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Comment by djaychela | Hacker News Reader

In 2007, I did a "buy a car for £100, drive it to Africa" type thing. Best adventure I've ever been on. Western Sahara (where this is) was really interesting - getting out of it and into Mauritania involved driving through a mined no-man's land and having to pay a bribe to the Mauritanian army who manned the checkpoint...

One of the things I saw there was a train that was miles long - we just missed the crossing and had to wait for what seemed like forever. It was full of ore, apparently. There was a brand new road in the country which was paid for by China, apparently in return for mining rights there.

All of this part of the trip was pretty desolate - just sand, rocks and the occasional bush. Drove for literally hours seeing no change whatsoever in the vast landscape.

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We did a similar excursion driving from Agadir to Layoune and back. We didn't go too far into Western Sahara because the checkpoints became more frequent and Morocco really didn't want 2 Americans out there. It was memorable, the heat, the cold, desert vegetation, the powerful Atlantic breaking on the dunes and rocks. And finding surfers in the middle of nowhere on these monstrously massive waves.

I will say Western education massively downplays the actual size of Africa with our mercator maps. As an amateur adventurer it was also the first time I felt really unsafe for my family. Our son was a toddler and being that far away from civilization with an old car that could overheat any moment quietly scared the shit out of me.

Regarding how hard it is to get a handle on the actual size of Africa, I’ve found The True Size Of (https://thetruesize.com) immensely helpful.

> I will say Western education massively downplays the actual size of Africa with our mercator maps

IME, Western education just about completely downplays everything about the non-West. Geographical size is just one small facet of this.

I would say nearly all education systems downplays non local history. From my experience most Chinese people don't know much of European history before the 19th century, and most latin Americans know very very little about the two world wars, most Europeans know very little about Asia pre 19th century.

Yes, because in the 15-19th centuries, Europe was busy colonising the rest of the world. This led to an overlap in their histories - something the colonised usually are thoroughly educated about relative to the colonisers. But, in our global zeitgeist, Western culture is quite well known, while other countries' are usually seen through outdated tropes.

> because

How does this connect with the GP? The commenter you’re replying to is suggesting that we should consider the difficulty/limited bandwidth of approaching history for an entirely global perspective, and that there is a universal tendency for people to focus on their local experience.

Full of ore and people! Like you said for a long time there weren't any roads into the interior of Mauritania so that iron train was the main link. I always found it super fascinating - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/02/12/h..., https://wildmanlife.com/riding-worlds-longest-iron-ore-train...

Its the subject of this visually stunning 12m film, "This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEo-ykjmHgg

Thanks for sharing that. That was very interesting.

It almost felt like I was watching a documentary short on Arrakis, where the train is the sandworm.

Thanks, this looks excellent.

I've done this with a 500EUR Citroën ZX! We didn't cross into Mauritania though.

How'd you cope with the heat? It almost did me in, 42 degrees C in a dark green car without AC is pretty much hell. Ten years later and I can't believe we coped that.

You can actually ride that ore train, it was a bit of a fad on YouTube a few years ago, punch in “Mauritania train” and you can find many videos of people riding it.

Where did you start your trip from?

Also, what car did you buy and did you have any breakdowns / maintenance issues ?

Hi. Started from Plymouth, went to Banjul.

Car was an old Skoda Felicia Estate. I gave it a going over before starting the trip, which really meant changing the head gasket (it was blown when I bought it, that's why it was cheap). I made a sump guard out of scrap metal, and aside from some old forest tyres (I had a felicia as a stage rally car at the time too, so had plenty of spares) that was it.

No issues whatsoever over 4400 miles in the car. Didn't miss a beat - one of the reasons I chose the car was because I knew them well.

I did have to convert it to left hand drive before doing the rally, which was interesting - I had some LHD bits (dashboard, steering rack) already, but the wiring was done by re-soldering the RHD loom over to be LHD for the driver (as an LHD loom swap wasn't an option as so much of it was different, it would have been more work doing that).

Also had a fun point where the car had LHD steering wheel, but RHD pedalbox, so it could be driven by two people at the same time. Only moved it up the drive like this as I didn't fancy explaining that to the police / insurance company!

It was this train https://youtu.be/1mL1aI6aabs probably

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