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Published: July 20th 2006
Peugoet Taxi
Finally arrive in St. Louis, thank goodness.My last two blogs were about Dakar, and although I spend most of my time here we have made a few trips outside of the city limits. And like everything else they are always an experience.
St. Louis About 1 month ago we took a weekend trip to the town of St. Louis in northern Senegal. Saint Louis is about 4.5 hours north of Dakar, on the coast very close to the border of Mauritania. Although it is still in the ‘Savannah’ zone, like all of Senegal, it is close to the Sahara which brings much more of a desert feel to the area. In case I have not already made clear…any form of travel here in West Africa is not easy. Getting to Saint Louis was an adventure in itself. The journey and humor begins with figuring out how to get there. You can’t just find a train or bus ticket. After much reading and asking around, we found the “best” way (in a sense only way) to get to St. Louis is in a “Peugoet” Taxi. And the story begins…..
We woke up early Saturday morning and made our way to Gare Routiere. This is a CRAZY
Seriously
Yep, that is us on the beach with two random guys just laying there 50 feet away staring. No reason. area where hundreds upon hundreds of worn down Peugeot car drivers await their next victims. The Peugeot is basically like a mini-station wagon…and holds 7 passengers (notice I did not add ‘comfortably’). The process is to go to this place, try to negotiate yourself the best price possible for a seat (we of course get offered rates 5 times anyone else), and then wait for the other seats to fill the car up so you can be on your way. We had one of the Plan drivers, Ossanou, bring us down to the station to help us negotiate a price. We though with Ossanou there it would be an easy process. We were wrong. The minute we pulled into the station our car was surrounded with people. And I don’t mean one or two…I mean about 20-30. It was unbelievable. We couldn’t even open the taxi doors. Finally Ossanou got us a “reasonable” price, we got out of our taxi to get into the Peugoet Taxi. People are taking you bags to carry them for you….surrounding you to sell you random things….still trying to convince you to go into a different car….it is total mayhem. Now we are in the
car and have the “best” seats….which is the front seat and 3 in the second row where there our windows. The three people in the way back get no windows…in this heat that is NO FUN. As we wait for the other passengaers the Peugoet is surounded with people trying to sell you stuff…..or people just asking for you to give them things “just for fun”. I got asked for my watch about 50 times, and the guy (who spoke some English) explained that its just for fun. Hmm….that doesn’t sound like fun. Now I have heard that this process of filling the 7 seats can last hours. We were lucky, although it was way too chaotic for me, we were in and out within the hour. The drive was very long, crowded, and as most things here, we never really knew where we were going…but it was interesting nonetheless. I never seem to be bored by the sights; activities on the sides of the streets, buses passing by with tons of people packed in, miles and miles of mangoes, cars driving with live goats on top of them (my favorite sight) and people in want seems like the middle
Dinner
Dinner in St. Louis of no where randomly hailing a taxi. There are all sorts of things to keep you occupied as you drive along one road for what seems like days.
Four-plus hours later we arrived in Saint Louis. It has a very different feel then Dakar, it is a very coastal type town, the buildings downtown are more colonial built in the 1800’s. It actually felt like an abandoned colonial town, which I guess, in a sense, it is. St. Louis was the former capital of Senegal before the capital moved to Dakar in the 1958. It has beautiful architecture but the buildings have not been upkept and are falling apart.
We stayed at a great place right on the beach. Unfortunately whenever we had to go to and from, we had to pass the local fish market….definitely not my favorite smell. During the days, we really just wanted to relax, so spent most of our time just lying on the beach. That is, for as long as we could until we could no longer handle the passer byes that no matter how much you ignored or asked them to go away, would just sit down near you, try to
Hotel De La Poste
Old post office that is renvovated into a hotel. From the roof there are nice veiws of St. Louis. This the typical colonial architecture of St. Louis talk or just lay down and stare. I won’t get into further details (for my family’s sake)…but that part wasn’t fun. At least we could just get up and leave to enjoy the private pool at our place. In the evenings we enjoyed wandering around the town, finding good places to eat and shop. We also went that weekend because it was the Annual St. Louis Jazz Festival. Oddly enough is was from Wednesday to Saturday so we only caught the last night. The festival was nice but, like everything here, it got started a couple hours later than we expected…and we were all pretty beat by the time the first band was done. (I know…I’m so old!).
One day in St. Louis we went ‘quading’ (i.e. 4 wheeling) in the sand dunes. No…there were no animals (a couple goats I guess..but that is about it)…but it was just miles and miles of desert with the occasional Baobab trees that are so famous to Africa. We rode through open fields, near the ocean, and through villages. Kids would see/hear you coming and would come running to try and get a chance to wave, it was very cute. Oh yea,
Architechture
Another view of the colonial architecture of St. Louis we took a drumming lesson on Sunday morning as well. As you all know I have NO RYTHEM and I was terrible, I opted to hang out with the Rasta guys instead.
All in all it was a very good trip, until the ride home….
We met a very nice taxi driver who offered to drive us back to Dakar on Monday. He had a great car (all things relative) and it wasn’t much more $$ than trying to deal with that 7 seater car so we went for it. Unfortunately, we were not thinking when we chose what time we wanted to leave. I am sure most of you all know that 3pm is the hottest part of the day. I thought I was being logical because noon is the strongest time of the sun so by 3pm things would be cooler. I was sadly mistaken.
We sat in the back of a taxi with no a/c at the height of Africa heat. I was in the middle, which didn’t help. Although the windows weren’t much better. Kristin (who was by a window) swares she thought her face was going to melt off as the hot ‘air of
Bridge
This bridge was designed by Gustav Eiffel (who also designed the Effel Tower) and was originally built to cross the Danube. The bridge "splits in half" rotating 180 degrees to allow for boats to pass through. fire’ came blowing in. We finally realized that we were better off baking inside of the car with windows up. We were afraid to fall asleep as we thought we may never wake back up…yes, it was that hot....so we played some stupid cars games to entertain us (i.e. I am going to Africa and I'm bringing...). To top it all off, our driver had this one cassette tape that he loved that unfortunately only had ONE song on it…on both sides! So we listened to the same song for 4 hours straight. Sometimes I catch myself humming it as I go to sleep….so sad.
The drive back was successfully though….we stopped at the street side vendors on the way and got tons of fruit. At one point we had little old ladies throwing mangoes and papayas in our window. It was pretty funny. (Although those were the Mangoes that may have been the culprit in my sickness). Toward the end of the drive as we got close to Dakar we hit unbelievable traffic. Our poor driver had to drive back to St. Louis that same night. After major confusion and attempts at sign language he pulled over and
Mangos
The endless Mango Stands....these go for miles. essentially got our bags and put them in another taxi which was sort of confusing. We realized he wanted to turn around and start the drive back north. Good thing because it took us another 1 hour to get through traffic.
All and all a fun and as always amusing trip. I was going to write about all of my small side trips in this blog…..but the St. Louis portion got painfully boring. So I will stop here. Expect another blog soon!
Miss you all!
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Jaclyn
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hey Nic, another adventerous journey... it's sounds so amazing to even be in your situations.. trying to get a 7 seater car sounds histerical. confusing, but histerical... cant wait for another blog.. these get me through the day.. your pictures are great too! Ps.. you look like a pro on that quad! hehe!