To pass the Moroccan border (Western Sahara is as previously mentioned still occupied and controlled by Morocco) is simple, although very time-consuming. We are set to wait for at least an hour to receive our exit stamp. Maybe they tried to see if we’d give them something to get through faster?

Between the two borders, there is still some three kilometers of no man’s land, and a road that is yet to be tarred. It is practically the only stretch between Sweden and Mali that is still not tarred. The road forks into a maze of various paths and roads, without signposts or other guides showing which one to travel. At times, the sand is so deep that the bicycle must be pushed forward. What further complicates our advance is the many mines that have still to be cleared out from the disputed borderland. By the logic that there shouldn’t be any left where others have already passed, we stay extra cautious not to cycle on untouched ground.

In Mauritania, the officials are, although not much more friendly, then at least way faster than its Moroccan counterpart. The customs just wave us through.

After another hour or so of biking, we reach a junction where east leads to the capital Nouakchott and west to Nouadhibou – a seaport at the very tip of a peninsula that stretches south along the coast. We eat lunch there by the intersection before we continue to Nouadhibou. There, we stay at Auberge Sahara with friendly staff from Senegal and Guinea-Conakry.

Today’s stretch of road is, as far as I know, the longest along the Atlantic route between sources of food and water. Although we still pass quite some places where one might be able to find both necessities and a place to sleep, but they are not commercial anyway so nothing to count on. When we make lunch halfway, a man passes by in his Landrover. He stops and invites us to stay with him in Dakhmar – the next village some 80 kilometers further south.

When we reach, he meets us at the local petrol station and escorts us to his home. He gives us harira, dates, juice, tea and fresh goat milk. The latter was brought to him by a nomad friend.

Summary Western Sahara

We cross the more or less invisible border between Morocco and Western Sahara. The latter a country that for long has been, and still is, illegally occupied by Morocco. We had quite some political discussions on our way through the country, and a few sahrawis – especially those politically active – had the courage to tell us how badly the Moroccan authorities treat them. But because of the risk of reprisals, I didn’t dare to mention this criticism in the same sentence that I used to describe the people that expressed it. Instead I describe one such meeting below.

When we one day pass by a small village, I ask its residents why Morocco’s intensively red flag sways the wind on their roofs. “We are in Western Sahara now, and you are Sahrawi, aren’t you?” I ask. They tell us that if they would raise their own flag, Western Sahara’s, the police would beat them. The young man we’re talking with gesticulates how the police beat them with their batons – hard and furious – and shows how he falls to the ground. He tries to stay away when the police is around – his Sahrawi origin is explicit on his ID card, and it will be enough to trigger the police, he says. To raise the flag of Western Sahara would be to tempt fate. Almost as if to compensate us for not being able to see the flag in freedom, swaying for the wind, he draws it for us on a piece of paper. Here, just like at the UN and the international community, his country is still just a stroke on a piece of paper.

Apart from the politics, Western Sahara largely resembled Morocco: friendly, hospitable people, good food, flat, straight roads and a lot of sand. But it was also more sparsely populated; more desolate. Also, there wasn’t the same amount of tourists as in Morocco.

I will never forget our ten days’ stay with Sanae and her family in El Aaiún. A beautiful capital, with streets and people that gave it the feeling of being a large village. Not a bad soul. There is something very easy and pleasant about this whole country. Over its people. Strangers are always welcome. Western Sahara is like an open invitation for a good meal and a friendly smile.

It’s always special to see the sun rise over a place that you’ve so far only seen in darkness. This one – yet another village built from scratch – infuses a sense of eeriness. Same-looking houses stand in rows, one after the other. They are painted in beige, like the sand that surrounds them, and blue like the clear sky above. Ghostly empty. It is strange with these newly built, complete villages, with quite nice, modern houses. All are completely empty, while the shacks in the cities are all fully packed. Why build here where there is no work for people to come for; to where there is no reason to migrate, instead of building better homes in the already existing cities? The Moroccan government has some untold truths, that’s all I can conclude.

Our host is very kind, although we didn’t get the chance meet much. We were already fast asleep when he returned home at two in the morning, and we only had a quick chat before we continued cycling around nine in the morning. I slept like a baby – it was almost completely silent; almost no sound. Only the wind that howled between the empty houses.

Now when the distance is further between the houses, we always ask before leaving how far it is to the next place where we can find water, food and a place to sleep. Today, we reach petrol station Atlas Sahara, that we’d been told about in El Argoub. The station is located only a couple of kilometers south of Buerda – another one of those new but closed villages. I met Said, the caretaker there, and at the same time saw another man by one of the houses. Fou – a crazy man – Said told me when I asked who the other man was. In other words Said, just like Khalid yesterday, was by himself, in yet another ghost town along the Atlantic route.

