Dakar, & Abby returns home

We haven’t been online for a few days, so this’ll be a triple bill. Sorry for the delay between posts!

We ate with the Germans last night, plus the Swiss couple who own Zebrabar. They’ve lived in Senegal for ten years, and their two young children go to the school in St Louis. Both children are fair and blonde, so I should think they’re quite eyecatching in the town. We offered Bjorn a lift to Dakar, as he needs to get some visas sorted out for the Zebrabar people to visit Mauritania, then he’s flying back to his home in Belgium after two and a half years in Africa.

We were looking at an 8am start this morning, but we agreed with Harry, the German chap who owned the big Mercedes truck also at Zebrabar, that we’d give each other a bit of a guided tour of trucks first. After showing them around the 101, we went across to see their big truck. I was actually well impressed. It’s a 1967 Mercedes truck, at one point belonging to the German state postal service as an emergency vehicle. Harry’s converted it into an overland camper which he and his wife can live in very comfortably. At 8 tonnes, it’s heavier, longer, wider and taller than the 101, and that’s reflected in the living space, which is bright and spacious, with full standing headroom, comfy seats around a table, a cooker with oven and plenty of thoughtful extras. Their bed is over the top of the cab, Luton style, and they’ve put in a big roof hatch so they can get plenty of fresh air in overnight (with mosquito nets in appropriate places).

It’s 4wd, and has a big 6 litre, 6 cylinder diesel engine, which only produces about 110 horse power, but must have a huge amount of torque to drag the thing around. I think their top speed is comparable to ours, but they’re slightly more economical. I had a poke around the engine bay (their truck has a bonnet, so they’re not sitting on the engine, unlike us) and it’s beautifully simple. No wires running everywhere – just a big, tough engine which could probably survive a nuclear blast. All their chassis, transmission and running gear is likewise heavily engineered, and I noticed they don’t leak oil!

Harry bought the truck a few years ago, with not many kilometres on the clock, for €5,000, which I have to say is the world’s biggest bargain, as he has the benefit of Mercedes engineering & reliability, plus 1960s easy-to-fix, bullet proof technology. If you were going to build an overland truck from scratch, this has to be the ideal platform. These trucks are still commonly in use (we’ve seen lots of them in Mauritania, and also in Iran), so spares and parts are a doddle in these areas. When we sell the 101 I’ll have to be forcibly restrained from trolling round eBay looking for a big Mercedes truck!

We left Zebrabar with Bjorn and headed south to Dakar. We were pulled over two or three times by the police, but in a change from the norm, they just were interested to know where we were from, and wished us all the best and let us go. One even pointed out that it’s the Queen’s 80th birthday this month, which was more than I knew!

We drove through the mango-growing region of Senegal, evidenced by stall after stall at the side of the road selling piles of mangoes. There were just mountains of them, stretching for miles, more mangoes than you could shake a stick at. I have no idea what happens to all these mangoes, as there’s no chance they’d be able to sell everything they had on display in a million years. We pulled over, and Bjorn bought a bowlful – about 10 or so mangoes for the equivalent of 50p. He cut some up as we drove, and they were delicious and sweet.

Bjorn is an architect who has worked for the last 2 ½ years in Chad as a development volunteer. He had some thoughtful opinions on the aid situation, which we discussed on the journey down. He sees a number of problems; I’ll try to paraphrase them here, but I may incorrectly quote some of this, so note these opinions may not exactly match Bjorn’s! One is that the aid organisations are very inefficient, in the way they are run and the way they deal with governments, but due to the ways they are structured, they do not have corporate accountability; neither do they want to drive change from within, as people would often rather maintain the status quo. Additionally, aid is all about development, but as it’s driven largely by agencies rather than local concerns, the local people end up without the knowledge or inclination to maintain the facilities. So Bjorn can build a hospital, but he knows when he leaves it, it’s not going to get the time and resources invested into maintenance that it needs.

