The Third Phase: Two Islands

Gosh, here we are in Timbavati Private Reserve next to Kruger N.P., South Africa, and I’m still writing about three weeks ago. I need to pick up the pace, so less interpretation, and more travelogue, until I catch up.

For our last night in Dakar, we packed up and took a 20 minute ferry to the Isle of Goree. This island is a UNESCO site and the first to recognize the slave trade from Africa. Just south of here in The Gambia is the other major slave trade island that used to be called James Island. It is now called Kinta island, after Alex Haley’s famous ancestor that supposedly was sold from there.

Isle de Goree

During the day Goree is filled with day trippers: school kids on field trips and the first white people we’ve seen in Senegal. There is a thriving African arts community now on the island to cater to the day trippers. We stayed overnight to experience the quiet and solitude after the visitors leave. We stayed in a lovely compound that was managed by Miriam, a very competent and sweet single 28 year old. After the last ferry, all the restaurants along the beach closed down, so we ate at a hotel restaurant overlooking the beach and ferry dock.

Day Trippers

Our Villa on Goree

Slave Trade Building, Goree

Freed Slave comes home to wife.

The next day after we ferried back to the mainland, a driver picked us up to for a three hour drive north to Isle Saint Louie, the former capital of French West Africa. Enroute, we were pulled over several times by Gendarmes. Baksheesh? I asked the driver, and he confirmed he had to pay a bribe. We eventually concluded that the police saw three white people in a car hire and figured they could get a little extra. But our driver said it was common practice so that might have only been an additional excuse.

Genedarmes shaking down our driver

In Saint Louie the three of us stay at Hotel Fil de Fluer. Mary, the owner, was born in Normandy but is of Senegalese heritage. She now spends six months in Saint Louie and six months back in France. She was interviewed by Anthony Bourdain in his Parts Unknown episode on Senegal as a keeper of the countries culture on Saint Louie. Because our hotel was booked after my first night I transferred to Jamm hotel about a quarter mile away in the center of the small island. The owner of Jamm is Yves who is French and married to a Senegalese woman. Together Mary and Yves negotiated the creation of a Guesthouse category for transient stay on the island as small guesthouses didn’t fit into any “rule” the government had for hotels. They both champion the hospitality of Senegal.

Hotel Owner Mary

After two nights on the island, Thom and Robin transferred back south to a beach resort area near the Dakar airport for a little R and R from the intensity of traveling Senegal. I stayed an extra day up north and got a driver to go to Richard Toll, a small town at the boarder with Mauritania and on the fringe of the Sahara Desert. This was a classic third world border crossing: drifters, trucks, bribes, shops and hawkers. Thinking I wanted to cross the river illegally on a pirogue in order to set my foot there, I watched my driver bribing a both a customs official and boat owner. When I finally understood what was happening I said, “No, no no”. While intrigued, I didn’t want to get across without a visa and not be let back in. The next day I transferred down to Popeguine and met up with Thom and Robin for an afternoon on the beach.

Border Crossing to Mauritania

Border Crossing

My visual impression of Senegal after a week driving south to north and south again; from the major city of Dakar, to the tourist towns of Goree and Saint Louie, to the hustle bustle of a backwater boarder crossing is: trash, walking, and colorful women. The highways, side roads, and fields are covered with trash. Plastic bags are blown around and caught into the barren branches of shrubs and trees. And no one seems to notice or care. As Mary said, most people are uneducated and have no aesthetic understanding, so most just don’t see it. Those that do, it’s low on their priority. To get from one place to another they walk. They have Sept Place, dilapidated station wagons that can hold up to seven people (Sept) that shuttle people around, but most everyone just walks. Kids going to and returning from school in their uniforms seem to be walking miles each way. Men going to and from their labors walk. Women doing their laundry or buying necessities or selling product carry loads on their heads and walk the empty desert fields littered with trash. Finally, in all this walking through all the trash, the women are beautifully and colorfully dressed in clean lovely flowing outfits balancing their goods on their heads. They are in stark contrast to the sandy roads littered with plastic.