January 24th: Dakar to Nouadhibou to Las Palmas
On route to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, we make a tech stop in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. This was once called Port Etienne and was an aviation outpost of the French mail run from Toulouse to Dakar, flown by none other than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In Wind, Sand and Stars he wrote, “Port Etienne is situated on the edge of one of the unsubdued regions of the Sahara. It is not a town. There is a stockade, a hangar, and a wooden quarters for the French crews.”
Video Credit: Konstantin Barabash
Now, although it is the second-largest city in the country, it looks like a godforsaken scree of detritus baked pale by the sun and strewn along the littoral of a long and narrow peninsula of sand. Fishing trawlers float in the outer harbour. Many are nearly derelict, their nets hang limp from booms jutting out over the water like the sagging antennae of water beetles, their steel carapaces encrusted with the slow rot of rust. We overfly the marina and it blooms with hundreds of slender wooden launches clustered together, sterns tied and bows radiating out row upon row so that their white hulls and blue concave insides create dense fractal flowers bunched along the docks.
Photo Credits: Mick Sheehy
The handler is dressed in long desert robes with a keffiyeh wrapped around his head like a Bedouin. His face is nearly hidden by the head scarf. He speaks five languages and takes me to the tower to file our flight plan the old way - scrawled out by hand on paper.
From here we make the water crossing to the Canaries. This is Konstantin’s last night on the tour and it feels like the unofficial end to the Africa leg, despite having just received the permit to demonstrate the aircraft to the Algerian Air Force earlier in the day, at the last minute, after repeated and convoluted diplomatic applications and the intervention of the Canadian Embassy and Trade Commission.
In the cool night we drink good Spanish wine, speak bad Spanish, and eat traditional Spanish food in a nondescript restaurant hidden amid the streets of this Spanish pueblo nestled below the steep arid slopes of the towering Pico de Nieves of Grand Canary.
Tomorrow we will head back towards the mainland and Marrakesh, back into Africa on our way to Algiers. But right now I am embroiled in planning where we will install the ferry fuel system and planning the marathon ferry to Singapore for the airshow. The upcoming demo in Algiers seems almost an afterthought.
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