New Photos – The Mauritanian Sahara

By Steven Shoppman in

Months ago many of you watched the video that we put together about our time in the Sahara in the Banc d’Arguin National Park.  Here are the photos.

Photos On Flickr

See the video

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The first big dune we had to cross got us stuck a good five times.The Tundra has so much weight that it gets stuck much more often.Miles and miles of sand and no roads gets a little uneasy at timesGPS is pretty acurate, but without a good map of GPS coordinates it can get tricky.More kilometers than not we made our own tracks.The Mauritanian desert is no easy task to navigate.Sometimes you have to stop the trucks and hike ahead to make sure that the sand does not get too deep.Deep ruts slow the trucks down in the Sahara desert.We had the entire costline to ourselves for miles.So Bouey practiced his arabic a little bit.Mautitania was french occupied, so who would we be to not collect some fresh escargot?Nothing like living large in the middle of nowhere.As the sun goes down you begin to realized why you spent all day eating sand.Words cannot explain the beauty of a sunset that you have worked so hard for that day.As the sun goes down farther and farther, the light just got more amazingLeaving our beautiful beach campsite was no easy task with sandy hills and cliffs surrounding us.Setting up for some action shots.Taking a break from driving.The huge, wide-open basins are great for speed testing:)Civilization at last! ??The high tides make fields of shells in the middle of the desert.Bouey is taking a rest from some hard runs dune surfing.Dunes as far as the eye can see.Brook...making some fresh tracksSteve checks out his line.He goes for the leapAnd botches the landing, with a nice mouthful of sand as a present from the desert.And the hike back up.At night these little guys would crawl under your tent for warmth and make a really creepy noise.After you get the car unstuck, it cannot stop for danger of getting stuck again, so the diggers have to walk.A little free souvenir, some sand.Every once in a while there is a lone rouge tree that says,

 

This entry was written by Steven Shoppman, posted on June 27, 2008 at 1:18 pm, filed under Africa, Mauritania, New Photos and tagged , , , , , , . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.