Author: Elizabeth

An early start to our day, as we were heading for the holy city of Touba, and it being Friday, if we didn’t reach the mosque by mid-morning it would’ve been closed for prayers. We entered the city by a gate, of which there are four: north, south, east and west. Within those boundaries the city is like the Vatican, a self-governing state with its own rules. Which include no alcohol and no smoking, also no car registration, although you do still need a license to drive one.

We stopped along the road at a random compound, our guide went in and asked the family if we could visit, and they were really welcoming.  The compound contained a side-by-side duplex, with one brother and family in one side, and a second brother and family in the other.  The children stay in the family house until the boys have an initiation ceremony, usually around age 8 or 9, at which point they start sleeping at night with other older boys in the “bachelors house” across the courtyard.  The girls stay on in the main house, though, with their parents, sisters, and younger boys. It’s peanut-harvest time, and the ladies gave us a demo of the process. They pull up the plants and pile them up to dry, then after some weeks they can rake into the piles to break off the peanuts, put clumps into big basins, and winnow it to separate the peanuts from the dry plant-tops, which are fed to livestock. They were extremely amused when Geoff tried it out, and one of the ladies very quickly tried to show him the correct technique. Gales of laughter all around!

And for those of you who thought that “Zebu” was simply a great Scrabble word, here is a herd of Zebu!

Spent the first part of the day at the national park Djoudj Bird Sanctuary. Djoudj has the first water source south of the Sahara so, as migratory birds cross the desert in Jan-Feb-March it is apparently a very busy place, and a big draw for ornithologists as well as thirsty birds. Even though now is not a migration period, we saw a variety of stay-at-homes, including a colony of pelicans. A few animals too, including a rather handsome warthog.

Back to St. Louis for a lunch of the local specialty “Ceebu jën” which is rice and fish with vegetables including cassava and a variety of eggplant I was not familiar with, plus a side of carrots marinated in a tamarind-based sauce. With our meal we drank ditax, the juice of the ebony-tree fruit. All very tasty!

We headed for Lompoul in the afternoon, for an overnight stay in the desert. Our lodging complex was eco-friendly — no air conditioning, limited electricity, and totally powered by solar. Geoff took a sunset camel ride, but I stayed put and enjoyed the gorgeous view and the desert silence instead. At night, we listened to a lively band sing and drum, then dinner, then to bed under a mosquito net. The night sky in rural Africa is stunning. No light pollution at all, and it is inky black, and full, full, full, full of stars. I think Senegal and Mali are the only places I have seen the sky like this.

And a small p.s. — what the heck are these guys doing on a Senegalese stamp???

We left Dakar this morning for Saint Louis, at the northern border with Mauritius, making an early stop at “The Pink Lake”, which unfortunately turned out to be plain old blue today because this is the end of the rainy season and the heavy salt content has been diluted so much it has lost its typical pink colour. Local workers dredge the heavy salt/water mixture into the boats, and make salt piles on shore to dry out, then use a pickaxe to break down the salt for bagging. It looked like very hard work to me, but they said not. I guess everything is relative…?

Next comment is on transportation. For the amusement of my Scottish friends and family, here is a truck we passed, a very long way from its original home in Bishopbriggs, a few miles from my cousins. Small world. The other is a bus we followed on a high-speed motorway — with a man relaxing on top, hanging out, checking his phone. Right after I snapped this I was horrified to see him suddenly scale down the ladder at top speed and swing himself around to the right side of the truck, holding on with a couple of toes and one hand — and yes, the bus was still travelling at about 100 km/hr. Had no idea what was going on, then realized there was a police checkpoint, someone had clearly alerted him by text, and he had to race down and hide on the other side of the bus from where the police were watching for illegal rooftop riders!

St. Louis is the old French colonial capital, and you see the influence in the architecture. Antoine de St-Exupery, the early aviator who wrote The Little Prince, lived here when he worked for the French postal service that flew between Toulouse and Dakar. We also visited the fishing village Gued Ndar, a place of frenetic streets and a busy beach…. and a pet pelican! We were surprised to see this fellow on the street outside a house, but learned he (or possibly she) is a house pet, taken early from a pelican colony and now bonded with a family. They sell fish to tourists who want to feed him — we did NOT, by the way, but certainly he looks well fed.

We began our second day in Dakar with a ferry trip to Goree Island, a place of truly grim history and present-day reflection. It was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast and is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. The contrast between the places that housed enslaved people, and the places where enslavers lived and worked, is stark.

In the afternoon, we went back to Dakar and visited The Museum of African Civilization, a hopeful and positive counterpoint to Goree Island. The baobab tree is important here, and in the museum entrance is a giant metal sculpture of a baobab, portraying the African diaspora. Its roots signify the deep and stable connection the diaspora has to Africa, the narrowing trunk the coming together of African peoples for strength, and the spreading branches represent the diaspora itself, spreading out to all corners of the world.

Too many interesting exhibits to describe, but I’ll show a couple of items I particularly liked. The first is an ancestor statue from Nigeria, with a cape of cowrie shells, which used to be the main form of currency on the busy West African trade routes until I think the 18th century, and which still have ceremonial and spiritual significance here. The second is a traditional hunter’s tunic from the Bambara people of Mali, and again, you will see some cowrie shells.

After two days in Portugal to get used to the time change, we flew to Dakar late last night. Arrived at 2:00 am, and walked out of the airport into heat and humidity — quite a change from Lisbon. We were NOT early risers this morning, but once we got going, enjoyed a tour of some of the main sights. Here’s a very small selection of photos — the first one is the Mosque of the Divinity, beautifully located on the ocean, next one a clifftop view of downtown Dakar.

And 2 pics that illustrate our slightly different approach to travel. It was about 35° today, and the first shows Geoff — the guy in the baseball cap — descending after climbing the 198 stairs to the African Renaissance Monument (yes, he counted them), and me in the easy chair with a bottle of water waiting for him to come back down.

After our guide dropped us at the hotel late afternoon, we decided to go walking by ourselves through some nearby market streets. Very colourful, very noisy, and very full of people, cars, motorcycles — quite an intense “window-shopping” experience.

Looking forward to seeing more of the city and surroundings tomorrow!

It’s a placeholder for now. Trip updates coming relatively soon, if all goes well…