There’s also a problem with aid dependency, in that regions and countries become accustomed to receiving help with development, and get out of the habit of driving it themselves. With the huge population growth in most African countries, there’s no way the existing development can keep pace with the population expansion; Bjorn’s suggestion was that development should be done as a two-way partnership, with some clear expectation of what the developing country should put into the relationship, carefully thought out to ensure long-term success.

The drive to Dakar was about 4 ½ hours, but as you get near to Dakar, which is on a peninsular, you hit busy suburbs quite early. The roads in Senegal are very good quality, certainly better than most of the UK; some of the route was even dual carriageway.

We were heading for a Dakar suburb at the north of the peninsular called Yoff, which, according to our Lonely Planet, had a campement. We rang in advance, but the line was bad, so Abby couldn’t quite catch everything, but they did say it would be fine to camp there. Bjorn knows Dakar a bit so piloted us in to Yoff, where at the end of a dirt road we found no Campement Pelougou, but a big building site. Apparently it’s been demolished. The conversation Abby had on the phone remains a mystery. Bjorn and I trotted off to check out an alternative, leaving Abby in the truck, and when we returned the whole vehicle was surrounded by inquisitive Senegalese people & children. Yoff is a conservative Muslim town, and the majority of the inhabitants belong to a specific one of the several Islamic “brotherhoods” which are widespread in Senegal. This doesn’t mean they weren’t friendly and helpful, but unfortunately they didn’t really have any alternative suggestions for us.

We went back to a petrol station to buy a regional street map, and to drop Bjorn off; he speaks excellent French and had really helped us find our way around. At the petrol station we got talking to a 24-year-old Senegalese guy who had a disabled father, and a young child, and was hopeful of going to England to find work. He was really keen to talk to us, even though we didn’t understand each other’s French, and was actually hoping we’d smuggle him back; it was hard to disappoint him, but what else can you do?

We drove off to hunt around for a suitable place to stay, and came across the Hotel Tahiti in Yoff. They didn’t have any way to accommodate our truck, but Abby spoke to them at great length and said they bent over backwards to help her, and couldn’t have been more accommodating. They suggested two alternatives just west of the airport. If anybody is looking for hotel accommodation in Dakar, Abby strongly recommends talking to the hugely friendly and welcoming Hotel Tahiti at Yoff, tahitihotel1@yahoo.fr, which is only 1km from the airport.

Eventually we found the Su Nu Gal hotel in Ngor, which doesn’t take campers, but has a private beach and restaurant presided over by a French expat, which does admit camping. You either pay 4,000 CFA (₤4) per person per night, or if you eat at their restaurant, for 7,500 CFA, you get the camping thrown in free. So that’s what we’re doing.

After parking up, we wandered along their small, sheltered beach with an ice cream, scattering the ubiquitous burrowing crabs everywhere. The sandy beach is protected with a breakwater of bulldozed boulders, which make it very tranquil, but there was still some rubbish floating around in the water, so we didn’t swim. However, you can see shoals of fish all around the beach, sometimes leaping clear of the water. Next to the beach is a lagoon, isolated from the sea but still replenished with fresh water through the boulders, which seems to be a bi-product of the breakwater works. The lagoon is teaming with fish, which hide when they see you, but we saw glimpses of several fairly large fish, certainly a foot or more in length, plus lots of disturbances on the surface from the various shoals. We were amazed when a large, spotted fish shaped like “an inflated rectangle” (Abby’s description) and about a foot long swam right past us. He didn’t seem at all frightened of us, perhaps something to do with his large thorn-like spines. We took several photos of him, then on our way back to the truck, saw another just like him in the next cove along. As we returned to the truck, we saw a magpie flying away carrying a large dead rat.

Abby’s just finishing her packing before we have dinner, and around 10pm we’ll be heading to the airport, which is only a few km away, for her to catch her flight back to the UK via Milan. All being well, Nicki should be arriving tomorrow night, so I’ll have a day to try to amuse myself. Should I change the front right hub oil seal I wonder, or is it too dusty?