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
Previous Page:  Next page: 

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: 

Our next stop was St Louis, north from Dakar, near the border with Mauritania.  We travelled again by ‘set place’ with another set of interesting passengers.  The beautiful old French colonial city of St Louis is on a long thin island in the River Senegal immediately adjacent to the Atlantic Coast. So there is a very thin spit of land between the ocean and the river. Then there is a channel between the spit of land and the island of St Louis. On the other side of the island the river is wider and a metal girder bridge spans the river connecting the island with the mainland. We took a local taxi the 4km from the gare routiere on the mainland, over to the island.  A very pleasing long frontage of two and three storey stately pastel coloured houses reflecting in the wide blue water of the river welcomes the visitor crossing the bridge and positively invites a photograph to be taken.   Immediately over the bridge, which was once over the Danube and moved by the French in 1886, lies the famous Post Hotel.  It was here that the pilots of the big flying boats from Paris stayed, before resuming their intrepid flights over the Atlantic to South America on their regular mail runs.  Having an interest in aviation we stayed in this historic hotel, crammed with pictures and memorabilia of the bygone days.

St Louis is also famous for its jazz and our first night was spent listening to local jazz musicians amalgamating traditional jazz with local tempos from African drums and enjoying a really good meal.  It has to be said that the once elegant St Louis has departed a bit from its former days of affluent elegance.  The buildings have decayed a bit and there is a dusty tired, but relaxed and laconic feel to the place.  Whilst this predominantly French speaking town lacks the hustle and bustle of Dakar the people are also less frenetic and there is virtually no hassle from street traders and hawkers.  Being English speaking I naturally tuned in to any English conversation I heard.  So we soon met fellow Gambians and we traded reminiscences and notes about places we knew.  So we met George a chap from the fishing village of Bakau in Gambia who had come to St Louis to fish there.  We wanted to try one of the tourist horse and cart things and naturally George knew someone who had one.  So George took us over to the extended fishing village on the spit of land between the river and the ocean.  We were always very careful about taking photographs of people because uninvited photography is a very definite invasion of privacy in anyone’s language.  We always ask before we take a photograph.  The answer maybe a simple no, and that’s OK.  On the other hand if you can give the person a copy of the photograph it is often a very welcome offer.  So we carry a Polaroid camera, as well as our digital, to do that. Not many people relish candid shots of themselves in their working clothes.  So people sometimes rush indoors to change into the best outfits.  The resulting photographs are then pretty good with happy people smiling out of the picture.  In a general situation like a fishing village snapping off indiscriminately can cause a diplomatic incident.  However with someone who knows the people and can explain your interest the situation is transformed.  Everyone was very friendly and interested in our travels, advice, hints and tips was given and these were stored for future thought.  We came across Kemo. A young man from Ghana who was stacking dried shark for export to Ghana.  Kemo explained that whilst there were plenty of shark in the waters off Ghana the climate of reliable and uninterrupted sunshine necessary to dry the fish was here in northern Senegal, just below the Sahara desert.

We had planned to walk over the border into Mauritania; but George warned that whilst the border was open and unmarked just a few kilometres north, the border guards made a modest living out of fining careless or adventurous toubabs, white people, £20 for straying over without a visa.  Unfortunately we didn’t have a visa for Mauritania.  The hotel said they could organise a trip with a commercial traveller going to the capital but the cost was exorbitant.   There was also a local travel agent who organised tourist trips into the desert provided there was small group of interested people.  But after a couple of days no such group materialised.  So we resolved to have one last relaxing night in St Louis and move on.  Our last meal was in the main hotel.  It was great; the waiters were interesting and charming professionals who greeted French, Spanish and German guests with equal affection and enthusiasm.  The atmosphere was warm, the food was first class and the red wine was served chilled so it slowly rose to the correct temperature as it sat in the glass.

Another early start, by far the best policy when travelling by public transport in West Africa.  You never know how the journey will pan out. So we found a ‘set place’ going south to Kaolack, bypassing Dakar.  It filled up in about an hour and we were off.   We always carried three litres of water and some food because vehicles could break down anywhere and a supply of good water was not always guaranteed.   On an otherwise uneventful trip we passed through the town of Touba and saw some magnificent mosques.  We made a note to come back here some time to have a better look.

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