I was crouched behind the driver’s seat of a fish truck with my backpack pushed in beside me when we approached the entrance of Nouadhibou airport.
It was still early. Dawn light was coming across the flat desert and through the windscreen I could see the airport fence, a little guard building and a sign: AEROPORT INTERNATIONAL NOUADHIBOU.
I had permission to leave Mauritania. But when we reached the airport, the people taking me in told me to stay hidden behind the driver’s seat while the truck passed the control.
I did what they told me.
We drove onto the airfield and waited there for around half an hour.
I had no airline ticket. I had paid nothing for the flight. A few days earlier I did not even have enough money to get out of Nouadhibou.
Portugal to Senegal With a Backpack
The story had started in December 2002. I left Portugal on a backpacking and hitchhiking trip toward Senegal. I crossed Morocco slowly and spent New Year’s Eve in the Sahara around the Erg Chebbi dunes.
After New Year I continued south. Eventually I reached Dakhla.
About 40 kilometres outside the city was the place everybody called PK40 — Point Kilométrique 40. There was fuel there and a police presence controlling the road south. I had nowhere to sleep, so that night I slept outside against the wall of the petrol station, close to the police barracks.
Nothing complicated. Backpack beside me, wall behind me, sleep.
The next morning the Moroccan policemen saw me there. Instead of moving me on, they helped me. They found a Swiss 4WD travelling south toward Senegal and arranged for me to go with them.
That was how a lot of this trip worked. I would reach a place without knowing exactly how I was going to leave it, and somebody would point at a vehicle.
Get in. Go.
The Swiss vehicle took me south. After that part of the journey I eventually came north again as far as Dakhla. This time I stayed there. Then I went back toward Mauritania alone.
The border was basically sand, vehicles, officials and signs standing in the middle of nowhere. Douane means customs. That battered red-and-white sign was simple enough: stop here.
Beyond it was Mauritania. And beyond the border, eventually, Nouadhibou.
No Money in Nouadhibou
When I came back to Nouadhibou in January 2003, I had a serious problem.
I was out of money.
There was no ATM in Nouadhibou where I could put in my Portuguese bank card and get cash. There was no useful alternative for me. No smartphone, no banking app, no easy international transfer arriving instantly.
I could not pay my way back north. I could not buy a normal flight.
I was stuck.
Before travelling, my friend João Sousa in Portugal had given me the contact of a man connected with the fishing business in Nouadhibou. I went to see him.
I will not give his name and I will not give the name of his company. I promised him I would never reveal them, and I intend to keep that promise.
He was Mauritanian. I explained what had happened.
He gave me money. Not a loan with paperwork or some complicated arrangement. Money so I could eat, pay for a hotel and stay in Nouadhibou while we worked out what to do next.
Then he began making calls.
That man completely changed my situation.
A Few Days Inside Nouadhibou
While I waited, I spent several days exploring Nouadhibou. I had local friends showing me around, which meant I was seeing a different city from what I would have found walking around alone with a backpack.
One of them drove me through neighbourhoods and out into the desert. He showed me villas where, according to him and other people I met there, men who had returned from Afghanistan were staying. I remember armed men around some of those places. He also took me out to shooting areas in the desert that he said these men used.
I saw the places. I saw armed people. I saw the shooting grounds my friend took me to. What I did not do was investigate who every person was.
What I got wrong later. Years later, when telling this story quickly, I sometimes referred to those men as ISIS. That cannot be right — ISIS did not exist under that identity in 2003. So I don’t use that label anymore. What I can say is exactly what happened to me: a local friend in Nouadhibou took me to places connected, according to him, with Islamist militants who had come from Afghanistan. We passed villas with armed men and he showed me shooting areas outside the city. That is what I saw. Anything more would be me adding a label twenty years later.
The Fishing Company Starts Making Calls
Meanwhile, the Mauritanian fishing-company director was trying to find a way of getting me out of the country.
Nouadhibou was built around fishing and fish export. Boats came in, seafood moved through companies and cold storage, and fresh products left again for markets farther north.
That eventually became my route home. There was a fish cargo aircraft operating from Nouadhibou to Portugal.
The problem was putting me on it.
As the process was explained to me at the time, my case went up the Portuguese side — from the diplomatic mission in Dakar all the way to the Ministry of the Interior in Lisbon.
