Nothing Stops Tea

The next day I got picked up in a van by the shady dude I had negotiated with the day before. Predictably he wasn’t the driver, in fact he wasn’t even a passenger. I gave him half the dough upfront (I needed some insurance cats wouldn’t throw me out in the middle of the desert between Morocco and Mauritania. And say I survived I couldn’t imagine the embarrassment at confessing to my mother that she was right. Even more embarrassing was that I had gotten so far, to start thinking like my mom; if those fools had wanted to throw me off they were going to anyway, money or no money.) and then before leaving of course we stopped for breakfast (many rest stops, how Moroccan of the Saharawis). After breakfast, we picked up Jonathan, a Canadian dude heading to Timbuktu through Senegal, who joined me, the driver, his younger friend who also drove for a bit and the businessman crossing the borders with merchandise that clanked and clanclanked all the way down and which he swore were only “shells.” As soon as we hit open road, our driver, Mustafa, decided it was tea time. He admitted that he gets groggy if he doesn’t have a cup in the morning. Now I had never seen anyway make tea on a moving vehicle before, but somehow he made it work. He also explained—again in Spanish—how Saharawi tea tradition is different from how Moroccans drink tea. It was something about how Saharawis always do three rounds of tea, while Moroccans are greedy with their tea. The tea tasted the same to me. Then of course we made one more rest stop at the last gas station on the road to Mauritania which had a surprisingly nice restaurant where I had my last tajine dish. We even had to eat it traditional style, picking at it with pieces of bread cause they never brought us silverware. Followed up by, yup, more tea. Once more gasoline arrived and we filled up we could leave and then it was another couple of hours of monotonous, dry, rocky scrubland before we reached the border and the fun began. The Moroccan border consisted of heat, lots of waiting, silent exchanges, checking in with the police, military and some third state force, getting our bags checked and boredom. It moved slow, but thankfully smoothly and we were eventually cleared to leave the Morocco. Between the two borders is a 5-km stretch of no-man’s-land where there are various land mines from previous hostilities in the area. There were a couple of charred car stasis/chassis that served as a powerful warning that this not an area where you fuck up around. But there were even more “reassuring” signs like lots of litter, plastic bottles and bags, car parts, and newspapers that are evidence that this is a routine voyage for many people. Although it is romantic to think that you are in a part of the world free of law, where anything goes, really I am sure people just use to get cheap car parts and avoid petty taxes. On the Mauritanian side it was clear that we were in a different country. First of all, it was much smaller and looked even more low-budget, with even smaller, poorer equipped offices that looked even more cheaply built. Then there were some of the guards which were “Senegal black.” In Morocco you see Moroccans that could be black in the US, but I didn’t see any really that would be black in Senegal, most of the cats in Mauritanian would be black in Senegal (that’s essentially because they are Senegalese, or cause really these countries and labels are colonial fictions, but more on that later.) Mauritania is an Islamic Republic and the importation of alcohol is illegal therefore they like to check your bags with alcohol as a pretense. Although the guy checking us was a complete asshole completely undoing Jonathan’s packing and taking apart most of mine. Then when I told the other guards that I was going to Dakar where I had been studying French and Wolof, and tried some Wolof on them (again what are Wolof speakers doing in the middle of the desert?) they told me my Wolof was terrible. The actual visa wasn’t as much of a hassle, even though that I think that was due to the bill our driver slipped the customs official when they shook hands quickly as we left. For 10€ we got a three-day transit visa, if you want to stay longer you have three days to get to Nouakchott and get an extension. There are lots of police checks in Mauritania not cause it’s disputed territory, but just because it’s a plain military Islamic dictatorship. It was easier than in Morocco though. No dumb forms to write out yourself, our driver just handed the first cops we saw a bag of sugar—for their tea of course—and the passport check was no problem.