Dressing Like a Local: Enhancing Your Travel Experience

Our ‘Fits Mauritania Style!

If you get the chance I highly recommend checking out our post …the desert gear story… but for now I’ll just say through a comical, let’s call it misunderstanding in India we showed up fully decked out in local clothing and we didn’t regret it one bit. What at first felt silly ended up enriching our experience in a way that totally changed my packing philosophy. Drew Binsky in his book Just Go. also discusses the positives around dressing like a local while traveling. He explains that it helps the locals receive him as more than just a tourist but someone that wants to dive into the culture, you look less “just landed on vacay”.

So day 1 in Mauritania you know we were going shopping!

Shopping locally gives you the chance to meet the locals, work out the language barrier and get a real ‘feel’ of the friendliness of the culture. I now have several WhatsApp threads going with shop owners that were excited just to meet foreigners! The translations are wild as I don’t speak a lick of Arabic and they only speak in English that they learned from American movies 🙂 The ladies in the shop were incredibly sweet and helpful in teaching me how to tie up the traditional outfits and they even handed me their baby!!! Gosh, holding babies is the key to my heart. If you are a woman planning on taking a trip to Mauritania and are curious about dress code, I’ll share my experience, men reading this – you can skip a paragraph 😉

Okay back to THIS trip! Take into consideration that the full name of this country is the Islamic State of Mauritania and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine it would be conservative. I do need to point out that these are social rules, or norms, NOT laws in this country. There are no groups of people walking around trying to enforce anything and the locals were accustomed to foreigners not dressing in their traditions. The women of Mauritania wear either mulfas or boubous, the mulfa is a larger than normal scarf like material that wraps from around your head (covering hair) and all around your body with a long sleeve dress underneath. There is a picture of me above wearing a mulfa after the local women decked me out and taught me how to tie it. And now you are wondering… do I still remember how? Sigh… of course not. The boubou looks a little more like something we would wear in the West, a little bit more “modern” its usually a long sleeve top with same pattern long skirt, not tight but it does have more of a figured shape to it. When wearing a boubou the women would have a coordinating hijab to cover their hair. Foreigners (of the female kind) are not expected to cover their hair except in or around Mosques or other religiously significant spots. What feels respectful and somewhat expected is to pretty much keep shoulders covered and pair your top with something loose fitting on bottom. It is the desert so flowy breathable fabric was perfect. Above you might see me in a long brown dress, this is actually the underdress to the malfa and wearing that seemed to go over well, I had a couple girls smile and tell me they have the same one, lots of compliments with no one seeming offended. The iron ore train brings lots of adventurers so I’m more than sure they’ve seen their fair share of white girls in cargo shorts so just the attempt at being respectful is appreciated.

* Now all of that said, once out in the desert and away from locals the dress code in our group loosened up. I wore a tank top one day and just kept a lightweight cardigan with me in case we stopped for tea or found a group of locals. *

As always! Thanks for tuning in and following our journey! It’s always time to plan a new adventure… Where will yours be?!