At the station, we knock door after door, all of them closed. Just as we consider giving up, a man opens one of them. Maybe he slept away the Ramadan hunger? He doesn’t hesitate to let us stay the night, and shows us a large, empty room. He throws in two mattresses and a pillow for us on the else naked concrete floor.

After a while, more people appear. One of them is a fisherman from a village by the coast, just a couple of kilometers westward. Another man works in the restaurant kitchen – due to open at three o’clock. There is also a small shop, with an unusually large stock of products – even actual toilet paper on rolls as opposed to the usual packages of paper tissues.

The restaurant’s kitchen is – here like at most other stations that we’ve passed – free for us to use. We make some pasta for lunch, that we eat in the cafeteria outside.

The station is a bustling rendezvous along a road where such places are scarce. Every time someone comes to fill up at the station, the staff first has to switch on a roaring generator for the pumps to work. During the time that takes, the passersby and the staff get the time to chat – everybody knows eachother. Around five, three police officers arrive in a small jeep to set up a checkpoint for the night. We buy some harira and a boiled egg for dinner. The cops give us fish, tea and cookies.

In the evening, I sit with the policemen in the restaurant. We watch some soap opera on TV, although it is in Arabic so I don’t understand much. We start talking; I ask them about bribes. They answer that it only occurs south of Sahara, but then that is how it sounds in most countries: “further south, but not here.” We then discuss ethnicities – a common topic. In the North, it usually is about whether one is Berber or Arab, but here in the South also Sahrawi. Most Moroccans seem to show pride over their ethnicity, but the policeman I speak with says, “It mixes now, and because we marry with Europeans, it is not a problem if an Arab marries a Berber and so forth. We mix!” He himself is Arab and works 1,900 km away from his family in the North. “Yes, it is far,” he says, with some resignation in his voice.

In El Argoub, we stock up food and water for the coming days. The distance between the small villages, that sometimes aren’t much more than a petrol station, increases each day, and there aren’t much traffic on the road, so it’s important to carry everything needed for one or two days’ journey.

Shortly after El Argoub, at a petrol station, we ask for a place to sleep. Apart from the pumps there is only a one big concrete house, with a one big room. A lone, naked lightbulb shines out through the large, floor-to-ceiling windows, and throws a dim light over the concrete ground outside. Some men sleep on mattresses in a corner of the else empty room. One of them comes outside, and advices us to join Khalid. He is the guard of a newly built village further up the road.

Khalid leads us through the darkness. We walk the kilometer or so to the village, where he lives in one of several otherwise empty houses. He lights a candle in the living room, on a sole table, and one in the kitchen, before he leaves us to visit some friends. We cook some pasta (as usual), and fall asleep on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room.

In Echtoucan, we take a break at one of two neighboring petrol stations. The first one seems to be closed – there is only a dozen or so crazy dogs barking outside. They chase us – froth from their teeth – to the next station. There, we are instead greeted by its friendly owner Lhassan. He has just recently opened the station, and the restaurant is yet to be finished. He invites us for some milk, bananas and dates.

Later on, we halt at a construction site along. It is yet another one of the many obscure project through which Moroccans build entire, new villages along the else sparsely populated coast road. In four to five years’ time, there will also be a petrol station on the other side of the road, with a restaurant and a small shop. Rachid, one of the workers, invites us to stay in one of several empty rooms, and to eat dinner with him and his friend. A generator makes a terrible noise. The variable current gives the naked light bulbs in each room a hypnotic, flickering light.

Rachid serves us harira, boiled egg with salt, coffee, bottled mango juice and the usual bread. For dessert we get small, deep-fried bread, to dip in a bowl of argan oil with honey curled over it. Delicious! Then of course tea, and dates. They make the tea from the same bottled water that they use for drinking, since the spring water smells strongly of sulphur.

By ten in the evening, yet another meal is on the fire. It is still Ramadan, and after having eaten nothing during the day, they eat throughout the night. I think we will be served chicken with veggies around midnight!

We stay another day with Hassan and his companions. Molod used to work in shipping people over to the Spanish Canary Islands. Each passenger paid about one thousand euro to be shipped over in a small boat, i.e. fast money for the one doing the shipping. But when Molod’s father found out how he earned his money, he beat him. “There is only one way to earn ones living – through hard and honest work,” he told him. So Molod stopped, and instead ended up here with Hassan.

