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When planning their honeymoon, many couples choose dream destinations like Paris, the city of love, or the Maldives, with its turquoise waters. Few are like Kristijan and Andrea Ilicic, the newlyweds who opted for a dusty freight train journey across the Mauritania desert.
Previously, as travel influencers, the two had traveled to many places around the world. Kristijan has visited no fewer than 150 locations. He told CNN via email: “We’ve seen a lot of places. This time, we wanted to see something completely different, and we found it in Mauritania.”
The couple spent many days under the desert sun.
The highlight of their trip was a series of photos taken on the deck of a ship loaded with iron ore as it traversed the desert on its 700-kilometer journey from the mining town of Zouérat to the port of Nouadhibou. The photos received over 40,000 likes. Kristijan recounted, “Everything was filled with iron ore. Clothes, air, food, everything. Keeping my wedding dress white for the photos was a miracle!”
Riding iron ore trains across the desert has become a favorite adventure travel experience for extreme travel influencers in recent years. However, this journey is not for the faint of heart. The 20-hour trip on a 200-car train, in temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius during the day and below freezing at night, with ore dust swirling in the wind.
Despite facing many difficulties in creating their honeymoon photos, Kristijan said the trip to Mauritania exceeded both their expectations and considered it an underrated travel destination.
The scorching climate and desert sandstorms posed a challenge for the couple.
“There’s so much to explore here. In the village we visited, the locals held surprise weddings according to traditional customs. Andrea and I got to wear their traditional clothing, experience the music, dance, and sing for two hours straight. This wasn’t a typical honeymoon, but it was a trip of a lifetime for us,” he shared.
Earlier, Myko Dele crossed the Sahara Desert to experience the legendary Mauritania iron ore train. With a total length of 2.5 km, it is considered one of the longest trains in the world.
This railway line is the economic lifeline of Mauritania, built by the French colonialists in the 1960s and subsequently managed by the National Mining and Industrial Company (SNIM). The train has operated continuously for nearly 50 years, primarily transporting iron ore from the Zouerat mine to the port of Nouadhibou.
200 train cars in the desert.
Because there are no official roads connecting the two cities, people, goods, and livestock travel freely in open-top ore wagons. For the Mauritanians, transporting food and sheep is their full-time job. They have to travel between the mines and the seaport several times a week, through sandstorms and some of the harshest climates in the world.
Passengers traveling on trains departing from Nouadhebou generally felt more comfortable than those traveling from Zouerate, as the carriages were empty except for a layer of ore dust, vehicles or camels, and all sorts of goods loaded from the harbor.
The iron ore trains were like furnaces by day and freezers by night. Privacy was nonexistent. When the train slowed down as it passed through towns, some people would jump off, quickly relieve themselves, and then hurry back to the train before it sped up again.
