On chickening out

After a long while of cycling through Western Sahara, we had our sights set on a Mauritanian peninsular, and the city of Nouadhibou, for some rest and time to get the usual ‘new country admin’ sorted. I had got it into my head that we’d then travel with the bikes on the Sahara Express, the Iron Ore Train, from Nouadhibou to Choum, before riding to Atar and beyond. We love the combination of bikes on trains, and there are a number of things we’d like to visit over that side of Mauritania, rather than just transiting. Not least because it feels like we’ve done a lot of transiting of late and that’s not really our style.

Having chatted with a few people and done some further research, to be honest, I’ve chickened out. In particular, our bikes and luggage would make it a bit of an ordeal. If we were not trying to get those across with us, I think we’d give it a go. It can be done in a variety of ways but all of them seem to involve a lot of waiting around, harsh conditions and a potential mad rush (in our case with daft amounts of kit) to get on.

I’d liken my thinking to how Beck can be regarding food. Beck is a fussier eater than me, with many more food stuffs on her ‘only if I have to’ list. When we were preparing for this trip I would encourage Beck to push at these boundaries a bit and she often replied that she would do so if she had to. It’s true to say that as we’ve travelled she has done just this. That’s how I feel about this trip. It’s something we would do if it would help us get out of dodge but it feels too fraught with stresses and risks for us right now. Like an extreme version of cycling instead of getting on a GWR train in the UK.

Maybe we’ll get braver—we already have in so many ways—and we have the luxury of time to adapt our plans when we don’t feel up to stuff. Though sadly we don’t have enough time on our Mauritanian visa to ride over to Atar and beyond, and will therefore now head south down the coast to Saint-Louis in Senegal.

I tend to live by the old adage that you are better off regretting the things you do rather than those you don’t, but this applies in any case when travelling the way we do. The route you choose necessarily means you forgo another route. Something you just have to accept. I’m adding skipping the Iron Ore Train to the pile of route choices we didn’t take.

One thing I do know is that when we are battling the insane headwind forecast for when we leave this peninsular—that we only came on to because we could take the train back off it—we won’t have an mental capacity to contemplate what we missed by not taking the Iron Ore Train…