Saturday, January 10th, 2009
I’m sitting in the courtyard of the Hotel La Poste in St Louis, Senegal. This is the oldest hotel in St Louis.
The courtyard is in the center of 4 stories and has palm trees in it, very nice.
The trip here was quite the adventure. It took 4.5 hours in a small station wagon that held 7 people and the
driver. In order to get this car we had to go to the main transport hub, which is a large parking lot filled
with cars, vans, buses and lorries. None of them will leave until they are full so buses don’t run on any
regular schedule and are packed with guys even riding on the back bumpers. We managed to get this car
so we didn’t have to wait which was good. Of course everybody needed to get a cut before we could even
get out of the parking lot. That poor driver must have paid 5000 francs just to get on the road.
The road was in pretty good shape but getting out of Dakar took an hour and a half in stop and go traffic.
The traffic jam was swarmed by people selling everything from oranges to inflatable beach balls and
sunglasses. It’s a kind of slow moving market.
Once out in the country we were moving along pretty well.
The towns along the road all pretty much look the same, dusty and half built, half destroyed cinder block
buildings. Each one also has a drift of garbage surrounding it. Blue plastic seem to be the most obvious but
it looks like most of it is plastic, the smell is awful.
St Louis is a much lower key place than Dakar and definitely shows more of the French Colonial
architecture. The people are less pushy and they seem to speak more english but they still all seem to have
an angle of some sort.
Tomorrow we are heading even further North to the National Park so with any luck I’ll be able to get
some pics posted before we head back.
The current plan has the ship leaving for Cape Verde on Monday sometime and the trip should take 3-4
days.
Thanks for reading.
KJ
P.S. It is now 9:00pm on Sunday night and we finally made it back to Dakar after a 6 hour drive back. We
went to the National Park this morning and that was pretty cool. The park is setup to protect wildfowl
primarily.
There are a set of waterways and lakes behind a series of dikes that have been used to keep the sea out and allow the rains to wash out thensalt from the soil. It is a major Pelican rookery. We also saw many
different kinds of birds, Egrets, Storks, Ibis, Ducks, Spoonbills, Eagles, Cormorants and Terns. I’ll try to
post some pics before I head back to the ship on the 11:00pm skiff run.
Next stop Cape Verde in a few days.
Thanks for reading.
KJ
The pictures of the new Dory paint job and my trip to St Louis are here.
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