Rosso Border: Mauritania to Senegal
Getting across at the border at Rosso is hectic enough for me to write some detailed info to help others. Remember throughout the process that you have enough time to get to St Louis in the same day so don’t feel rushed at any point except to start early from Nouakchott.
- In Nouakchott, you need to get a taxi to Gare Rosso which is a standard price of 1000 ougiya. Its quite a long ride so worth the price.
- At Gare Rosso expect to pay anything from 1400 to 3000 ougiya depending on the seating. I paid 3000 because it was the next car leaving and I wanted to catch up with the Japanese guy I was supposed to meet earlier but was late for. I sat nice and comfortable for a relatively fast trip. I even overtook the squashed up Japanese guy who paid 1400 ougiyah.
- At border the drop you some distance from the gates and you get people trying to get you to change money on the way. Don’t. Go through the gates with your passport, you might even get a policeman meeting you before the gates to take your passport and you through (so that he can be the policeman to try his luck).
- Now the Mauritanian police or the one who escorted you will try to get 1000 ougiya off you for ‘administrative purposes’. I just flatly refused to pay and waited till they gave me a stamp – they tried to make me think that between 12 and 3 they are closed and the 1000 would remedy that. Tell them you checked with the embassy beforehand – that worked for other people. I used stubborness rather than brains.
- In between all this there are people trying to ‘help’ you and other people trying to sell you tickets for baggage on the ferry. Don’t pay anything to anyone.
- I dunno how the ferry works, but I took a pirogue (small boat) filled with people across for 200 ougiyah. You could probably pay less. Bargain with the guy before getting on. You can always wait for another boat across the Senegal river. Beautiful short trip, by the way
- On the Senegal side I got pulled straight into an office by the policeman who wanted to charge me 20 Euro to get my entry stamp. I just refused to pay. This time I had enough brains to tell them I checked with the embassy beforehand. They told me the embassy lied to me. I went back to just being stubborn. Then came some dialogue where deportation and the trip back to Mauritania amongst other blatant lies were mentioned. Eventually they just gave me the entry stamp. Don’t leave without this stamp, your passport will be checked later when you leave the town outside the border. Don’t piss these guys off either, they just looked like the type that can get hardcore.
- Now you can change ougiya to cfa (pronounced safa). The exchange guys will probably be right next to you from the time you got off the boat anyway. Know the rate more or less beforehand.
- I mostly didn’t give in to the corruption due to a very simple reason: I didn’t have the money. A Peruvian guy went through the day before and was good enough to send me an email with all the charges and details. And being me, I went there with just enough ougiya. I also had a 50 Euro in my pocket but that was if things really went bad.
- So the exchange guys were boggled that I only had 1000 ougiyah to change. The taxis to St Louis are down the road for the border and I had just enough to get one of the bigger ones.
- The smaller ones take 7 people (3000 cfa) and the bigger ones (1500 cfa) take eleven people. Included in the price is the 1000 cfa for baggage that is negotiable. I also met up with the Japanese guy and we waited in one of the big taxis. Stupidly we waited for about 4 hours for it to fill up while two smaller ones left already. Eventually we decided to take a smaller one (I lent some cash from him) after a bit of discussion between the smaller and bigger taxi drivers when we changed.
- The trip to St Louis was about 3 hours and in St Louis we caught a taxi for 400 cfa to get to our auberge – tired, dirty and hungry.
Quite hectic but mostly it just needed some patience in amongst chaos and some confidence in your own position. Very difficult when it’s actual border police trying to screw you.
Tags: Mauritania, Senegal, Travel, Tag Index
Ghalied
July 16th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
[…] Yep, unfortunately I do not plan to update this blog anymore. I might get a new one in the future but you could always start the beginning and read it from scratch or read some of my favourite posts here and here or here. […]
January 4th, 2012 at 11:51 am
Thanks a lot for these precious information 🙂
December 7th, 2016 at 8:24 am
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an extremely long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyways, just wanted to say excellent blog!