IT WILL BE SO AWFUL, IT WILL BE WONDERFUL

 

THE SAGA:

Europe
Lift Off
The Maree Hotel
Theatrical Debut
Fruit & Valentines
Old Friends, New Acquaintances
London Summary
The Dragoman Truck
Running of the Bulls

West Africa
Photos
Truckin
Marketing Marrakesh Style
Bits of Drama & Humor
Morocco Summary
Diarrhea in the Minefields
The Sahara Desert
Marooned!
Ship of Flies
Truly Gritty
Almost Arrested
Urban Adventures
Rural Excursions
Summary of M. & M.

Central Africa
Photos
Romance in the Rain
Border Crossings
God is Great
Hotel de California
Beach Blanket Bingo
Dining al Fresco
Going Mental
Shitty Cities
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Turd Wars
Why I Wear Shoes
Summary of Equatoria

Zaire
Photos
Heart of Darkness
Near Disasters
First Week in Zaire
First Week in Zaire, part 2
Bridge Over River X
Forest of Snakes
Bastards of Buta
JimBo's Jungle Bakery
Zaire's Last Grasp
Goodbye Zaire

East Africa
Photos
Gorillas and Guerrillas
To Bathe or Not To Bathe
The Dickhead
My Kind of Town
Gang Attacks & Death Mobiles
Land of the Carnivores
The Big Game
Losing It in Zanzibar
Summary of East Africa
Goodbye Africa, Hello Asia

Central Asia
Photos
Mission Improbable
Mission Improbable (Part 2)
Hello Yellow Silk Road
A Tale of Two City-States
Let's Make a Deal
Trolling for Trouble
Can You Say Kyrgyzstan?
Cheap Hotels & Expensive Women
The Ugly Americans
Central Asian Summary

Pakistan & India
Busing for Glory
On the Road Again
Shangri-la Part 1
Shangri-la Part 2
Airborne!
Shangri-la Part 3
Hello Dolly
Valley of Shawls
The Omen
Temple of Rats
Born in the USA
Epilogue
Postmortem

Back to Home

Mauritania Diary (Part 2)—Ship of Flies

Friday, March 10: Campground in central Nouadhibou


Repairing the gearbox
The Dragoman passengers settle into the slow passage of time as Dave and Helen, our drivers, labor feverishly around the clock to disconnect the drive train and dismantle the gear box. It is a formidable task when you consider the havoc a few grains of sand or a couple puffs of dust could wreak inside the transmission. A block and tackle is rigged up to hoist the heavy parts about. Dave sketches exploded view drawings, illustrating the mangled gears, and faxes them to London. A replacement gear box cannot be sent to us because it is too heavy to air freight into Nouadhibou.

The town is hot and dry with few diversions for a stranded tourist. The only greenery to be seen is the paint on the little taxi cabs that dart up and down the main street. Was that color chosen for the fleet because it does not exist naturally here? Should you chance across a bush or small tree, it is invariably covered in dust. No problem for the goats and donkeys that wander about as they prefer to forage from an unlimited supply of cardboard scraps and discarded plastic bags. Still the hawk-nosed Moorish men in turbans and robes add an exotic look to the dull, brown landscape, I could not resist buying a large purple scarf to wrap around my head so I can nod knowingly to the locals. The houli, as it is called, proves quite effective at keeping dust out but I couldn't figure out how to wear a baseball cap with it.

The BARF cooking team continues to introduce classic American food to the Brits. Today sloppy joes are on the menu: minced beef browned with onions, smothered in thick tomato sauce, and ladled into a bun. How ironic it is that here in an obscure town on the desolate coast of West Africa, the Unit and I are eating the same food we would have at home! However, the preparation process is quite different and therein lies the cultural experience.


Shopping in Nouadhibou
Nouadhibou has a couple modest supermarkets but by modest I mean equal to one aisle in a modern American convenience store. Since most of the goods are imported by sea or air, they are often too expensive for our food budget. So the Unit and I join the early morning crowd in the native market to get the ingredients we need for our cook shift. Bread is no problem—decent bakeries are France's colonial legacy to West Africa. Likewise, vegetables and fruit are easily had although, lacking French, we frequently resort to scratching numbers on the ground to negotiate prices.

Fresh meat is a challenge. Let me describe a typical third world, open-air butcher shop. It is usually an unpainted shack made of scrap wood and corrugated tin. The counter consists of a couple darkly-stained boards waist or chest high. In the center of the counter is a large, old-fashioned scale with its collection of kilogram weights. The nicer places have a chopping block, also darkly stained. If you are really lucky (assuming the shop has electricity), there will be a cooler in the rear for storing meat. We had no such luck in Nouadhibou. Neat cellophane- wrapped packages do not exist here nor does meat cut in any recognizable portion. Instead there are simply hunks of raw meat and bone lying about. When you order (always by the kilogram), the butcher chops away and plops the chunks down on the scale. The piece de resistance are the great clouds of flies which inevitably descend upon the meat. A good shop will employ young men to fan the flies away periodically. During this time, it is a good idea to step back as the clouds can be pretty thick.

