Border Crossing- Getting Mauritania visa

At this point, I still had not decided whether I would accompany M.FR on the cross Sahara trip all the way to Senegal. We made a stop in Rabat, Morocco’s capital to see if we could get visa to enter Mauritania. We did some online research to understand how it worked, but the information was not very clear. We decided to give it a try anyway.

We drove to the Mauritania embassy to start queuing at 7:30. The embassy door was supposed to open at 9, but there were already a significant number of people waiting in line, some backpackers, Moroccans etc etc. While we sat down and waited in a queue, a group of guys appeared out of nowhere holding what it seemed like application papers for visas. People started to flock around them and getting them to fill the form for a payment. There is another embassy across the street, and their guard brought out chairs for these form-filling people. We also joined the group, not really knowing what was happening. We paid about 5 dollars to get our forms filled and went back to the line. We waited another two hours before we were in the door to submit our forms over the counter. Then, we were told it wasn’t the right form and they gave us another one (so the initial step was totally a waste!). We refilled it, submitted it with the payment and our passports. That was it! Visas were stamped on our passport by the afternoon, and we were ready to depart Rabat towards Sahara. It was surprisingly easy, and I had less excuses not to go along.

While we waited in a line, we met some interesting people. There was German guy who has been cycling from home heading towards Cape Town in South Africa over several months. The other extreme was Canadian woman, who believed that paying “extra” to “expedite” the visa process justified jumping the line. Anyway, she was on an attempt to visit all countries in the world. She has visited many already and about to finish her trip in March 2014, which is impressive.

Driving through Morocco was so pleasant. Such a beautiful country with varied landscape.

This is how we started our more unorthodox section of our trip.