Saint Louis

 

 

 

Saint Louis is Senegal’s most northern city, situated on an island at the mouth of the River Senegal. It was originally located there by French colonisers, but now has expanded beyond the island onto the mainland on both sides. In fact the physical geography of the area is more complicated than that, because as the river approaches the sea it splits into multiple channels and lagoons, leaving scattered packets of land, most of which are uninhabited.

 

From Banjul to Saint Louis overland is normally a two-day trip. You can break the journey in a choice of intermediate cities and towns, and we selected Thiès, a city of a million inhabitants not far from Dakar. We left home early, caught the second ferry across the River Gambia at 8am, took a bush-taxi to Amdallai, completed immigration procedures into Senegal, took a donkey cart to the taxi garage in Karang, and asked a helpful attendant for a sept-place heading for Thiès. We were the sixth and seventh passengers so it was not long before we were on the road headed north.

 

After only a few minutes we were stopped at a customs checkpoint. Ahead of us, officials were emptying luggage from a large bus and inspecting the contents. The driver turned off the engine and we prepared ourselves for a long wait. After only a few minutes, however, one official broke away from the mêlée around the bus and came to speak to our driver. He gave a cursory look at our bags, before choosing one passenger’s sack of possessions to empty onto the roadside. Amongst other things, it contained a CD player and loudspeakers. The official took these away and sat with them under a tree, with our fellow passenger in attendance and looking anxious. They spoke for a long while. Questions were asked. Perhaps promises were made. Maybe a sum of money changed hands. Eventually the passenger returned with his belongings, and we proceeded on our way.

 

The first section of road to Kaolack is badly deteriorated and full of holes. For an hour or more, the car had to weave around bumps and pits like a slalom course, and progress was slow. Approaching Kaolack we left the road and drove instead across salt-flats, between heaps of harvested salt, and eventually rejoined the road to enter the town. From Kaolack to Thiès the road is better, and runs through dry rocky terrain, punctuated by occasional villages and towns. It was mango season; each time the car drew to a halt we were surrounded by women with bowls of mangos, hoping to make a sale. Mangos are sticky awkward things to eat, so we bought bananas instead, and shared them with the occupants of our car.

 

Arriving in Thiès, we booked into a simple guest house, showered and rested whilst waiting for the afternoon heat to subside, and finally set out to explore the town and search for dinner. Senegal always gives me the impression of being more advanced than The Gambia; it is a little wealthier and more developed. Thiès is a well organised city and as we walked around the centre, there was plenty going on. We strolled for an hour and then ate pizza and drank beer in a restaurant with friendly helpful staff.

 

The next morning we woke early in order to take the first available transport to Saint Louis. We arrived at the taxi garage to find that the vehicles had been displaced onto nearby waste ground by some incident, and Senegalese-type organisation had been replaced by Gambian-style mayhem. Vehicles sat empty (in neat rows!) and customers milled around aimlessly between them. We wanted to make a journey between two of Senegal’s major cities, and yet no-one seemed sure which cars would be going that way. We found a group of important-looking Mauritanian men who were also heading our way, and shadowed them as they enquired from one vehicle after another. What started as a small number grew in number as we accumulated hangers-on who were attracted by our persistent search. Suddenly a large minibus swung into the middle of the crowd, dispersing us in all directions and sending goats running for cover, someone shouted “San-Looi” and we leapt aboard. A young Gambian man headed for Mauritania shared our bench and kept complaining about the price, but it was cheaper than a sept-place, and was the first vehicle that showed any intention of going our way, so we at least were content.

 

A few kilometres out of Thiès we paused in the mango capital of the world. Along the roadside were stalls and stalls of mangos, piled in bowls. The bowls are a little devious – they have a false bottom, so there are actually no mangos in the bowl, just the pile that you can see on top, resting on a piece of plywood inside the bowl. As soon as we stopped, the minibus was alive with people buying bags of mangos to take with them, passing cash through the open doors and windows of the vehicle. The crazy thing is these fruit are on sale everywhere. There is nowhere in West Africa you can go that is more than fifteen paces from a mango, and yet these people were behaving like they had never seen them before. Perhaps it had only just been announced that these things are edible. It was an amazing sight. Fortunately there were plenty to go round, and after several minutes of excited bartering, we were on our way again.

 

Then we had the fun of accidentally driving through a police checkpoint without stopping. The officer was at the side of the road, inspecting the papers of a truck driver, and he bounded into the road and started jumping up and down as we zoomed past. We screeched to a halt and reversed back to the checkpoint. Again, this could have entailed a very long wait, but the officer was in good humour and did not detain us for long. For much of the journey north, the road runs parallel to the disused railway between Dakar and Saint-Louis. In the spirit of finding bizarre journeys to make in West Africa, I wondered if it would be possible to travel on this railway on one of those railway wagons that is propelled by two people rocking a see-saw-type lever. I am sure it would attract a fair amount of attention from the various villages along the route. But the line is not free of obstacles. In places the railway has been hidden by the encroaching Saharan sand, and in other places covered by piles of litter. And in one place I saw a compound wall that had been built right across the rails.

