Tambacounda

We arrived in Kaolack in the evening and booked into a nearby hotel.   Kaolack was busy and bustling next morning and a big Senegalese man wearing a wide brimmed black cowboy hat, showed us the gare routiere where the set place cars for Tambacounda left from.  The next car to go to Tambacounda  was very old and battered with doors that didn’t close properly, windows which couldn’t be lowered and interior upholstery which was missing or damaged.  However rejecting this car would mean possibly a long wait for the next one to fill up so we jumped in and set off.  The engine sounded really rough and the crunching gear changes were a bad sign at the beginning of the 250 km journey.  The roads however were good and our misgivings about the state of the car gradually evaporated as we made steady progress.  This happy confidence declined as the car failed to start after a routine police checkpoint at Kaffrine, about 50km east from Kaolack.  The driver went off to find a mechanic as we sat under a tree with the other passengers and shared our mandarins.  After lying under the car to find out what was wrong the mechanic grunted and diagnosed a clutch failure. So we pushed the car to his roadside workshop.  Here he and his appendices proceeded to remove the engine and strip out the clutch plate from our car and remove the engine from another wreck to fit the recovered clutch plate into our car.  During this five hour operation we shared our food with the other passengers, played with the little boy who was travelling with his family and bought sachets of washing powder from a local shop.  By six o clock the beaming driver rounded us up and we were mobile again with only 200km to go.  The sun was getting lower and the shadows stretched across the road.  As the light faded we realised the car had no lights, the fan belt had broken and the alternator didn’t work.  We drove determinedly into the African night with the driver peering ahead and our torch shinning out the back to prevent us being rammed by faster vehicles.  We banged and rattled along in darkness at about 40km/hr and finally reached Tambacounda at ten o clock.  As we drove into the town was saw our hotel and stopped the car.  After friendly handshakes and goodbyes from the driver and our fellow passengers we hefted our rucksacks onto our backs and walked back to Keur Khoudia, our hotel for the night.  Despite arriving late and not having booked we were welcomed and shown a nice, clean and basic room by Edrissa.  It had a concrete floor covered with rugs, en-suite facilities, including a flushing toilet, and electricity.  The Edrissa offered to heated up a pot of ragout and spaghetti and even went to a local bitico to buy us a couple of bottles of cold beer.  So we were well fed and spend a very comfortable night in an agreeable hotel.

This article is part of a series describing our tour of West Africa
Previous Page:  Next page: