I love those words. Road trip. The time has come for us to take our own road trips here in Senegal. Tomorrow (Sunday) we take an express bus up to St. Louis (pronounced the French way, of course), in northern Senegal near the border with Mauritania. St. Louis is the most important city in northern Senegal, an otherwise sparsely populated area. It was until 1956 the capital of Senegal (and Mauritania), and was also the first capital of French West Africa (it was eventually moved to Dakar).

We’ll come back on Thursday, then leave Sunday the 27th to Ziguinchor, in far southern Senegal. We’ll be in Ziguinchor and the surrounding Casamance region for 10 days before returning to Dakar. I hope these trips provide good posting material!

Of course, we have already been outside of Dakar, as you saw in my last posting. This week we made another quick trip, to the cities of Thies (pronounced “Chess”) and Mbour. The first two pictures here were taken that day in the fading light of sunset after we had returned to the gare routiere, the transport station in Dakar. Most medium and long distance transport in Senegal is by the Peugeot sept-place cars seen in the picture. This is the actual station. Pure chaos. It’s a challenge to find out which car is going your way. Earlier in the day the station had been much more crowded.

There must be some system to what looks like disorganization. I did occasionally see a man with a chalk board full of chalk marks. Every now and then he would make a new mark — I guess it indicated another car had left? Abraham and I passed up a few cars that looked too questionable — broken seats, missing headlights, wheels terribly out of alignment. We actually wound up chartering the first car just for ourselves after having passed up to many.

This picture was taken on the highway leaving from Dakar. It was morning, and sept-places crowded the road. This one in front of us appeared to be in better shape than most. Notice the Madonna decal on the rear window. For some reason sept-place drivers love to put her decal on their cars, mainly this one from her mid-1980’s phase.

Once away from Dakar, Senegal is very sparsely populated. There are many many miles of open stretches. In this picture we are near Thies. Most of the northern two-thirds of Senegal, however, is flat and almost completely treeless.

We saw watermelons for sale everywhere. Thousands of them. I hope they can sell them all.

The sun was setting as we returned to the usual Dakar traffic.

On a completely different note, here’s a picture of me, in case you had forgotten what I looked like. This was taken two weeks ago on one of our afternoon outings to Ile de Ngor.

I hope to make my next posting, about St. Louis, next Friday or Saturday.