 

It was about four hour’s journey to Saint-Louis. The rain starts a little later at this latitude than back in The Gambia, so every place looked thirsty and arid. The road was generally straight, and in places where we rose over a large dune, the road could be seen far ahead, like a pencil line drawn into the sand. On arrival at the taxi garage on the outskirts of the town we were offered, and accepted, a ride onto the island in the world’s most battered taxi. There were panels missing, and bits hanging off which trailed along the ground. When we stopped for petrol, the driver lifted the bonnet and the fuel was delivered through a line in the engine, bypassing the conventional route into the tank. After this we crossed the 500m bridge (designed by Gustav Eiffel and originally built for the Danube, apparently) over the River Senegal, and the taxi took us to an auberge where we would stay for the next few days.

 

   

 

 

We had a simple room. Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to wash, and somewhere to hang clothes. Beyond that we did not need much, and did not intend to spend long in the accommodation itself. We toured the island from the Muslim north to the Catholic south. The pastel-coloured buildings reminded me of the city of Antigua in Guatemala, another ex-colonial place. In the centre we were approached by a number of tour-guides offering trips, vendors offering brightly coloured trousers, and calachette drivers offering a ride on their horse-cart. We found places to eat pastries and drink cold fresh fruit juice, galleries to visit and derelict colonial buildings to explore inside.

 

       

 

       

 

 

One day we took a boat trip to the Langue de Barbarie, a narrow 20km-long spit of sand between the river lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean. This area is one of the first bits of water south of the Sahara, and teams with bird life, especially during the northern hemisphere’s winter. We saw huge flocks of pelicans and flamingos, both European and Africa cormorants, and thousands of smaller birds too. It was an awesome sight.

 

     

 

     

 

 

The next day we walked off the island of Saint Louis via the western bridge, which in fact leads to the top end of the same Langue de Barbarie we had visited the day before. This side of Saint Louis is a community of fisherman known as Guet N’Dar. We walked through the sandy streets and through the fish market where we saw fish being unloaded from boats, dried, and sold, and a huge line of refrigerated trucks ready to transport the catch to Dakar. We bought provisions at small bitikos, and sat under a palm tree on the sand beyond the settlement, to read, eat lunch, and to doze. It was a long walk back, and we were fortunate to be picked up by a man with a horse cart. He used his whip rather frequently, and the horse responded by kicking the cart with both her back legs, which made for an interesting journey.

 

       

 

       

 

 

This trip took place during Euro 2008, and it was important to find a place to view matches. We considered a number of hotel-type options, before the auberge owner tipped us off about the fire station bar. There was a big crowd at this place, cheap beer and satellite TV. And lots of firemen for Louise to gaze at whilst I watched the football. Each evening we watched the second half of a game here, before moving on to a restaurant for dinner. Louise, who hates football, was very patient with this aspect of the holiday, and quite got into the tournament before long. She made a habit of supporting the better-looking team, so was disappointed while Germany and Russia were doing well; she was much more a fan of Italy and Spain.

 

After a few days of croissants and comfortable living in Saint Louis, we decided to make things harder for ourselves, so we set out for Richard Toll, on the border with Mauritania. We organised a car to take us across the desert, rather than using the tarmac road. We stopped for lunch at the Lac de Guiers and saw white-throated bee-eaters snatching insects out of the air, and a tiny malachite kingfisher sat on a reed. Then we passed a group of people harvesting groundnuts, who gave us a handful of the nuts which, undried and unroasted, are chewy and white. And we saw amazing villages of Fulani nomads, pastoralists who build temporary shelters out of grass and use virtually no manufactured goods (except perhaps a mobile phone!). It made me think how very diverse we are, humankind in our various cultures, and how odd it is that some of us in the West consider our ways to be somehow “normal”, and how unrecognisable my life might have been if I had been born in a different place.

 

       

 

        

 

 

Richard Toll is surrounded by extensive fields of sugar cane, irrigated from the River Senegal via a web of canals. It was remarkable how much water was around, given that no rain had fallen in this region for eight months. One afternoon we sat on the bank of one of these canals to read and eat a picnic. We watched a colony of busy weaver birds building their intricate nests, hanging from a willow tree over the water. Almost every vehicle in the town was a horse cart; they were everywhere, carrying both passengers and freight, so many in fact that it was difficult to cross the road between them. Other than that Richard Toll is notable for…nothing…in fact I am not sure why we went there. But it was good to see Mauritania across the river, and one day I would like to go there, to the land of proper desert.

 

     

 

     

 

 

 

After a couple of days we picked up a vehicle returning to Saint Louis, this time using the main highway. Someone’s box of goods for market flew off the top of the minibus as we drove but the sharp-eyed driver spotted it in his mirror and sent the apprenti back to gather the remains. The harmattan was blowing in, carrying sand from the Sahara, and we drove through a yellow mist. It felt like a November morning in the UK, encountering banks of fog along the road. Sand blew across the surface of the road, forming snaking patterns against the tar surface, eerily alive. Through the windows, little could be seen but flat sand disappearing into the mist.

 

We arrived back on the island in time for one more Euro 2008 match, and a delicious Vietnamese meal. Then we set out early to take the first sept-place heading for Kaolack. The car took a cross-country route rather than going via Thiès. It was an unexpected bonus to pass through Touba, a holy city of pilgrimage for Muslim followers of a particular Sheikh, a place with an enormous number of enormous mosques. And it was striking to cross a distinct boundary back into the region where this year’s rains had already begun, to pass from dry dusty sand quite suddenly into fresh green grass and leaves, contented sheep, and a landscape with a clean, watered, washed appearance. Our car made rapid progress to Kaolack we were able, unexpectedly, to make the complete journey to Banjul all in one day.