The key to buying meat in such a setting is to ignore the ambiance, especially the airborne part of it. Plus there are a few tricks that the Unit and I have learned:

  • Always go to the market early in the morning when the meat is freshly butchered.

  • Purchase from amiable butchers only. One who never smiles or one who smiles too much cannot be trusted.

  • Do not buy anything that smells bad or is no longer red in colour. Bad meat cannot be made good by cooking it.

  • Convey to the shop's proprietor that you will return tomorrow if you do not die from food poisoning today.

  • Insist on the best cuts and pay top dollar (or ougiya, in the case of Mauritania); never haggle. For beef, this is usually the filet—demand it.

  • Do not be afraid of some fat in your pile of meat—you can always throw it away. Remember that many third world cuisines prize fatty meat and shopkeepers are honoring you by including it.

  • Be sure to wash the meat before cooking to remove any fly eggs. Always wash your hands beforehand (and afterward unless you want the eggs on you).

We pushed the meat through the truck's grinder, narrowly avoiding the addition of my thumb several times, and cooked up a splendid pot of sloppy joe mixture. But much to our chagrin, the Brits were relatively graceful in their handling of the messy sandwiches. Perhaps years of experience maneuvering baked beans on toast into their mouths helped.

Saturday, March 11: same place

This morning we made banana pancakes much to the delight of all the flies in central Nouadhibou. But our group of travellers is unperturbed—they have adjusted their standards. It is amusing to watch the buzzers get stuck in the jam, honey, and syrup. On the other hand, it became annoying when you had to shake 10 or 20 flies off the butter knife.

Later I researched the truck's collection of travel books for advice on coping with flies. From "Traveler's Health—How to Stay Healthy Abroad" by Dr. Richard Dawood: "Flies live with equal happiness on dung and on food. If you allow flies to walk on your food and then you eat it, for all practical purposes you are eating excrement."

As I noted above, to survive this menace you must adapt. As an example, ponder the following comments from Dr. Jane Howorth's travel medicine book, "Healthy Travel: Bugs, Bites, and Bowels."

"Flies can be infuriating to guests at the dinner table and different people react to them in different ways. Those who are new to tropical travel are often revolted by flies feasting on their food, but with experience people tend to become increasingly blase so that it is possible to grade the length of time on expatriate has lived abroad by his reaction when a fly lands in his beer. The new expatriate will throw the beer away and pour himself another. An expatriate who is well settled into life abroad will fish out the fly and continue drinking, but the truly hardened expatriate will drink the beer, eat the fly and extol the virtues of this readily available source of protein [exclaiming] 'the chicken is so stringy, you see!'"

The owner of the campground interrupted my reading and invited the Unit and I to a tea ceremony. The man unfurled a large woven mat on which we sat cross-legged. Then he lit a small brazier of charcoal and placed a silver teapot on it. The pot contained water, sugar and ground tea leaves that smelled strongly of anise.

When a boil was reached, he poured some hot liquid into a drinking glass no bigger than a shot glass. This glass was emptied into the second glass which, in turn, was poured into the third glass. Then the liquid was returned to the pot. The man was a master of high altitude pouring, filling each tiny glass from two feet above without spilling a drop. The Unit later commented that this man's toilet was probably never fouled by careless male urination. The cycle was repeated a second time to thoroughly warm up each glass. Finally, he poured tea into all three glasses and we threw them down with gusto.

The man spoke only French, we only English, so I showed him my internet and IBM business cards which led to a fairly bizarre conversation. After three rounds of the scalding, bittersweet foam, the ceremony was concluded as the hospitality generously offered was hospitably received, I think.

Tonite's dinner promises to be unique—the next cooking team, Tony and Yoshi, bought two big octopuses from a fisherman on the beach. The group maxes out at lunch in anticipation.

This episode was painfully written and edited in longhand since a Nigerian sewer crashed my hard drive and DHL air freight trashed the rest of my laptop. The file was uploaded using the marvelous 64 KB link of the African Regional Centre for Computing (ARCC) in Nairobi, Kenya (http://www.arcc.or.ke).

Next KlimaGram: Mauritania Diary (Part 3)—Truly Gritty | Return to Home

Last Updated September 1999
To rag on the author, send e-mail to JimBo at jetcityjimbo@yahoo.com
To contact the webmistress, send e-mail to Suebee at suebee45@hotmail.com

Copyright © 1997-1999 Jet City JimBo All rights reserved.