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.

Sajara

50 million stops and a whole day later I finally arrived in Dakhla, officially known as the capital of the middle of fucking nowhere. After my final army checkpoint, I saw the single most appetizing advertisement of my whole life. A billboard before entering town advertising in English for the best place to rest after a long journey through the desert, The Sahara Regency Hotel. Alas, I couldn’t afford that and instead checked into the only budget hotel recommended by Lonely Planet. They lied about it being clean, but for $6.50 I got a double and picked the cleaner of the two beds, in addition to shared squat toilets and shower facilities, though at least there was hot water. So I had to squat to shit for the first time in six weeks. I almost missed it. I also saw my last Moroccan sunset over the Atlantic. After settling I had to figure out transport to Mauritania since there is no form of public transportation across the border. Literally asking around me I met Ahmed, a proud Saharawi—who scolded me for referring to it as Morrocco, I would never had done that though if I hadn’t spent the whole day trying to remind myself not to say Sahara in front of police so that I wouldn’t have any issues—who spoke shaky Spanish (for example pronouncing Sajara instead of the more Spanish Sahara with the silent “h”) and helped me find transport. FYI If you are thinking of crossing the border in Dakhla there are some random men who sit on near the plants in front of the Sahara Hotel. It was weird to be in the Sahara desert speaking Spanish, I would have expected French (and Arabic too obviously, although Ahmed also scolded for referring to as Darija or Moroccan Arabic instead of Hassaniya, the Mauritanian dialect) but never Spanish. Now I really need to go Equatorial Guinea and visit Spain’s “only” two African colonies, the scraps they got when they lost out on the “Scramble for Africa.” In return for helping me out, I bought Ahmed a sandwich (it cost $1.25, Dakhla was the cheapest place I visited on my whole trip) and he told me how he was about to get on the bus cause he has to keep it moving from the police. But if I was ever in Dakhla or Laayoune I could stay with his family, he promised. Hospitality was his duty as the people of Cuba have expressed their solidarity with the Saharawi cause. Too bad I am Dominican.

Disputed Territory

Everything was smooth, with the bus making stops every 90 minutes for 90 minutes until right before getting to Laayoune. Laayoune is the capital of Western Sahara. There I ran into the first of six police checkpoints. After 14 hours on the bus, I had learned to ignore the stops, only this time I was the sole reason for the stop. The soldier poked my shoulder rudely, waking me up and demanding my passport. He asked me for the essentials, name, date of birth, nationality, and profession, and I felt terrible for holding up the whole bus. An hour and change later, we got stopped again. This time the soldier made me go down to his little office by the road in the middle of fucking nowhere, and took even longer in getting my info. Afterwards, the bus driver advised me to write down all of my relevant information on scraps of paper I could hand out to the soldiers as they stopped me. I thought the whole thing was so silly. The dudes were copying my information in the most random places. One dude wrote it in his planner, another on the back of some other document he had, and the others accepted my scraps with some recopying it and others just taking it as is. Why don’t they just have a form you can fill out? Well, what’s all the fuss about? I was in Western Sahara which is claimed and occupied by Morocco as part of its own territory, while the Saharawis assert that they are an independent nation oppressed by Morocco. Western Sahara was for centuries part of Morocco’s empire, but it didn’t really exist as a formal political entity (as always in Africa) until colonialism. The French and Spanish divided Morocco between themselves, with the French taking the tastier morsels and leaving Spain with the scraps: the mountains in the north by the Spanish border and a large chunk of desert in the south that the Spanish renamed Rio de Orio (Gold River) even though there was no water or gold. Although Morocco negotiated its independence from France in 1956, Spain resisted the tide of colonization and held onto Western Sahara until Franco’s death in 1975. The UN was supposed to administer a plebiscite to decide whether Western Sahara would be independent or join Morocco. King Hassan II of Morocco though interrupted the vote (maybe forever) when he ordered the “Green March” where 350,000 Moroccans marched down into the desert to claim Western Sahara as part of a historical “Greater Morocco.” Really the King just understood the value of nationalism and possible foreign war in distracting people from more urgent domestic concerns, and also the value of the phosphate deposits in Western Sahara. Mauritania was supposed to get a slice too, but quickly withdrew after a new Algerian-backed armed independence movement, POLISARIO arose and forced them to retreat. POLISARIO warred with the Moroccan government until a ceasefire in the 1991, although hostilities never completely ended. The UN has a highly visible presence in Western Sahara and they are still supposed to organize a vote on Western Sahara’s political future but there are disputes as to who is going to be allowed to vote since many Moroccans have moved in encouraged by the Moroccan governments investments and tax exemptions. Most likely Western Sahara will remain part of Morocco and the Saharawis yet another nation without a state. Again, all this meant for me was having to be woken up by soldiers several times who just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t an investigative journalist going to meet the rebels. I just wondered why anyone would fight over this territory. I mean, honestly, it’s the desert. There is literally nothing. I didn’t even see the tall dunes of fine yellow sand that is burned into the Western imaginary, rather it was all dull looking, rocky scrubland. Not very romantic at all, but still if the Saharawis want it that bad I think they have put it up with it long enough to deserve to call it whatever they want and govern themselves however they wish.