Sweeping across a lawless stretch of the Sahara desert runs one of the world’s longest cargo trains. From sea port to iron mine in Mauritania, its carriages extend for 1.5 miles, each filled with 80 tons of iron ore. Battling the fierce wind, abrasive dust and chilling nights, Jody MacDonald took the 15-hour trip to the coast, finding an unexpected beauty in the desolate landscape.
In 2016, Leica commissioned Jody Macdonald to do a project with one of their new all-weather cameras designed to withstand extreme environments. As an award-winning photographer who has sailed around the world twice and paraglided in the Himalayas at 17,000ft, Jody is no stranger to adventure. Riding the iron ore train in Mauritania is something she’d always wanted to do, so she proposed the idea to Leica and they instantly agreed.
Jody planned to ride the 2.5km (1.5 mile) long train from a small town called Choum – located south of the iron mine in Zouérat – towards the port of Nouâdhibou on the Atlantic coast. It was her first time in Mauritania, a country consisting of two-thirds desert. But while its territory is twice the size of France and occupies a large portion of Northwest Africa, Mauritania remains virtually unknown to the Western world. Poverty, terrorism and slavery are rife and swathes of the country are heavily mined, with some “red zone” regions being off-limits, deemed too dangerous for non-locals to visit.
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To help her navigate her way around, Jody took an assistant with her (her brother, a surfer). While it helped that he spoke French (which, being a former French colony, is widely spoken in Mauritania), Jody believes having a male companion was essential for her safety. “Being a Muslim country travelling as a single female is not a great idea, so having a male and somebody who spoke French was very helpful,” she says. “Women don’t [travel alone] there and it’s frowned upon. As a [solo female traveller], you would attract a lot of attention – and not good attention. That’s not to say it’s not possible, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend it.”
Jody got out to take photographs but they quickly found themselves pinned to the side of their truck, trying to seek shelter from the sand which felt like sandpaper against their skin.
Their journey began in the capital of Nouakchott, from where they travelled north through the interior to hop on the Mauritania Railway. But the journey alone was a small taster of the extreme environment they were heading into. While driving, the sky suddenly darkened to an ominous shade of red and the winds whipped up to around 150km/h. Jody got out to take photographs but they quickly found themselves pinned to the side of their truck, trying to seek shelter from the sand which felt like sandpaper against their skin. Back in the truck, Jody noticed the seat was covered in shards of glass, and saw the back window had imploded with the impact of the storm.
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When they finally reached Choum, the pair was told by locals that the train usually passes through sometime in the late afternoon. There is no train schedule. So they lay in wait by the tracks, where a few families showed up with goats and boxed goods, and parents cooked dinner and heated tea on small stoves as kids ran around.
It was long after midnight when the train finally turned up, six hours later than they’d anticipated. The silence of the sleeping town was replaced with the loud clattering of train cars as they jolted together in the dark, forming a sound like rolling thunder. Jody and her brother quickly grabbed their gear and waited for the carriages to slow, but the train – which isn’t intended for passengers – did not stop. Instead, they had to run alongside the cars and grab a ladder to haul themselves up.
Opened in 1963, the Mauritania Railway operates a daily service from Nouâdhibou’s port to the iron ore mines in the country’s northwest. The entire journey, which scales the border of the disputed territory of Western Sahara, takes roughly 20 hours in total and the train consists of three to four diesel locomotives, up to 210 freight cars and a passenger car.
While it isn’t a passenger train, many locals use it as a free shortcut across the desert. “In order for people that don’t have a lot of money to get to the coast – say if they have family there or something – hopping on that train is an easier way to cut across the desert because it would probably take you a week to go all the way around by road,” explains Jody.
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Though passengers are technically illegal, Jody emphasises that legality and illegality are obsolete terms in the desert. “You can’t really think of it in Western terms as being legal or illegal,” she says. “I mean, they’re not going to arrest you for doing it but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s legal or promoted as a thing to do.” Occasionally, people even herd animals onto the trains, though Jody didn’t see that happening when she went.
Once in the freight car, they made themselves comfortable on the jagged iron ore heaps. But sleep was impossible because whenever the train increases or decreases in speed, the cars jolt together violently and the noise is deafening. While temperatures can reach up to 40 C during the day, the temperature plunges at night, so “you’re uncomfortable, you’re cold, you’re just enduring it,” says Jody.
Though there is little light pollution, there isn’t much to see in the desert save for the stars and the endless, arid plains. “You’re just waiting for sunrise, because as soon as the sun comes up it’s gonna get warmer and then you can look around and take pictures and it gets a lot more interesting,” says Jody.
Jody estimates that there were around a dozen fellow train hoppers, but because of the length of the train it can seem like you’re the only passengers; “it’s incredibly loud and it’s not a place where you can hang out and talk,” she says.
As the sun rises, you notice how everything is covered in a fine iron ore dust, which seeps into clothing and stains everything a rusty red hue. “We got some really cheap foam so we could lay down on the iron ore, but we didn’t want anything nice because you knew it was going to get really dirty and destroyed,” says Jody.
Fortunately, the camera Jody was using had a fixed mounted lens and was all-weather sealed, so she didn’t have to worry about changing lenses. However, taking photos on the shifting carriages was challenging. “The train cars are banging all the time so you definitely have to be careful being near the edge because you could definitely be thrown overboard,” warns Jody. For protection against the dust, she wore ski goggles and a headscarf.
While some people would find the landscape monotonous, Jody – who grew up in Saudi Arabia – finds deserts fascinating. “I like places that have an unexpected beauty to them,” she says. “Places that are often very harsh and inhospitable, [that] from the outside get a particularly bad reputation… I think if you can just immerse yourself in the landscape, slow down and pay attention to the details, you can see that [the desert] actually has lots of life to it… Just watching the light change through the landscape throughout the day, it always looks different and always has a different feel to it in changing light and there’s all these creatures that come out at different times; it’s fascinating and beautiful.”
Iron ore mining in Mauritania has been going since the 1970s, and fuelled Mauritania’s economic development during the first two decades of independence. “I didn’t really dig too deep into what the mine was actually doing,” admits Jody, “but you would think it would have to have a huge environmental impact in the area. Fortunately the mine is literally in the middle of nowhere, so it’s not directly affecting local villages. I’m sure it’s not great for the Earth, but to what degree I’m not too sure.”
Ultimately, Jody wanted to capture the spirit of adventure and the wild expanse of the desert, as well as the freedom that train hopping encapsulates, which feels far removed from the highly regulated health and safety rules of trains in the West. “I really like places like Mauritania that are more raw and less developed, and aren’t influenced by tourism,” Jody says. “It’s expensive because it’s hard to move around, there’s not a lot of roads and fuel costs are high… but other than that I really enjoyed it; I would go back in a heartbeat.”
jodymacdonaldphotography.com
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Publish date : 2021-06-24 03:00:00
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