La petite côte

I'm back!

Last time we left off I think I was about to leave to go traveling for a bit. Well, now I'm back from the adventures with stories to tell. I left Dakar with Lamine on Friday evening in a Peugeot station wagon thing called a sept-place (like seven places to sit) for the gare routière, a crazy, dirty parking lot type place where you can find transport going to ever part of the country. It's surprising organized considering the chaos that you see while walking through. The ground is covered in garbage and black residue. There are people all over directing people where to find the cars that will get then to the right location and vendors walking around and selling a variety of items, especially food and water. The fares generally end up coming out to about two dollars per hour of travel. I wish places like this existed in the US! Unfortunately, Lamine and I found a sept-place going to Saly-Mbour (they are right next to each other) that only had 2 spots left so we were squished in the back in the undesirable seats. Our driver was CRAZY and since the traffic was bad going out of the city (it reminds me of trying to get to northern MN in the summer because there is pretty much only one road out and everyone wants to use it at the same time), he decided to do a little off-roading at high speeds. Super fun. He ended up getting pulled over eventually. I'm not sure if he had to pay a fine but right after he got done with the police man he went right on off-roading and speeding.

We made it to Saly in about 2 hours and went to see Lamine's friend Habib who is currently working there on a construction project. Saly is a strange city because it's probably the most touristy place in the country, with a very high concentration of fancy hotels, restaurants, banks/cash machines, villas owned by white people, and the white people themselves. It almost had the feel of a sleepy American beach town. The good thing about having all the white people around is that you don't get harassedd as much because there are already so many others around! In any case, it's quite a strange place but nice to go for a weekend because it's kind of like taking a break from Senegal for a while.

Saly at Night





Saturday morning we went to see Habib at his construction site (he had to work that weekend for some reason). At first I didn't know what they were building but assumed it was a complex of villas for rich people to puchase. Boy was I wrong! They are building a soccer training complex that is beautiful but I can't help but wonder if the money couldn't have been spent on other more important things....like maybe education or health? Hmmm...well, I suppose it will help the country in some way....I hope.

Habib had to go back to work fairly quickly so Lamine and I headed to the Réserve de Bandia, a wildlife park near Saly. We tried to get a taxi to take us there but he wanted 7000 CFA (about 14 dollars). That was a ridiculous price so we took a Niang Ndiaye (ex-MSIDers, I have no idea how to spell this!), a white mini-bus type thing there instead and payed about 60 cents each. The guidebook said that you need a car to enter but since we obviously didn't have one of those, we decided to check it out anyway in hopes that they would have vehicles to rent. Luckily, they did. The only catch was that they were super expensive (well, by Senegalese and my standards). We decided to have lunch and wait to see if another group without a car would show up. Sadly, they didn't. However, since I will possibly never make it back there, I decided that we should go anyway. It only ended up costing about 83 dollars for the car, the guide, and 2 entrance passes. It ended up being well worth the money because it was kind of like a 2 hour mini-safari. While there were no big lions or tigers, we did see giraffes, rhinos, lots of cool birds, warthogs, little monkeys and lots of different gazelle and cow-like animals.









Since Saly is well-known for it's beautiful beaches, I forced us to spend Sunday at the beach. I say forced because Lamine thinks that it's still too cold to go to the beach. He’s crazy because it’s getting hot here! I laid in the sand whild he ran on the beach and did his sports stuff so we were both happy. While it is warm enough to lay out in the sun, he is right about the water. It's definitely not warm enough for swimming yet! I could only manage to go in up to my legs.

After the beach, we packed up our stuff and went back to the gare routière where I got into a sept-place headed for the much less appealing Kaolack and Lamine got in one headed back to Dakar.