We stayed in the Ganalé Hotel, recommended to us by VSO colleagues. It had a funky bar with great ambiance, subdued lighting and old musical instruments decorating the walls.  Discrete Western and African music filled the bar with the latest romantic tempos.  Even the bar stools were famous in Dakar.  The legs from shop window manikins were bolted onto the high bar stools.  These were painted as if the legs wore frilly knickers and fishnet stockings.  Strangers to the bar often did a double take as they thought they saw a man standing at the bar wearing fishnet stockings.  It was a fun place and an excellent start to an evening in the city.  After a drink we moved on to the Farid restaurant, reputed to be best Lebanese restaurant in Dakar, located in Rue Vincens a narrow side street, just off Avenue Georges Pompidou, the main drag.  As we entered, the waiter glided between the twelve discrete tables set out in the dark wood panelled restaurant.  Each table was immaculately laid out with a crisp white table cloth and two sets of silver cutlery. A single red rose in a cut glass vial added a spark of colour whilst a candle in a coloured glass candle holder illuminated the faces of the diners in romantic gleams of soft light.  The food was excellent, well balanced blends of delicate Lebanese flavours. This contrast to Gambia was amazing and we started to plan the next few days and finding the embassies to get our visas .

The next day we chatted to the local taxi drivers and negotiated a rate for taking us to the Burkina Faso embassy.  What at first sight seemed like a relatively easy job with a good guide book, a map of Dakar and a local taxi driver was far from straightforward.  The problem was that the embassy had moved.  Our friendly taxi driver Omar was however tenacious and resourceful. Having arrived at the given address and realised that the embassy was no more he asked at local shops and chatted to old men sitting smoking outside their houses.  There was consensus that the Burkina Faso chaps had up sticks and moved. Eventually someone thought they knew the general area of town were the new embassy was located.  So we went there and Omar diplomatically pumped the locals for intelligence on the migratory embassy.  Whilst Margaret spoke French and better Wolof than I Omar knew the local dialects and could more readily plumb the nuances of the garbled explanations.  He reported back regularly on the latest piece of fragmentary evidence.  We felt we were getting closer when two small boys on bicycles reported to Omar that they could lead us to a side street and the missing embassy. Omar seemed cautious about this lead and thought it might be just a scam, but we followed the two bicycles in Omar’s taxi.  Sure enough there it was, in an out of the way side street across the city from its first location.  The boys were rewarded by an amount advised by Omar and we rang the bell on the gates.  The caretaker, with a huge grin and missing front tooth, advised us that the embassy was closed for the day but would be open the next day and gave us the phone number.  Omar took us back to the Ganalé and had to be pressed to accept a fare which we thought commensurate with all the assistance he had given us. We agreed to meet next day to try again and braced ourselves for long bureaucratic delays.

The next day dawned bright and early at the Burkina Faso embassy.  A delightfully efficient embassy clerk took our details and gave us forms to fill in.  She asked us to return in the afternoon to collect our passports and visas.  At two o clock we had three month, multiple entry visas.  She said she was delighted that we wanted to visit Burkina and hoped we had a wonderful trip.  Omar waited patiently outside ready to take us to the Mali embassy.  He had already made discrete enquires and confirmed that it was located where our ‘Rough Guide to West Africa’ said it was.  We noted the new address and telephone number of the Burkina embassy and passed these on to the ‘Rough Guide.’ Our reception at the Mali embassy was similarly friendly but the guard told us it would closed during the public holiday, next day.

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Slowly the vehicles disembarked.  Barra was a small port catering for the needs of the travellers passing through.  The road through town was lined with stalls made from undressed rickety wood and corrugated iron.  Each was filled with every commodity that could possibly be of interest, canned drinks, bottled water, bread, biscuits, combs, shampoo, plastic sandals, candles, mosquito coils, you name it.  There were also women with large enamel bowls full of cooked chicken with onion and gravy sauce who could prepare a quick sandwich.  The chicken, dripping with sauce was placed in the open bread stick and was then manipulated using dexterous fingers to remove the bones and tough bits.  This left just the meat and the sauce on the bread.  Cold chips or noodles were added by hand if some extra sustenance was required.  This was then topped off by tomato sauce and or mayonnaise to taste. Nice. This tasty morsel was wrapped in some form of printed paper.  Sometimes it was a telephone directory from a Danish city or newsprint from another Scandinavian town where environmental issues were taken seriously and paper was recycled.  The sandwich lady would wipe her hands on a cloth on her lap before accepting the money and dishing out the change.  Customers were particular about bank notes covered with onion gravy.  There were also men grilling lamb in converted oil drums if you wanted something hot. Butchers offered fresh meat to those who wanted to prepare their food at home. 

