AIRBASE CARPET DE

This area hasn't got the pretty long stretch of sandly beaches rather patches of rocky - pebbled shoreline.Sadly, seawalls are prevalent in the area due to persistent occurence of soil erosion ,which left chunks of land gradually gobbled by the sea .The main road following the coastline were supported by seawalls which affects the normal sea drift. The reason why majority if not all people in the coastal areas continued the old long ' tradition' building sea walls ,otherwise the sea will gladly devour the low lying beach lots and nothing left to stand on . Ugly and aesthically not pleasant to see but sea walls does serve its practical purpose to cater primarily to human interests and component of survival .

In this picture , the cemented structure which sticks out to the beach is only temporary , the local way of accumulating and diverting more sand and pebbles when the monsoon currents change. If you look around there are many of these structures made by locals ,by which looking in a different perspective is a symbolic specimen denoting obvious existence of competition who gets more sand in .Some are lucky ,some are not . This can cause conflicts in unexpected extreme circumstances though .

The view from the Nouakchott hotel 1/10/08 -
Capital of Mauritania, 270 mi/435 km northeast of Dakar, Senegal; population (capital district, 2000 est) 612,000. It is the largest city in the Sahara. Products include salt, cement, insecticides, rugs, carpets, embroidery, and crafts. A port area 8 km/5 mi to the west exports copper (mined 195 km/120 mi northeast of Nouakchott), petroleum, and phosphates. There is some light engineering in the city.

Nouakchott was a coastal village on the desert trail from Dakar. Before independence the country was administered from Saint-Louis in Senegal. Nouakchott was chosen as capital in 1957. It grew rapidly in the 1970s as refugees poured in during the Saharan drought.

It is near the French military post on the old imperial road, the Piste Imperiale. The University of Nouakchott was established in 1981.