Kidira

Breakfast was omelettes and coffee.  After discussions with Edrissa and other hotel staff we decided not to go to the Niokolo-Koba National Park because the cost of hiring a four wheel drive car with driver was £80 per day.  We had planned to go there and stay the night at the Hôtel Simenti, a sister hotel to the Keur Khoudia, but we thought the cost was too high this early in the trip.  Added to this, the chance of seeing elephants and other game was said to be slim. This was later confirmed by Orla one of our fellow VSO volunteers who lived near the National Park, on the Gambian side of the border.  She said that elephants had not been seen in the park for ten years!
Edrissa who had already been so helpful and friendly offered to show us the garage to get a car to Kidira on the border with Mali so we decided to press on.  Again we bought three seats in the middle of a set place.  This time it was a good car with clean seats and a sound engine.  The road was surfaced, smooth and free of pot holes with white lines painted up the middle of the road.  As the yellow ochre scrub and occasional baobab tree slid past we chatted amicably with our fellow passengers.  Matti a Malian woman lived in Senegal and was on her way to visit her daughter in Kayes.  Sitting behind us, Kalif had travelled down from Dakar that morning and intended to carry on all the way through to Bamako, the capital of Mali, that night.  This monumental journey involved him getting a bus in Kayes to take him the last 600km to Bamako.  We were very interested in this leg of the journey because we intended to head to Bamako in a couple of days.  He said that the best buses were over the big bridge at the other end of Kayes.  Babansu, a really lively and friendly chap was from Guinea Conakry and was heading home to see his folks, before travelling on to the illegal diamond fields in Sierra Leone. We made really good progress and drove into dusty Kidira at mid morning chatting on and off with the others.  The few villages we passed on the way were collections of white rectangular mud brick houses with dark brown palm thatch roofs.  These were corralled in woven twig and palm fences.    Kidira on the other hand was a dusty frontier town, ramshackle with heavy lorries parked up waiting to cross the border into Mali.  Outside many oil stained buildings the detritus of mechanical maintenance accumulated, an engine block, piles of worn out truck tyres, rear axle assemblies and bits and pieces of lorries of every make.  Mechanics in worn out t-shirts and greasy trousers dozed listlessly in old car seats strategically positioned against a wall in the shade of an overhanging corrugated iron roof.  The set place dropped us off at the neat police station compound where our passports were stamped to record our exit from Senegal. We stayed together as a group and Matti found us a van that would take us across the big bridge over the Senegal River to the border into Mali at the town of Nayé. The river flows from Mali around the north of Senegal, forming part of the border with Mauritania until it flows into the Atlantic at St Louis. 

This article is part of a series describing our tour of West Africa
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