Today we got up early and started packing between having breakfast.  We paid our camping bill and headed for the petrol station to get petrol for the stove and 20l of diesel for the jerrycan to avoid filling up with dirty Mauritanian fuel.  The Shell station had no diesel so after filling the stove bottle we went to the next station to fill the jerrycan. While there, we gave the kids who came to ask for some things, some pens and then headed for the Diama border post about forty five minutes away. 

In under 2 hours we were through and tackled the severely rutted road through the Diawling national park. The park is part of a Trans-Border Biosphere Reserve that is a popular bird nesting site because of the combination of fresh and salt water at the Senegal River delta. We saw lots of ducks and flamingoes in the pans and big flocks of pelicans flying overhead, a warthog with three piglets and some of the fishing communities where they were catching, smoking  and drying fish.

As we came to the end of this long ground stretch we came across 15 to 20 bikers from Portugal heading for Dakar.   A “bom dia” and apologies for not being able to speak more Portuguese,  elicited a conversationin English with the driver of their backup vehicle at the end of the line of bikes. They were doing a trip to Dakar.

A few kilometres later we were back on tarmac. 

Soon the dreaded warning light was back on the dashboard.  Much googling for Ford in Nouakchott only came up with a newspaper article about Caetano(a Portuguese company) having recently been awarded the Ford dealership in Mauritania from the former dealer.  Caetano operates many motor dealerships in west and east Africa, including the one we had been to in Dakar. But, we could not find any website, location or other reference to Ford in Mauritania.  So we googled for the best vehicle diagnostics centre in Nouakchott.

Major road works on the N2 into Nouakchott meant we had to navigate our way through sandy backroads until we could reach the diagnostic centre.  Trevor asked them where the Ford dealer was and they pointed him to a blue building 300 meters down the road.  This looked more like a spares dealership than a service center, but Trevor went in and asked.  One of the customers who was just leaving spoke English and said he was Lebanese and has a big auto repair shop down the road and had the diagnostic machine available. His machine showed that it was exhaust emissions related issue which he said was probably related to dirty Mauritanian fuel and predicted that it will not occur once we are in Morocco. He cleared the warning light and we paid him 15 US dollars for his services. 

We headed for the Auberge Triskel. We emptied the 20 litres of fuel in the jerrycan and added about 15 litres of Addblue  at the hotel. We had dinner there where Trevor tried the camel stew with dates. The night was spent in a Bedouin tent on the roof of the house, with thick hard mattresses on the floor, generally quite comfortable but lots of mosquitoes but the mosquito net sorted that out.