Breakfast is coffee with milk, dates, bread with olive oil, cheese, yoghurt. We go for a long excursion in the desert. Hassan shows us what is to be found: sand, stones, fossils, seashells, flint stones (white, grey and red), an old cartridge from a Kalashnikov rifle, the rusty remains of a truck (”it was blown up by a mine”), ‘desert coral’, skeletons of camels and shell pieces from old ostrich eggs. Sometimes Hassan halts. Through the whining wind, he can distinguish the sound of a vehicle from miles away. Long before we hear it, if we ever do.

For lunch: bread with canned sardines and a simple soup of water and wheat flour.

Later, we return through the evening darkness to the main road and the petrol station. Occasionally Hassan leans out through the window and looks up at the stars for guidance. “If you get lost here, you’re a dead man,” Hassan says, and continues, “But I know every path here.” Quietly to myself I hope that what he said last is as true as his first statement.

He turns off the headlights and says, “This is the challenge that smugglers face. They drive a few kilometers inland from the main road by the coast to avoid the police and their checkpoints. Still have to go without any light in order not to be detected.” Despite the darkness, the road is surprisingly easy to see – maybe thanks to the moonlight. I take the wheel for a while as Hassan lights yet another pipe of tobacco. It’s a relief when we finally reach the main road. The hour of driving – with the surrounding landscape never changing – felt like forever. Like the eternity a lost man would face.

In the outskirts of town, two wild dogs feast on a sheep. Dead cattle along the road isn’t unusual – they’ve probably been hit by vehicles at night.

After some 50 km, I catch up on a lonely fisherman on moped. He has wild black beard and circular, small shades kind-of John Lennon-style. Despite his age, he speaks quite decent English. We keep each other company for half an hour; try to talk through the hard blowing wind. At the turnoff to a small dirt path, we halt to say goodbye. A few hundred meters away towards the sea, he has a fishing camp – a sole tent. Further away, an escarpment leads down to the beach and then the ocean. The wind is too hard today for fishing, he says. He is just there to pick up a few things and bring them home to Boujdour. In one or two weeks’ time, when the weather has become better, he will return to do some fishing.

Another ten kilometers up the road, a deserted truck by the roadside becomes our shelter from the wind for lunch. Although wind and sand gets by anyway, so our bread crunches quite some with every bite. As we continue southward, the wind is still in our favor. Sometimes, butterflies join in. They circle playfully around us before they vanish, maybe heading back to the desert. The wind blows the sand across the road, like shawls sweeping across the tar; like souls of the desert.

Reaching another petrol station after almost 150 km, we meet Hassan. He invites us to his camp 25 km inland, where he works as a geologist. He is dressed in a military-green jacked, and underneath a camouflage patterned vest. The jacket looks quite typical for a geologist with dozens of pockets to load with stones and other findings.

We leave our bikes locked in at the station and hop into Hassans Landrover. Lina up front with Hassan and I on the floor in the back together with two Hassan’s two companions Barer and Molod. Molod speaks very quietly – uses a lot of body language – about God, bread, the sun and the magic leaves of the acacia tree that can palliate diarrhea. Our friends sunburned, windswept faces and screwed-up eyes testify a life under an ever shining sun. Deep wrinkles by the corners of their eyes after much peering – and a lot of laughter.

Hassan drives off from the tarred main road, that follows the coast, and speeds away across the semi-desert sand and gravel. He follows barely visible tracks; faint trails in the sand from those who have come before us. He keeps referring to his camp as ‘the paradise’, and after an hour or so of driving, we understand why. A green forest – covered in dust – emerges in front of us through the else monotone, flat desert landscape. As we arrive, the sun sets behind us.

The place is really an oasis in the middle of nowhere. Hassan parks the car by the first trees, and we walk the last bit to his place. The camp is fenced off, and outside by gate sit two elder men on large blankets. We drink tea, taste some sweetened, fresh camel milk and eat dates with them, before we continue inside. The camp itself is made up of two large, hangar shaped tents (expedition style). The kitchen and dining table is in one of them, as well as a writing-desk, and we sleep in the other on each a mattress. Hassan has constructed everything himself. He has connected a solar panel that gives enough electricity for a refrigerator, an electric stove, light in the evening, and maybe even some watching of TV. Further, deeper inside the forest, he has built a grand concrete piscine. It’s filled with water from what really makes the place a paradise – a natural hot spring. The 35 degrees Celsius water gives great warmth in the cool evening. Beautiful!

For dinner, we eat a tajine of dried camel meat, potatoes, tomatoes, onion and raisins.

Like yesterday, the wind is on our side – at times I reach 50 km/h on the straight, flat road. Beautiful! The wind is actually always north in the Sahara, but it’s not always that it blows so strongly.

