 Around the same time in France, a TV show by desert doyen Théodore Monod (who'd travelled widely in Mauritania with camels from the 1930), also helped raise the country's profile.It was the 1991 ceasefire with the Polisario Front along with the escalating Algerian Civil War of the 1990s which saw the so-called Atlantic Route open up to trade and tourism, when Algeria and its trans-Saharan routes closed.Initially Moroccan army convoys loosely escorted travellers, which included a healthy trade in used cars from Dakhla, Western Sahara to the Moroccan border with Mauritania.