Mauritania:
Coming from Morocco, entry into Mauritania is one of the most painful experiences you will have throughout your Africa travels. We consider the Benin-into-Nigeria border to be the worst border crossing we experienced in Africa. In our ranking of worst African border crossings, Western Sahara-into-Mauritania very well deserves the second place.
Once you are in the country, Mauritanian people turned out to be very nice and friendly. In Mauritania we never felt any harassment against tourists and their money, so common in most African countries. In the tiny shanty villages of the North, people will run to the road as they notice a car of tourists pass by: clearly they hope you will through them something. However, as we walked around in the country's main towns, we were never bothered for money, a cadaux (gift), a bonbon or anything. more to the contrary, Mauritanian people were always very friendly and sweet whenever we asked for help or assistance: like for example if we asked some random person on the street to allow us use his phone to make a call for us. In one ocasion, as we stopped in some small town in the North, I entered some building asking if they knew any place where I could withdrew some money. As the only ATM's in the country seem to be in Nouatchott (the capital), the man asked me what I wanted the money for. I explained I needed money to buy food. He then replied he could give me (for free) some food, some sandwich to eat. In most any other African country, where the white traveller is immediately assumed without any question to be stupidly wealthy, a reply and an offer of that kind had been totally impossible.
As a matter of fact, contrary to common opinion, inside the country, we did not even ever had a problem with any official. Mauritanian police offices have quite a reputation of being corrupt. We did not experience that inside the country (we did have a rather bad experience at the border, though). Certainly, there were many checkpoints along the way and it slowly became rather tedious to be constantly stopped. However, they were always very friendly and only one or two times, we were kindly asked if we had any little gift for them. We did not and were still able to continue with no further inconvenience.
Traveling through Mauritania, you will find and be stopped in many checkpoints along the road. This turns out to be rather tedious, but it is not any worse than in most other AAfrican countries. As a matter fact, we would say it is less painful than average in Africa. In Mauritania all they ask you is to fill out your information: la fiche. This includes your name, driver's license, license plate, etc. For this reason, it is a good idea to write down all that information in one sheet and then make multiple copies of it. You will get through each of the checkpoints if you just hand them one copy of 'la fiche', with all your information. If you think Mauritania checkpoints are bad, wait to go to Cameroon or Gabon. Over there it is like visiting the dentist's office: they keep looking for any chance to pull some tooth (money) out your mouth. In fact, you will not need to get to Ecuatorial Africa; you will already experience your own ordeal at Mauritania's border crossings...
