Category: Senegal 2022

And for our last official stop of the tour — how did 10 days go by so fast? — a game reserve at Bandia.  It’s a very large park managed by the Senegalese government, containing local birds and animals for sure, but they have also brought in animals like zebras and giraffes that are not native to West Africa at all, but are animals tourists apparently want to see when travelling in Africa. They do very well here, they just are not native to the area. Couldn’t quite decide how I felt about that!

To wind up the blog for this trip, a couple of pictures of the happy tourists.  Don’t we look relaxed ?  The second pic includes our driver Waly on the left, and tour guide Abou on the right. We had a great trip with them, and would encourage anyone interested in going to Senegal to talk to us about this tour.  But for now, off to pack for the homeward voyage.  Thanks for following along as we have traveled — I have appreciated the comments!

We have been out seeing wildlife but now the wildlife is coming to see us. We were greeted outside our hotel room this morning by an African Red-billed Hornbill — Zazu in The Lion King, by the way — then a hundred yards further on by a monkey.

Our guide warned us The Gambia, for some reason, is incredibly bureaucratic, with rules and regulations around everything. That turned out to be true. We probably drove a grand total of 120 km within the country, and were stopped about 12-15 times at checkpoints, usually to verify that the car’s papers were in order, but also to make sure we had seatbelts on, that we weren’t speeding, that we didn’t have too many people in the car, God knows exactly what but anyway we were stopped really a LOT.  We also had to fill in several forms at the Gambian hotel, and were warned we had to carry these with us at all times on the premises, but nobody ever asked to see them, not even once, it was all quite strange.  On our last morning there, we realized the swimming pool signs in two hotels perfectly illustrated the difference between the two countries. The one on the left is in The Gambia, the one on the right is in Senegal.

We took the ferry back across river to re-enter Senegal, and by the way a couple of readers asked if we had been worried about overcrowding on the ferry, as one hears of ferry disasters periodically, but the big ferry we took felt safe, not overcrowded at all, and had strict regulations about numbers of people, cars, buses, and trucks, plus it had safety equipment including flotation devices. That said, there was an alternative ferry available that gave us the heeby-jeebies, a taxi boat that was clearly overloaded.  And of course no lifejackets or floating cushions or anything.  Pretty scary stuff!

Back in Senegal, we visited Fadiouth-Joal, a mainland town plus two islands created originally from big piles of discarded mollusc shells built up over hundreds of years. Earth has settled around and into it, but what you see is mostly shells, and it is really sizeable. The first island is residential, and the second one is an unusual mixed graveyard of Christian, Muslim, and Animist burials.

Our base for the next couple of days is Banjul, and we began our day in the mangroves, where they gather oysters. It was all very interesting to me, I learned a lot. The mangroves only grow in saltwater, and they don’t grow on the ground, they literally grow in the water. They put down long thick roots, oysters attach themselves to the roots, and when the tide goes out the oysters are exposed, and women harvest them by chipping them off the roots, leaving the roots there for more oysters to attach themselves. The oysters are eaten and they process the shells for paint. They smoke them for some hours over a slow wood fire, to create very high-calcium white ash, that is used for the paint, and can also be mixed into the feed of domestic chickens to make their eggshells stronger.

We went for a leisurely paddle through the mangroves, then got out of the boat and went to see a 500-year-old kapok tree, they call it the elephant tree here because there is quite a resemblance to an elephant’s skin texture and features. These trees as they age often develop substantial openings, I didn’t like the idea of crawling in myself, but will attach a video of My Lovely Assistant Geoff magically emerging from the tree, to show you the size of the thing. I am sorry, I think the screen is enormous but it is the first time I ever tried to insert a video. Fingers crossed you can see it.

Next stop a beach where fishing catches are brought ashore. Some fish is immediately sold onward fresh, but a fair quantity is either salted or smoked on-site.  It is difficult work, the crews can be out in their quite small for boats up to 14 days, and the work on the beach to haul, sell, clean, salt and smoke the fish is non-stop and feels rather chaotic.

Final visit for today was a crocodile pool, to be honest I wasn’t keen on visiting as I expected it to be depressing, but it was spacious and clean. The crocodiles have spiritual significance for the local people, and in particular childless women will visit for a sort of ritual bathing ceremony beside the crocodile pool in the hope this will help them conceive. The guide said it often seems to work, perhaps in part because the participants really believe that it is going to work. We were permitted to visit only immediately after the crocs had been fed, as they are sleepy and lazy then, and not looking for an appetizer of Tourist Tartare!

Well, I must’ve been distracted last night when I posted the Touba & Toubakouta blog, because I totally forgot to actually tell you anything at all about Toubakouta! Not TOO much to relate, but a pretty hotel, with a relaxed bar, nice pool, good restaurant, and outstanding staff. Quite a bit fancier than where we had been staying the last few days, although we have absolutely no complaints anywhere, really comfortable accommodations and always friendly people.

Moving on and trying to keep things in sequence, the next stage in our adventure is that we crossed the border from Senegal into The Gambia, where we will stay for the next couple of days. The ferry was pretty chaotic — so many people, so many cars, so many trucks, so many vendors, and so little space on the boat! But all went well.

Senegal was French-speaking, The Gambia is English-speaking, and the feeling in the two countries is quite different. First stop here was Juffureh, thought to be the ancestral village of Alex Haley who wrote “Roots”; the Kinteh/Kinte family are still prominent in the area. From there, we took a boat across to the former James Island, which was rechristened Kunta Kinteh Island by the Gambian government in 2011. Sadly, this was originally a transit stop for enslaved people, who would be gathered here and then sent on to Goree Island before the transatlantic crossing. A place for reflection on man’s inhumanity to man.

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!

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.

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.

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.