In Boujdour, we meet Abdo, twenty years old. He invites us to stay with him and his family in their house in “La Campamento II.” The area looks like a rush job of less solid yet decent houses. If I understood it correctly, the area was built by the Moroccan government so to resettle Moroccans. It is yet another attempt in changing the majority of Western Sahara into Moroccans in time for a vote for independence (which has also been postponed several times). A group of police officers waved negatively towards me when I tried to take a photo of the area.

In the evening, Abdo takes us on a walk through town, and down to the beach/waterfront. In the gloomy darkness, the streetlights’ circular beams seem miles apart. The ocean waves throw wet winds over land. Back home, we are served a traditional soup with dates and bread.

The first twenty or so km south of El Aaiún cut through dunes of sand. Occasionally they spread out partly over the road – unstable ground for the bike. The wind is strong. Gusts of sand whips ones face and legs like needles. The sand gets inside the shades. I squint to keep the sand out of my eyes; see only a few meters ahead of me. The sand is like hands trying to block ones sight.

When we finally reach the coast and turn south, the wind is instead from behind. We make 25-35 km/h without much effort. End up staying at a petrol station along the road.

We reach El Aaiún (Laâyoune, El Ayun) in the afternoon. Its streets wind over a few hills; it’s one of those towns that would take a lifetime to understand and navigate. We find some kind of a centre anyway, and call Sanae. She is the daughter of a family that we met in Akhfenir, Morocco, who invited us to stay with them here. Sanae comes and fetches us outside the call center at Rue Mekka, and we walk together to her family’s house. We end up staying twelve days in the beautiful town together with Sanae, her family and her friends. Once we leave, it feels as if leaving home.

Memories of El Aaiún

The clear, warm blue sky as the sun has just set. The sand colored houses, like edgy dunes. The few but bright shining lights – the streetlights, and the naked light bulbs from inside the houses. The wind, and the sand that it whirls up from the streets and alleys. The dead empty streets as the sun has just set, and the people have gathered inside to celebrate the fasting. For dinner harira – a traditional soup that is eaten during Ramadan – or just a piece of bread dipped in olive oil. The many green-suits walking the streets. The UN’s huge, bright white shining 4×4 vehicles that fill the parking lots outside the city’s most expensive hotels; their well-fed staff that occupies the tables at the few cafés that serve burgers and fries; where the prices are on menus. Uncle Hassan, whom every afternoon comes home with something from the ocean, kept in a black plastic bag: a dozen of sardines, a couple of big fishes no one can name, or a gigantic old crab.

Going rounds of cafés with Sanae and her friend Taha. Or take a ride in some friends’ black Mercedes to the sea. There, the straight, empty street along the beach is lined by tall streetlights, which light is dimmed by the damp air. We have a coffee at the only open café there by the ocean – as empty as the street and the beach outside. As empty as the ocean.

The Christmas lights that decorate the nearby mosque. The men as they walk there for the evening prayers. Their decided steps, filled with faith, underneath peacefully swaying djellabas.

We cross the more or less invisible border to Western Sahara. A country that for long has been, and still is, illegally occupied by Morocco. We had quite some political discussions on our way through the country, and a few sahrawis – especially those politically active – had the courage to tell us how badly the Moroccan authorities treat them. Because of the risk of reprisals, I cannot mention this criticism in the same sentence that I use to describe the people that expressed it. Instead, I write about one such meeting in the summary for Western Sahara.

First a shut down petrol station, then the road down to village Dawra and then a few residential houses lining the road. When passing the latter, some men come running out to greet us. After chatting for a little while, they invite us to tea at their house.

We leave our shoes by the entrance, and get to sit in a seat of honour in the livingroom sofa, whilst the family stands up or sits on the wall-to-wall carpet. 17-year-old Hmad, the youngest of the men, pulls out a small notebook from his jeans. The small book is bended and torn, as if one with the jeans pocket. Inside, Hmad has drawn pictures of a boat. A small wooden boat, shaped like a banana, that will take him to the Spanish Canary Islands, he imagines. He says he will get there soon. The worn notebook is a book of hard dreams. Dreams that fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans.

Hmad invites us to stay the night at his house. He has just moved in, so the four rooms are still empty. He fetches some thick blankets and a TV from his parents, and a charcoal grill on which to make tea for us. The TV doesn’t work (no antenna), so it’s more like a piece furniture. Some cockroaches also lively up the else clean walls; they observe us at distance. While Lina waits at home, Hmad and I walk through the night to the village’s small centre. He makes a phone call to some relatives in El Aaiún. I buy some bread for dinner, to eat with olive oil.