Taxis and bushvans destined for upcountry destinations waited for all their seats to fill before they set off.  Some had to wait until the next ferry before all the seats were taken.  Travelling in the evening could result in an all night wait.  As passengers waited they snacked and dropped wrapping and cans out of the windows of the stationary vehicles.  So Barra always had large amounts of litter and waste blowing around in the dust or trodden into the mud.  Occasionally this was swept onto the shore where large pigs routed around to discover traces of onion gravy smeared on pages of the Copenhagen yellow pages.  The vehicle park was always pandemonium, we had set off from there several times for upcountry destinations.  Each driver had a tout who tried to entice the traveller into one particular vehicle.  So the traveller was met by a barrage of excited and excitable young men who demanded to know where you were going.  Having determined this the traveller was ushered to the car or bush van concerned.  To the uninitiated this focussed bedlam was quite intimidating but the experienced traveller remembered that they were the customer and ignored the shouted exultations and asked for the type of transport they wanted.

This time we were heading to the border town of Amdallai and wanted a bush van, which was cheaper than a taxi. And so it was that our rucksack was hefted onto the roof and we settled into a rapidly filling bush van, sharing grins and biscuits with our fellow travellers.  At Amdalli we reported to the police station to have the Gambia exit stamp in our passports and continued into Senegal. The immigrations formalities were brief and efficient but the lady immigration officer was a bit stern and did not engage in the usual friendly banter. Transport in Senegal is much better organised than in Gambia. The gare routiere, or transport garage is about one mile from the Gambian border and that can be covered either on a donkey cart or in a clapped out taxi.  Since we had lost a few hours with the fouled propeller we opted for the car. It was really old and dilapidated even by Gambian standards.  Our big rucksack had to be wedged in with the spare tyre to stop it falling through a massive hole in the floor of the boot onto the road. We shared the taxi with five other passengers four crammed into the back seat and both of us shoe-horned into the front seat, cheap and cheerful.  The people at the Karang gare routiere were as helpful as usual, we bought three seats in a ‘set place’ bound for Dakar and set off almost immediately.  The ‘set place’ is a Peugeot 506 designed to take seven passengers, one in front with driver, three in the first rear seat and another three in the rear seat behind that.  It can be a bit cramped if the passengers are large so we often bought three places in the first rear seat to spread out a bit. 

After clearing the immigration formalities at Karang we drove the 100 km to Kaolack.   The road between Karang and Kaolack was surfaced but there was a 10km stretch with potholes and the driver left the road to drive along a dried up river bed which was smoother.  We chatted with the other passengers who were all going to Dakar. Behind us were three women, one with her young son, Sanna. At a police checkpoint the driver was persuaded, after some discussion, to part with 4kg of sugar to a policeman to let him off with some minor traffic offence.

The roads in Senegal are much better than Gambia and the 350 km journey from Kaolack to Dakar was fast, well faster than we were used to.  Occasionally we stopped to let little Sanna relieve himself.  His mother passed him over to me and I supervised his comfort stop and then passed him back. We arrived in Dakar six hours later and were amazed by the network of multi-lane concrete dual carriageways on the outskirts.  We hit town in the rush hour and the roads were blocked by slow moving traffic, but eventually we arrived at the bustling central gare routiere.  Our first night in Dakar was a revelation.  On the road up Senegal looked more or less like Gambia, perhaps just a bit better organised, with electricity in the villages, some with solar powered street lighting.  There also seemed to more regulated farming practices with crops in fields. Dakar looked and felt more like a large southern European city.  Place De L’independence was the central square with manicured gardens at the northern end.  It was really a big long thin rectangle of ornamental fountains and well kept lawns surrounded by a constantly busy four lane highway.  The circulatory border roads were lined by modern colonnaded multi-storey office blocks and 25 storey hotels.  At the mid point on one side of the square, Avenue Georges Pompidou, Dakar’s main shopping street started.

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