EMPath2A land crossing that worked for one passport and not the other, a flight neither of us had budgeted for, and the better part of a week not knowing exactly when we'd be a team of two again.
One stamp, two different rules
We'd crossed a lot of borders together by that point, always as a pair, always the same paperwork dance twice over. At the Senegal crossing, that stopped working. Eddy's passport got a stamp. Max's didn't. Senegal's land border simply wasn't set up to issue her a visa on the spot, no matter how much cash or patience we had on us that morning.
She was refused entry to Senegal because they weren't allowed to issue her a visa at the land border crossing.
There was no arguing a rule like that. The fix, when we found it, was almost absurd: fly instead of ride. A visa on arrival by air worked in a way a visa on arrival by land simply didn't, a difference in how the systems are set up that had nothing to do with either of us personally and everything to do with which passport we were each holding.
Waiting at Richard-Toll
So we split up, which we don't do often on this trip. Max turned back toward Nouakchott to find a flight. Eddy stayed behind in Senegal, at a small roadside gite in Richard-Toll, close enough to the border to turn straight around the moment there was a plan.
There wasn't much to do but wait. We talked on and off through the day, mostly logistics, flight prices, which airport, whether the visa on arrival in Dakar would actually work the way the internet said it would. Underneath the logistics was the part neither of us said out loud, whether it would actually work, and what the backup plan even was if it didn't.
The flight neither of us had budgeted for
Max bought a one way ticket, Nouakchott to Dakar, and got the visa on arrival at the airport exactly the way it was supposed to work. No drama, just paperwork and a queue, the opposite of the land crossing a few days earlier.
The whole detour, the flight, the visa fee, the extra days of hotel and gite costs on both ends, came to close to a thousand euros. Not the kind of number either of us likes writing down, but the kind that's worth writing down anyway, because whoever plans this route next should know the real cost of a mixed-nationality border, not the optimistic version.
Eddy rode south to meet her, and we were a team of two again, riding into Dakar together, tired, a lot poorer, and genuinely relieved. Dakar turned into its own small marathon, days spent moving between embassies chasing visas for Guinea and Sierra Leone before we could keep heading south. After the week we'd just had, a queue at an embassy felt almost restful.
None of it was advice either of us had wanted to test firsthand, but it stuck: check land border visa rules separately for each passport before you plan a route as a mixed-nationality pair, and if a crossing refuses one of you, look at whether flying changes the answer. It did for us, at the cost of a thousand euros and the better part of a week we hadn't planned on losing. Worth knowing in advance. Better than finding out the way we did.