10 November – Laayoune to Dakhla , Western Sahara. 16,472 km
Leaving the windy but peaceful salt lake campsite behind, we headed southward again. Laayoune is biggest city in Western Sahara but really isn’t that big! It has a rather overwhelming United Nations presence. We spent the morning in the city stocking up on groceries and checking our emails but we did find a rather good lunch at one of the bigger hotels. After lunch I counted more than 20 UN vehicles parked outside two hotels... just what are these people doing here? All they seem to do is either drive up and down the main street or ‘rest’ at the hotels. And, exactly what are they protecting? There is a whole load of nothing here interspersed with a few guys fishing on the cliff edges and two big towns filled with Moroccans taking advantage of the tax breaks the government gives them to live so far from anywhere. It’s a very cushy number for the UN staff... they get to cruise round a bit in their brand new shiny cars and smoke cheap cigarettes. Maybe they think there’s going to be an uprising from the fishermen! The whole dispute started from the rights over the phosphate mining but now that the world price has plummeted it is actually costing Morocco rather more than it makes from the mineral. The Moroccan king agreed to a referendum on who should own Western Sahara but have managed to stall since 1992 and it isn't expected any time soon... until ownership is decided the UN will continue to have an easy life here at the cost of tax payers all over the world.
The land along the coast is being prepared for what we assume will be one long chain of tourist hotels. The best thing for us is that the fuel prices are tax free and subsidised which means we pay just under 30p a litre for diesel... putting this into context, diesel is only twice the price of water per litre!! We filled up the big 450 litre diesel tank as well as the main tank and this should get us way into Senegal before we need fuel again!
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Shipwrecks on the coast of this empty land. The endless view through the windscreen confirms there is nothing here but desert - makes for very boring games of Ispy!click on either image to enlarge. |
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Pulling into the police check at Boujdour the guys in the ill-fitting uniforms asked us why we hadn’t stopped at the stop sign (which we had!) so Oz argued with them. The guy said it was a 400 Dh fine (£28) and asked Oz if that was OK... unsurprisingly he said ‘No!’ He then asked for our passports, V5 and green card. We gave him the first two but I had to search for the last item as we hadn’t been asked for this before and I had put it somewhere very safe! Finally after a long wait and a lot of discussion he told us to go on and we didn’t pay a fine. When we arrived at the campsite we heard from everyone else that they too had experienced the same grilling from the police and some had even paid the fines!
We spent two nights at the Camping D’Aouziwel (25,56.80N: 14,52.18W) where we watched a big, battered water tanker arrive to provide fresh water for the site – the local water is brackish. The campsite was great but we needed to move on and drove the 340 km of further nothing down to Dakhla, positioned at the end of a wonderful spit of sand. The campsite (Camping Moussafir 23,45.85N: 15,54.45W) was nearly empty when we arrived but soon filled up with a Dutch, Amsterdam to Dakar rally of about 20 cars with a further 20 arriving the following night – combine this with the 30 French cars on a similar rally and we were chock-a-block fairly soon!
Next stop the Mauritanian border and all the fun that entails.... more once we’re over the other side!
Kate, Oz and the Mog.
