The Sea Tortoise

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Dakar, Senegal, West Africa -- Filthy on a good day, just blatantly vulgar the rest of the time. The stench can be downright gutwretching at times and in places... and yet somehow the place has its appeal.

The locals are an amalgam of tribal leaders -- the neauveau riche strutting about in their overpriced cars and authentic bling -- the Euro-mutts, the Sophisticates... all of which collectively comprise less than five percent of the population -- living alongside some of the poorest people on earth.

Believe it or not, Senegal is well off, as West African nations go. Most people have something to eat and a place to lay thier heads every night. The lodgings might be considered squalor by most Western standards, but the climate is perfectly moderate here at the coast. Day and night, summer and winter, it is comfortable. As to the stench, it does get a purging with the monsoons each summer. The other 10.5 months of the year, open sezers are enough to make one gag, and slopping the beach with trash and pealings must not be quite bad enough. If it were, they wouldn't run sezer pipes straight into the ocean. I liked the place much better before I had seen these things... and yet it has a way of growing on one... for a while.



When I tell the locals that I live here, they always say "Yes, but when you go back home where will you live?" At first I thought that was just because so many come and go, but I am starting to realize that they also think no one with a choice would stay here. I am starting to think maybe they are right.


This Senegal Parrot was bought by a local for about $2 USD. Unfortunately, he didn't have a cage or food, or money to buy them, and had already cut the bird's flight feathers. When I found the guy dragging the bird around by a shoelace attached to its leg, I couldn't tolerate it. The bird lives on my balcony now... and the guy is out two dollars and the responsibility for the creature's life.

Gratefully, though, Senegal is not Dakar any more than LA, San Francisco or even Santa Barbara are really California. Besides, if we get a bit more honest, cruise ships and munincipalities have been dumping raw sewerage into our oceans for years, and we still swim and surf in that water.

Here in Yoff, I pay $300 a month for a big room with private bath and a balcony that faces the ocean, which is less than half a block away. In LA, I would be lucky to rent a parking space for that sum, but here water, electric, cooking gas and cleaning services are included, along with the occasional home-cooked meal. Like I said, the place can grow on ya.



Today I took a walk along the beach. I spoke with a couple on how train their very unruly rotweiller puppy, then shared the sand with joggers, fishermen, begging children, horse-drawn carts, pillaging goats, black kites, and the occasional woman slopping the beach with the day's pealings, fish heads, guts, plastic wrappers and left-overs.



Lacking refrigeration, left-overs don't stay long. Most here have a fridge now, but most of those living on the beach are squatters occupying unfinished buildings abandoned by some zealous rich person, probably European, so they (the squatters ) don't have electricity to run a fridge... but I digress.

The most distressing images are the goat head, sitting there on the shore waiting to be washed away, while other goats scrounge all around it for something to eat...



...and the decaying corpse of a sea turtle. That giant creature may very well have first hatched and crawled into the ocean back when Dakar was a slaver's port. It has lived through centuries of human progress, vulgarity and stupidity. Yet now it suffers an ignobme death and disrespectful grave -- stepped around and over only because it is putrid, while traces of its mortal coil erode alongside so many buckets of slop.



A part of me wants to brave it and seize a relic -- the beak, perhaps -- but in the end, I decide this would be an even greater insult to the lackluster rememberance of its passing, so I take a picture and leave it to whatever peace it may find lying there upside down on the beach, just a hundred yards from the farthest most westerly point in all of Africa. Sleep well, Ancient One, and dream for us. Remember the time when Dakar was not yet born, and this was still amongs the most beautiful places on earth. The locals may not notice, but this Toubab saw, and mourns your passing.

JT -- 21 Jan., 2008 11 pm Yoff, Dakar, Senegal

More pictures from this period, including tidepools, flying kites, a kid surfing and some of the other pleasant parts of that walk along the beach, can be seen at this link: Misc Pics from Yoff Wk 3 Jan 2008

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