Because I know how horrible the American education system is with providing a decent foundation of geographic proficiency, it’s map time!

 Behold the peninsula on which I live. And also the surrounding towns that force themselves into consideration, given their capacity to add hours to car trips going into the country’s interior…

One of my traveling companions from the weekend remarked on the stark difference between the havoc of the Dakar peninsula and the virtual nothingness of the sandy countryside. The great irony is that in order to attain these reversals of existence, you must first do significant battle on the suffocating roads of Rufisque. It is only after you brave the scads of street-wandering vendors, broken down (yet, amazingly, still moving) vehicles, are you rewarded with something that is decidedly not dakarois.  

So where did we go? If you were a Wolof speaker (which I could not get close to claiming to be), you would already know where I went this weekend.  Saint Louis, or Ndar, in the Wolof language was the destination of choice. Here’s your map: 

  Saint Louis, up there, near Mauritania. It’s a long way to Missouri.

 Saint Louis used to be the colonial of the federation of French West African colonies, that is until Dakar go to be a really happening spot and stole most of the limelight away from Saint Louis in 1902. The cool thing about the city’s relative neglect by the masses, is that it is still quite beautiful, and has a charm that Dakar cannot touch.  

We hired a chauffeur and car to drive us to and from Saint Louis.  I want to give you an idea of what it is like to travel in the backseat of a car through Senegal- watching your driver incessantly jaw on one of his four cell phones while music blares (how did he hear that phone ring?).

He was a great driver, and the car had air conditioning, and it wasn’t packed with eight people. This was a pretty cushy transport, by Senegalese standards.

I like this photo showing the island in the middle of Saint Louis (the heart of the old colonial city). Lots of fishing goes on in these parts- and you see dried fish on the tables right on the water front. Oh yeah, it smelled good.

To see the city and learn some of its history, we took a ride around the island in a horse-drawn carriage. The guide knew his history, told some terrible jokes, and had a horse named MC Solaar.

So yes, Saint Louis was beautiful and definitely will beg a number of follow-on trips, but the coolest part about going up there was not the sight-seeing. I’ll save that for another post, but for now, I just wanted to give you a little slide show of something that is not Dakar.

Crossing the Faidherbe Bridge, to get to the island

Thank you Google Earth!

More to follow…I’m just being lazy at the moment….