Nouadhibou and Nouakchott, the two largest (and more or less only) cities in Mauritania must be contenders for the best place names in the world. How can you not visit?

Nouadhibou

An arid peninsula surrounded by shimmering blue ocean leads to Nouadhibou, the second town of Mauritania. It’s a dusty hotchpotch of yellow ochre and beige buildings, ramshackle shops lurking in alleyways and minarets. Traffic has materialised from nowhere, a jam of vehicles, tricycle vans and donkey carts. The driving is frankly atrocious. No-one bothers to use their indicators as they veer right and left with gay abandon, across the oncoming traffic.

Nouadhibou has little to excite, except for the shipwreck cemetery, adjacent to the port, which, like nearby Dahkla in Western Sahara, is right at the tip pf the peninsula. It boasts that this boat mausoleum is one of the largest in the world, with more than 300 wrecks from all nations beached on the shores. Though the cemetery is diminishing in size, as the wrecks are being dismantled, the parts paddled ashore on dinghies, to be sold as scrap.

Nouakchott to Nouadhibou - 500 Kilometres of Desert

The road south is much as it was in Western Sahara, just a little more unkempt. we've swapped guide Kahlil for guide Ahmed, who is young and keen and gorgeously attired like Naji.

Camels line the plastic strewn verges, waiting to be milked, flocks of goats wander past. The nomads watching over them from pavilion style tents. Flat sand dotted with acacia scrub stretches to the horizon, every so often a gorgeous cluster of caramel coloured crescent dunes; these are cleared with ploughs, where they spill onto the tarmac. Naturally, driver Naji indulges in some dune bashing and there’s a whistling cargo train to chase. What’s the point of a Landcruiser otherwise?

The actual road is narrow, not quite a two-lane highway and trucks thunder past, asserting their dominance by holding to the centre and refusing to reduce speed. We lurch off- road to avoid them, juddering at the impact of the compressed air. There are copious roadblocks manned by soldiers who take an interest in our passports that is in direct proportion to the size of the queue waiting. Most of the traffic is heading north. Otherwise, there is just the odd wayside settlement, a miniature walled mosque, a few cuboid dwellings and some more goats.

Lunch is grilled chicken and chips in an empty restaurant, battling the flies. Unsurprisingly, vegetables are far from abundant in these areas. As usual, my guides follow up with foaming bitter tea ceremonially poured from aloft. When done properly the liquid is shifted from cup to cup to pot and back again for several minutes. It’s a serious business.

Every so often we encounter the sea, where the Sahara Desert spills into the ocean.

Nouakchott

Five hundred kilometres today, too many gendarmes halts to count, and we’ve finally reached Nouakchott, nestling on the coast and at the edge of the desert. Nouakchott means ‘place of the winds’; there are a lot of sandstorms. Despite this disincentive, it’s the largest city in the Sahara and was designated as the country’s capital only in 1960. It’s therefore one of the world’s newest capitals. The approach, on the airport road, is certainly a wide and modern highway, but it soon narrows, and we’re back amidst honking cars, inching very slowly indeed when we need to make a left turn. I shut my eyes.  The vehicles are mainly French and German of seventies or eighties vintage and boxy. A rust bucket taxi bumping along in front of us is full of holes and the front wing is hanging off. 'Come fly with me'.

It’s Independence Day this week and there are an abundance of flags and banners for sale in the capital; civic buildings are festooned in banners of the national colours. Red, for the blood shed in the independence struggles, was only added to the previously plain green and yellow flag last year.

Port de Peche, Nouakchott

The highlight of Nouakchott is the spectacularly colourful landing of hundreds of fishing boats at Port de Peche, with its fish market and numerous factories. Lines of men in woolly hats and PVC dungarees chant as they lift the boats onto rollers and manoeuvre them through the foam and up the steeply sloping beach. Seagulls wheel overhead screaming, women with bright headscarves squat in the sand spreading some of the catch in anticipation of an early sale and sad-eyed donkeys with carts wait patiently for the rest of the fish to be unloaded, as it is showered with ice, packed into crates or sacks and heaved onwards. 

Next, into the desert and Chinguetti, then south to Diawling National Park and the border with Senegal.