How a currency mix-up made Mauritania almost free

“The best country in the world,” said the first local who spoke English. For about half a day, he was right.

We crossed into Mauritania at Nouadhibou and drove on to Nouakchott, a city held together by old Mercedes, every one of them dented, half of them somehow still running. We needed cash. We had read at home that Mauritania changed its currency in 2018 and knocked a zero off, but at the ATM we had no internet, so we asked a few locals for the rough exchange rate. They answered the way most people here still count, in the old money, ten times the real figure.

So we walked away with ten times the cash we needed, and for half a day everything was almost free. Petrol at 0.15 euros. A Coke at 0.10. A hotel room for 4. We felt like we had broken the country.

Then reality arrived. We were carrying a serious brick of banknotes, and the Mauritanian ouguiya is effectively worthless the moment you leave the country. You cannot change it at home. We found an agent in a back corner of a market who, for a cut, wired it out to Europe through Senegal. No receipt I would show a bank, but it worked.

That is Mauritania in one afternoon: warmer than its reputation, and run on workarounds. You do not arrive and execute a plan here. You arrive, get something wrong, and find the fix already exists, two stalls down, run by someone who has solved it a hundred times before.