us? A roof position???

Brendan soon cottoned onto the fact that Gianni and I were able to do some hard bargaining and turned around to his tout and said that he'd pay 250Dh like us. The tout turned on me quite nastily and blamed me for the shortfall of 150Dh and that I shouldn't have told Brendan anything, I feigned ignorance and said it couldn't be helped if Brendan understood the price we were paying. They agreed 300Dh.

We were ready to go! The guys asked us to climb in - I said 'where?' the van was full and they wanted us in the back of it. Climbing up I saw that over all the boxes, tables & sacks there was a space for sitting on a few blankets on top of our packs and the two Moroccan ladies had already climbed in and were making themselves very comfortable.

So now I was headed for the Mauritanian border feeling like an immigrant being smuggled over the border, like we have in Europe so often!!!