Sahara

It's been quite a month. I was back in Senegal a week before I had the chance to leave again, this time by foot, across the Sahara.

At Rosso, Senegal, I was set upon by bandits who took money to send me across the Senegal River, and the border with Mauritania, to an illegal landing point where I climbed through a whole in a wall to enter Mauritania without a stamp in my passport. Then I had to go back to the border the next morning and explain that I had made a mistake, and would they put a little stamp on that page. They did, for a fee.

In Mauritania, there is only one thing to do. There is a train (see photo), the longest train in the world. It runs from Schoum, a selection of huts in the Sahara, to Nouadibou, a town on the coast and border with Western Sahara. This train is 2.5km long, 200 open wagons, and carries iron ore to the port for export.

I reached Schoum under the guidance of a man in a blue butcher's coat, a hulk of a man with a mass of facial hair. He carried a baby goat in his arms, cradling it as if it wasn't going to be eaten later. He and I took a 4x4 to Schoum across desert of blinding beauty, we stopped for prayer at sunset, to pick up a man living with his family in a tent, to drink some camel milk.

The desert is not empty, as I imagined. It is full of low bushes and camels and hillocks and hills and rocky outcrops and families living in one place before moving to the next. It is cold and windy when the sun lowers, and to fall asleep in the car and to awake looking out of the window at such a lonely and confrontational landscape, as if in its infinite size it has the power to swallow small people up, is humbling. Frightening.

At Schoum, the butcher, the goat, and I stood in the darkness straddling a narrow set of train tracks. We looked both ways and saw no lights. Perhaps the train had already left. We asked some kids, they said the train was late. I went to a gas-lit hut and asked for some couscous, which they brought, with a camel bone in the middle, shards of meat and sprinklings of sand. The friend of the couscous server took me in another 4x4 to the train tracks and we saw a light in the distance, the front of the train, and one kilometers behind it, the rear. It rattled past and eventually stopped. I climbed a ladder into a wagon full of fine iron ore and the man waved me off.

I stayed 18 hours on the wagon, my head wrapped in a cloth to keep out the black powder and the cold. It was a full moon and under it I travelled 700 kilometers across the Sahara, past dunes and camels standing lonely on a hill, past villages built from oil drums, nomad dwellings, through the night and into a cold and misty morning.

At Nouadibou, the taxi driver would not let me sit in the front of the car. This is not a woman's world.

I shared the taxi with a man who looked like a Rajasthani Indian, fine black circles ringing his eyes and a long slender face. The driver was as dark and round-faced as a Senegalese. A woman got in as pale as me, dark brown eyes. They all spoke Arabic. No two Mauritanians look like they come from the same place and both men and women are as striking as any people I know. The men wear billowing pale blue cloths, the women metres of pinks and yellows and reds.

In Western Sahara, I hitch-hiked on a sardine truck, flip-flop vans and in a Mercedes Benz. The driver of the sardine truck, pictured here on the coast of this vast country, played independence-for-Western Sahara-music (suprisingly cheery stuff) for 600km and refused to take any money at the end of the trip. In the flip-flop van I was accompanied by two Mauritanians who sat in the back with the plastic shoes and brewed tea on a gas canister. When it was ready they drummed on the side of the van and we stopped and climbed out into the night, the sand beneath my feet cold like snow, and drank tea in the darkness. The driver was pleased to give me, a woman, a job (handing round the tea). So there is a role for women in this country, after all.

In Rabat, Morocco, I went to the steam baths. After a hot scrub I sat in the changing room and talked to other women. It was the first time I had spoken to a woman, spoken openly to anyone, since leaving Senegal. They asked me what cause I defended as a journalist and I felt this was a country and a people I could love, a people engaged in politics and world events. I told them women in Mauritania can not sit in the front of cars and they were horrified. Here, they said, we are free.

I ate well in Morocco. Fresh vegetables, good bread, stuffed sardines, mint tea, grilled meat, spices and dates and sweet nutty treats. I saw thousand year old arches hiding clusters of blue and white houses, Andalucian gardens filled with clementine trees. Men bringing in olives from the fields, saddle bags straddling donkeys, barefooted children herding goats. Goats climbing trees. Stylish and sophisticated cities, uncluttered, clean. Not one person tried to sell me a carpet. And I wanted to buy one.

In London no one believed I saw goats climbing trees.