Some impressions of Senegal
We’ve been in Senegal for a few days now, so I’ll discuss some of my thoughts.
It’s certainly interesting and different to be in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. As a region, West Africa is poorer than Africa as a whole, and that’s certainly been evident so far. Dakar, the Senegalese capital, is not a great city by any stretch of the imagination, though it’s supposed to the most cosmopolitan capital in West Africa, so I’m not sure that bodes well for future cities. Fortunately we had a really good time there regardless. Through ‘couchsurfing’ we stayed with a Benin couple, Sorif and Sariyou, who were very welcoming and friendly and it allowed us to have a different kind of experience from the usual tourist one. Three other travellers were staying at the house at the same time and that made it even better as everyone got on well and we were able to go out eating and to a live music bar together. As far as sightseeing goes, we spent one afternoon on a nearby island, Goree, which a few centuries ago was a holding place for Senegalese slaves before they were shipped to the Americas (about three years ago, this island was featured in an episode of ‘The Amazing Race’, for what it’s worth).
In West Africa there aren’t that many buses for transport, so it’s usually by ‘bush taxi’, usually a pretty beaten up car with an extra row of seats in it to accomodate seven passengers. Yesterday we took one of these for about five hours to the northern colonial town of Saint-Louis, the first French colony in Africa. While Saint-Louis will never be confused with Cartagena or the other great Spanish colonial cities of the Americas, it does have a certain faded charm about it, and it’s certainly nicer than Dakar. There are many colonial buildings on the island that makes up the heart of the French settlement, and it’s pleasant and safe to walk through the streets. We’ve had two nice meals here as well, so in all I think this will be perhaps the nicest sizeable place that we’re going to visit in West Africa.
Memories of being very cold in Meknes only four weeks ago are fading pretty quickly. It’s not unbearable (yet) but it’s reasonably hot, probably in the low 30s Celcius, and the days are longer than they were in Morocco.
Overall we weren’t really looking at Senegal as being one of the main countries of the trip so we’re going to continue on to Mali soon. There’s a presidential election here on Sunday, and the general rule in any African country is that when there’s a presidential election, be somewhere else, just in case there’s trouble in the aftermath. So we’re going to go back to Dakar on Friday to pick up our Mali visas and hopefully we can get to Mali on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning.
It’s going to be harder to upload pictures to the web from now on but hopefully I’ll be able to put some up when we get back to Sorif’s place on Friday.
Tags: Africa, Dakar, Senegal, Travel, West Africa
Nick
Senegal is great place to visis – I am missing photos in your post – there is small photo gallery: http://www.asmat.eu/html/fotografie_senegal_e.html