ANCIENT CAMEL CARAVAN EXPEDITION

As we passed through Walata on our last trip, Alberto, Ali and I had talked about following the old Camel Caravan route from Walata, heading north towards Morocco. Ali said this had never been done by vehicles, only on Camels. So we decided to attempt this true expedition. 
 
Once again I found myself traveling by road, from Bamako, Mali to Walata Mauritania. That was a three-day journey. Upon our arrival in Walata, we looked up some old friends from the previous year; they were very pleased to see us again. After spending a day and one half in town, we made our way out to the Desert; it is only two Kilometers from town. There was an actual road for about 45 Kilometers, then no signs of a road for the rest of the trip. We only had twelve days in the Desert, so the goal was to see how far we could get since the terrain was 100% uncharted to motor vehicles.

The first day or so was not real difficult, but by the third day we started to wonder what had we gotten ourselves into. It became nothing but a sea of sand packed with very hard mounds of desert scrub grass. This would be fine if the mounds were in a straight line, however believe me they were scattered like the stars in the nighttime sky. This made it extremely tough for the vehicles to maintain any kind of consistent speed at all. So it was a constant rev-up, slow down. This is very rough on the vehicles, as they are not engineered for such travel. Being the explorers we are, we carried on with the hopes the conditions may improve, but they seemed to just get worse. Picture this, for six to eight hours per day we traveled at an average speed of about thirty Kilometers per hour and I personally felt like I was in a blender or a washing machine. The force of bouncing around in the vehicles was like nothing I had ever experienced before in all of my remote travels. For me, this is what true exploration is all about!

One very exciting aspect of this trip was the fact that no one had ever traveled this route, so none of us had any idea what to expect. On about the fifth day we started to see something white off in the distance, as we approached we found it to be a large tent where a group of nomadic desert residents were living. We stopped and had a wonderful chat with them and some tea. They informed us that only about fifteen minutes drive up from their stop was another encampment where this day a wedding was taking place, so needless to say we made our way in that direction. Please keep in mind the fact that we are seriously in the middle of nowhere, you never know what or whom you will find in the Sahara! As our vehicles pulled up, they were very surprised to see anyone else out here, especially westerners traveling in the area. There was about forty people or so in attendance. They welcomed us and said they were happy to let us share in this festive occasion. There was one very large tent where most of the women and young children were. They were singing, drumming, dancing, and having a ball. Most of the men were outside readying their Camels for the celebration. The Camels were decorated in gorgeous bright colors. Then the guys got on their Camels and started to travel in big circles around the tent, chanting and singing, it was quite a site. This was an amazing for me to witness, with all the noise and the vibrant colors, what a treat! Later in the day it was time for us to say goodbye and continue our journey north.

From this point onward, we never saw another person until our return to Walata. We simply continued north documenting our stops and putting those coordinates into our GPS. This was important for a couple of reasons, one so we could add them onto our map and most important, we would need this information to find our way back to Walata. We figured that we made it a bit more than halfway up to the northern Mauritania border on the way to the Moroccan border.

It was time to turn and head back to Walata and we did. It was very difficult to follow our original tracks due to the shifting of the sands. This is where those GPS coordinates came in real handy. We had several minor breakdowns with the vehicles due the rough conditions, however Mohamed was traveling with us as he always does, with his skills and some spare parts we were never down very long. The other grueling aspect of this trip was how often we got the vehicles stuck, quite often due to the conditions. Traveling through some of these areas, once the lead vehicle would get stuck so would the others in most cases. So we spent a lot of time digging out and using the sand plates to get unstuck.

We made it back to Walata in one piece and with the realization we had just completed a journey that NO ONE else had ever done. For me, that was an amazing feeling. Someone asked me, would you do that one again and I said why not!