Senegal

---

We're quite far behind on our blog entries. If we have had internet, it's been painfully slow, so pictures have been pretty much out of the question until now.

It's hard to know where to begin describing Senegal. I regret not taking a tape recorder and as much as I don't want to smell many of the scents of Dakar ever again, it would be an effective way to convey some of the chaos that is Senegal. An English traveller referred to Tanzania as "proper Africa", which it was, but I guess then that Senegal is just a poorer version of "proper Africa".

We arrived at about 4:30 am in Dakar about 2 hours after we were supposed to arrive. We had been sitting in a Moroccan airport in Casablanca for the better half of the evening. Peter sensed a need to stand in the line up at the departure gate, I on the other hand thought " fat lot of good that'll do "...line ups are quite a foreign concept in the this part of the world and they rarely amount to anything but typical cultural boundary frustrations. As it turned out, Peter's intuition was well placed... I felt perfectly confident that our numbered seats were waiting for us and that all would be well once inside the plane and nestled away... not so fast... it didn't work out like that... as we boarded the plane the stewardess smiled and said that the planes had to be changed and that it was now "open" seating. We were in seat 29, the plane only had 20 seats. Thankfully we were already seated when they began to turn away passengers without seats! I was only confident that we wouldn't be removed once in the air...there were alot of unhappy people.

When we got off the plane and stepped outside we were greeted by the typical mob of taxis drivers all scrabbling to get our business. Completely exhausted, we settled for a cab that had the nerve to charge us 10 Euros for a drive down the street... we got ripped off! Though we knew it at the time, we never knew how bad until the next day when we payed about 1US$ to go 5 times that distance..."enshallah / Gods will" as they say in Arabic, seems to be their conclusion to all things they can't control.

Dakar is a sweaty, dirty, thrilling city. There's a constant hum of music and smells, some pleasant...most not. We stayed outside the city on the coast, in a small guesthouse. It had it's own little beach area which was nice. All around the hotel there were local beaches. It seems that the city people come out here and spend the day on the beach or camp overnight. But not at all like we do. Everyone crowds around the same little piece of land, it doesn't seem to matter what's there. In one area there was a dead whale on the beach, in another, a stream of sewer running into the ocean where everyone was swimming and the local football team was using all this as detours for their exercising route...?

We hooked up with a Peace corp. worker who had spent the last year in Atar, Mauritania. To quote her "be glad you didn't go to Mauritania, they live in the desert...who'd do that...why would anyone want to live in the desert...it's not worth the hassle." I found that somewhat comforting after leap frogging the country...but I'm still curious.

So we spent a couple of days wondering around the markets of the busting city and after numerous rumbles with the local touts/leaches, some delicious snacks and searing hot temperatures we headed north for Saint Louis.

---

Photos

Peter lounging on the beach
At Cap Ouest Dakar

locals on the beach
Cap Ouest