Advertisement
Published: January 26th 2005
Edit Blog Post
Tambacounda, is where I'm staying for the night. This town is a major crossroads between Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Gambia, and for the Niokola Koba National Park.
Niokola Koba Park, is Senegal's major national park - its residents include elephants, lions, leopards, hippos, crocodiles, water buck, bush buck, kob, baboons, buffaloes, monkeys, warthogs, antelopes and hartbeest.
I haven't decided yet if I'm going to visit the park or make my way to Guinea - I'll decide that in the morning.
I'll go into more detail now about recent events:
TUESDAY 25 JANUARY
I left the relative comfort of the Hotel in Ziguinchor to make my way towards the Guinea border.
The taxi driver that took me to the garage told me that I needed to go to Kolda first and then catch a connecting bus to Tambacounda.
I had to wait an hour for the minibus to leave the garage. Once we got going it was very slow - the roads were bad. The driver kept driving on and off the tarmac to avoid the holes. The scenery though was very good. I
Room (Hut) in Kolda
Note the bathroom is behind the wall at the back of the bed. The Hut is circular couldn't help noticing the very tall termite mounds everywhere in the tropical landscape.
The journey to Kolda took 6 hours, for a distance of 200 km.
At one point in a village in the middle of nowhere we were transferred from one bus to an even more rickety bus.
When I arrived in Kolda I decided not to try and catch another bus that day. I had seen signs for a couple of hotels on the road into the town.
Kolda is not a pretty place. In fact its a tumbledown town. There is evidence of building work, but everything is in a state of disrepair, buildings which may once have been white concrete looking very dirty, some of them obviously falling down. The streets are lined with insubstantial shacks, which house the shops and the sand blown streets are full of litter and animal dung. Not a pretty place - a small African town.
As I was walking through the streets I met a German guy who directed me to a hotel. He was staying with a local family.They were the family of a
Senegalese friend of his from Germany. I later had an extensive chat with the German guy and his Senegalese friends.
The Hotel Maya, also doubled as the local nightclub. My room was a traditional round hut. The bathroom was behind an internal partition behind the bed. The hotel itself like much of the town seemed to be in a state of repair or falling down. My room was very good but just across from the good huts there were buildings which I think were part of the hotel which appeared to be in the process of being re-built.
The people in the hotel were very friendly and helpful. The town is not mentioned in my Lonely Planet guidebook and was free of Western tourists except myself and the German guy. He had spent the big Muslin festival of Eid al-Adha, known as Tabaski in Senegal with his friends family. Tabaski is probably the biggest celebration of the year. It commemorates when Abraham sacrificed a Ram instead of his son. Everyone that can afford it wants to have a Ram for the festival. Unfortunately, when the festival was happening I was suffering from tooth ache - in fact on that particular day I didn't eat anything at all because eating anything made the pain worse. The day after the Festival my new German friend ate the sheep's head for the first time in his life.
WEDS 26 JAN
The morning of the 26th I left Kolda for Tambacounda. The roads were slightly better than the previous day and I got into town at 2pm. Again I had seen an advert on the side of the road for a hotel and made my way there.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.482s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 32; qc: 147; dbt: 0.2437s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb