The morning was cold. With the cold breeze from the ocean, that turned up last night, the temperature had plummeted to just above 18°C before sunrise, almost 20°C lower than during the day. What a difference! We were slightly shivering when we got up. The rising sun started warming us quickly, while we had our breakfast. The wash room and toilets still looked like a mess, after the entire overlander bus had been through them last night. Only late in the morning a camping staff member hosed down the place and cleaned it.

The temperature quickly climbed above 25°C and further. The humidity dropped at a similar rate.
Over a coffee, I chatted to one of the German overlanders in a van in camp. We exchanged travel stories and discussed traveling and countries in general. He is in a fortune position to own an amusement attraction in Germany and his season ends in September. Therefore, he can easily travel after that until Christmas. Today, he wanted to reach St. Louis in Senegal. So I recommended him the place, where I stayed on my way north, the Zebrabar. He will try to get there by tonight. That means, that we might see him again there, if Alex actually makes it to Nouakchott tonight.

Due to the heat, we took it easy. When it was time for lunch, again we had another small lunch from our pantry.
The owner of the hotel and camping complex came past for a chat. We stood there for some time discussing traveling with Mauritanian Airlines and local politics.

In the afternoon, I went to the office of the hotel to ask if I could print out my visa letter to get back into Côte d’Ivoire later this month. The receptionist told me, that she had been trying to print some form this morning, but none came out. I offered to take a look at the computer and printer, why it wouldn’t work. She happily agreed. It was a Windows machine with a mixture of French and Arabic software on it. Not so easy to make sense out of things. The keyboard was one of those AZERTY-Arabic keyboards, that tries to offer you all kinds of key sets but you, as the user, don’t know how to get those latin keys to work. With a bit of trying, I managed to figure most of them out. It was extra challenging with my password logging into my email. After fiddling around for a while and she showing me, which document she had tried to print earlier this morning, I thought, I had found the culprit. A wrong printer driver for the printer attached had been activiated. How, why and who did this, I had no idea but within minutes, 40 times the same form came flying out of the printer, only to be interrupted once in a while by a jammed sheet. Once cleared, the printer did its job.

Now it was time for my documents. Logged into my email and, of course, Google immediately started to complain heavily, that I logged in from an unknown device from an unknown location, yada, yada, yada. Yes, I told it to do so in such cases, because I use all the available extra security features, such as two-factor authentication, etc.
Once I had authorised the log in with my phone, I found my email with the documents to print and ran them off on the newly configured printer easily. Very happy with my success and even being thanked very much for my help, I made my way back to the beach and camping section. On the way, I started chatting to one of the German passengers of the big overland truck. Their plan is to go all the way to South Africa within five months and then back up on the east coast, hopefully making it to Cairo. He had, however, only booked from Fes in Morocco to Guinea Bissau. He also asked for information about traveling in West Africa in general.

Having seen the mess in the bathroom yesterday, Charlotte was smart and made an early call to have a shower ahead of everyone else, while Trevor attempted to have snooze in their tent, that was still standing in the afternoon sun being a proper sweat tent.

Alex’s saga trying to get here continued. He was at the airport in time today. Then the news came that the departure was delayed until 19:20, three hours later and with a different plane, a Boing 737 instead of the Embraer E175 originally foreseen. The Embraer actually turned up at Abidjan airport coming from Bamako during the afternoon, all passengers disembarked and a good hour later it left again into the West African skies en route to Bamako. Alex and all other stranded passengers were still sitting in the terminal waiting for their flight. What the heck! There are rumours that the plane left with passengers, who bought tickets since Thursday. Their alleged plane, a Boeing 737, had at that point not yet been seen flying over West Africa towards Abidjan to pick up the stranded passengers. Hope that Alex would be making it today, was fading yet again.
Alex and I exchanged many messages back and forth. While chatting to him, I watched three Mauritanian veiled young ladies having the fun of their lives on the children’s swings. Screaming in ecstasy whenever the swing skewed and sent them in all directions, letting them sometimes bang into each other.

Then, at quarter past six, I spotted a Boeing 737 from Mauritanian Airlines with an unusual flight number, having had departed Nouakchott a little earlier and heading straight towards Abidjan, without explicitly saying so. It must be the plane to pick them up and finally bring them here. Hope that he would make it here tonight had to a certain extend.
Later, once the plane had reached Ivorian airspace, Alex messaged that fellow passengers in the terminal were getting unruly, demanding information about their fate.
At shortly before eight p.m. and minutes before their special plane landed in Abidjan, the legendary West Africa traveller Alex transmitted us the following lines, published with explicit permission from the author himself: “I’ve decided to write about my experience:
Having endured nearly 24 hours stranded in Abidjan, a group of passengers orchestrated a mini-revolt at the immigration entrance. Their rallying cry, “nous sommes fatigués” echoed the collective exhaustion. The demand resonated – summon the elusive man from Air Mauritania or brace for unrest. The consequence? The airport’s police chief descended with a squad of armed officers, urging the crowd to stay composed as he personally delved into the issue.
As tranquility settled, Mr. John, representing Air Mauritania, appeared, escorted by the police chief and his retinue. Addressing the weary travelers, he delivered the news: the flight would touch down, albeit fashionably late, around 9 pm. Amidst this unforeseen chaos, standing out was inevitable, especially as I found myself towering over most in the uprising. An experience unlike any other, marked by peculiarities and a lingering anticipation in the air. I suspect that should the plane not arrive, I may participate in my first West African revolt.“

We here in Nouakchott at the beach chuckled after reading these lines. At quarter past eight he announced that the flight was finally boarding. We wished him a safe journey and that we will track him. Depending how the plane will find its way back to Nouakchott, the pickup will be very early tomorrow morning!
Finally after waiting more than 48 hours, we could watch on our plane tracker app the flight MAI112A had left Abidjan at 21h25! That meant it would be a long night for Trevor and me. Estimated arrival time around two a.m.! Stay tuned if we are actually able to welcome him to Mauritania and to the expedition!