8-Day Mauritania Desert Expedition with the Eye of Africa Train Ride

Land at Nouakchott's Oumtounsy International Airport, where our team meets you and transfers you to the Semiramis Hotel. Mauritania's Atlantic capital sits between the open ocean and the western edge of the Sahara, a low, sand-coloured city of markets and fishing pirogues. The evening is for a welcome dinner and expedition briefing, and visa-on-arrival formalities are handled by our team. Overnight in Nouakchott.

We leave the coast early and drive north into the Adrar, some seven hours across open desert, with photo stops along the way and lunch in the shade of an acacia. By late afternoon, we reach Azoueiga and the tallest sand dunes in the country, a sea of gold rising hundreds of feet from the plain. We make camp at their foot, and the evening belongs to the fire, the silence, and a sky with no competition. Overnight in a private desert camp.

A morning drive brings us to Terjit, one of the Sahara's most beautiful oases, with date palms and warm springs hidden inside a narrow canyon of red stone, with a picnic lunch at Tivougar along the way. We spend the afternoon in the greenery and cool water, a startling contrast to the dunes behind us. Overnight in camp at the oasis.

We drive to the Richat Structure, the "Eye of Africa," a vast set of concentric rings some forty kilometres across, so large it is used as a landmark from orbit. After exploring its rings and ridges, we continue to Ouadane, a ruined caravan city half-swallowed by sand and one of the oldest towns in the country. In the late afternoon, we walk its stone lanes and the old UNESCO quarter. Overnight at an auberge in Ouadane.

A desert drive brings us to Chinguetti, the seventh holy city of Islam and a UNESCO World Heritage site. We tour its ancient manuscript libraries, where scholarly families still care for handwritten Qur'ans and astronomical treatises nearly a thousand years old, walk the sandblown old town, and visit the Grand Mosque with its famous stone minaret. We climb the dunes above the town for sunset. Overnight at an auberge in Chinguetti.

The headline day, and the night of the whole expedition you'll remember longest. We drive out toward Tmeimichat, passing the Choum Tunnel and Ben Amera, the second-largest monolith on Earth after Uluru, before reaching the rail line to prepare for the crossing. The train keeps its own schedule, so we hold time in reserve and board the moment it arrives, an open ore wagon on a convoy that can run three kilometres long. We ride west across the Sahara as a desert sunset gives way to a sky of impossible clarity; wrapped in scarves against the dust and the cold, we bed down in the wagon beneath the full sweep of the Milky Way and sleep out on the train as it rolls through the night toward the coast.

We roll into Nouadhibou soon after first light, dust-covered and quietly transformed. A hotel, a hot shower, and a warm meal are waiting, and the middle of the day is for rest. In the afternoon, we drive out along the Cap Blanc peninsula, the windswept headland that shelters the largest surviving colony of Mediterranean monk seals on Earth, around 300 animals protected by a national reserve, for the sea air and a coastline that feels a century removed from anywhere. Overnight in Nouadhibou.

We drive south along the Atlantic, stopping at Tiwilit, where the dunes run straight down into the ocean, for a last desert lunch on the shore. Continuing to Nouakchott, we visit the great camel market and watch the fishing fleet come in at the Port de Pêche as the sun goes down. A farewell dinner closes the expedition before your onward flight; most international departures from Nouakchott leave late in the evening. Eight days, the Eye of Africa, two UNESCO caravan cities, one of the longest trains in the world, and a Sahara that will call you back.