Somewhere between those offices, permission came back. The Portuguese backpacker could fly home on the cargo aircraft.
Nouadhibou to Lisbon. Stop in Agadir for fuel. Free.
I still had no normal airline ticket.
Getting Onto the Airfield
On the morning of the flight they picked me up very early. The vehicle was part of the fish operation. I climbed in with the same large backpack I had carried down from Portugal.
When we came close to the airport entrance, I was told to get down behind the driver’s seat.
This is the part that still makes me laugh. My permission had gone through people far above that gate — but in ministries two thousand kilometres away, in Lisbon. At ground level in Nouadhibou, the practical method of getting me onto the airfield was apparently: hide behind the seat.
So I did.
We passed through the gate. Then we waited beside the runway. Maybe thirty minutes. Nothing happened.
Then the cargo aircraft arrived.
It stopped, the rear door opened and immediately the whole operation around it came alive. Workers began moving the fresh seafood cargo. I remember fresh lobster.
And then two men came out. One was the Russian pilot. The other was Portuguese.
“Ah, You’re a Traveller”
The Portuguese man looked at me and my backpack. Something like: “Ah, you’re a traveller. OK?”
He checked me out for a moment. Apparently there had been some uncertainty among the officials involved about exactly who this Portuguese guy in Nouadhibou was. Why did he need this unusual arrangement? Had I done something serious in Mauritania? Was I trying to run away from some problem?
Then he saw me. Young guy. Big backpack. Broke.
Traveller.
He put out his hand. I took it and climbed into the cargo aircraft.
The Portuguese man was Celestino Jorge da Cruz Galego, usually known as Jorge Cruz Galego. The Russian pilot was flying. Galego was managing the operation.
And Galego could talk.
Flying With Jorge Cruz Galego
For much of the trip he sat talking to me and telling stories from his life. I had accidentally ended up travelling with someone from a completely different generation of Portuguese aviation.
He told me about his years in Africa during the Ultramar period. He told me he had flown the President of the Republic during those years.
Then came the aviation stories. One of the big ones was his flight to Macau. In 1987, Galego, Álvaro Prata Mendes and Arnaldo Alves Leal had flown the single-engine aircraft Sagres from Lisbon to Macau, following the idea of the pioneering Portuguese aerial journey attempted in 1924.
This was the man sitting beside me inside a fish cargo aircraft over West Africa. I had met him because I had run out of money. He was telling me stories and I was listening.
At some point he also explained why there had been so much curiosity around my situation. From the perspective of people receiving telephone calls in ministries and diplomatic offices, the story must have sounded strange. Portuguese citizen in Mauritania. No money. Needs authorisation to leave. Wants to fly out on a fish cargo aircraft.
They apparently wondered what kind of trouble I had managed to get myself into.
Galego met me and realised immediately there was no great mystery. I was just a backpacker.
Fuel in Agadir
We flew north to Agadir. The aircraft stopped there for fuel.
Not long before, I had crossed Morocco in the opposite direction slowly by road, hitchhiking south through the country, sleeping wherever I could, reaching Dakhla and continuing into Mauritania. Now the same distance was disappearing underneath us.
We refuelled and continued to Lisbon.
I don’t remember the aircraft as some comfortable passenger flight. The important thing for me was simpler.
It was going home.
Lisbon
When we arrived at Lisbon airport there was one last surprise. A nice private car came directly to collect Jorge Cruz Galego.
Of course it did. By then I understood that I had spent the journey with somebody who knew people, knew aviation and had spent his life moving through a world very far from my backpacking trip.
He left in the car. I was left with my backpack.
A few weeks earlier I had left Portugal hitchhiking toward Senegal. At PK40 near Dakhla I had slept against the wall of a petrol station. In Nouadhibou I had reached the point where I had no money and no way of withdrawing any. A Mauritanian stranger had paid for my food and hotel and refused to let the problem stay mine alone.
Then, before sunrise one January morning, I had hidden behind a fish-truck driver’s seat, crossed the gate of Nouadhibou airport, climbed into a cargo aircraft full of seafood and listened to Jorge Cruz Galego tell me flying stories all the way north.
Now the same big backpack was sitting beside me at Lisbon airport.
For more journeys from this period, continue with my Mauritania desert expedition — or the whole shelf of first-hand stories.
