What better time to head off the peninsula than during the first travel day of a religious holiday?  

Tonight marks the start of Maouloud, the birth of the prophet Muhammed. There is a town about 80km northeast of Dakar where about 2 of the 13 million people in this country travel to in order to mark the event. The town that I chose to visit yesterday? It’s about 60km northeast of the city,  on the same major route that the Embassy people already call the Street Walmart. I spent a few hours in a car, got a tan, and also got to acquainted with a whole new defnition of “window shopping”.

On many levels, it’s really a great thing that both Christian and Muslim holidays are celebrated here in Senegal -need I point out that you get more days off? The problem with being uninitiated to all of these holidays is that I have not yet learned to plan my own travel accordingly.

The streets heading into and out of Dakar might be nicer than those in other countries on this continent, but they still are nothing compared to what we enjoy in our Eisenhower Natioanl System of Interstate and Defense Highways (really, that’s a needlessly long name).  Nope, each time you get into a car here it’s a big question mark. The question precisely being, how much of a tan am I going to get as I sit here and bake in this little oven while a thousand vendors stream by and smash random articles of intrigue against my window that just might catch my wallet’s fancy?

It’s really not all so bad, but I swear I did get some color yesterday. I also got to wave to many smiling children in buses that crawled by in the other direction, as well as marvel at multiple longhorned cattle happily reposing in the beds of pickup trucks. No one was in a particular rush to get anywhere, especially since there was atill at least another 36 hours before Maouloud kicked off.  Surely we all can cover 80 kilometeres in 36 hours…