St Louis

Our campsite was about 3km south of St Louis, but we thought a walk to the town in the morning would do us good. To the east of the 100-yard-wide, 14-km-long spit of land we camped on is the Senegal River, and all up the beach on the river side you find pirogues, the Senegalese long wooden fishing boats, beached. One was being mended, although given the mending involved two big men beating the daylights out of the wood with big hammers, it took us a while to work out whether they were mending it or breaking it up. Maybe they were once Land Rover mechanics. Another was being built, from huge planks of wood, held together with iron pins. The pirogues are very slender boats, around 60’ (20m) in length, but probably only a few tonnes in weight, and powered by outboard motors. They move quite quickly. We did see a sail-powered local boat last night, but the fishing vessels all seem to be motorised.

A gentle sea breeze helped cool us off, but it wasn’t quite enough to get rid of the pronounced fishy odours. All along the beach, women were cutting up fish and drying them in the sun. Africa certainly assaults your sense of smell, particularly from the stagnant pools of fish juice in the street. The ubiquitous goats and small children were grubbing around too, plus some slender white wading birds, which joined the goats in picking through the crud. Last year we bought some Oxfam Goats for Africa as Christmas presents; this year I don’t think we’ll bother, as they seem to have more than enough of them, in this part at least! (If anybody reading received an Oxfam African goat last Christmas, and you’d like us to track it down for you, email us a picture and we’ll do our best to locate it.)

At the north end of the beach, nearest the town, the pirogues were landing their catches, and it was certainly a lively scene. As the boats come in, villagers wade through the murky water to offload the catches, which are then sold at the side of the road and loaded into lorries to be taken away. So many people were involved in this: men shovelling ice, women packing fish into baskets, children running around playing, with taxis, horse carts and fish lorries driving through the middle of everything. There were a couple of areas which were either schools or crèches for the younger children.

At the north end of the fish market, you cross the bridge onto the island of St Louis itself, which is around 1.5km long north-south, and only about 400m wide. It’s a classic French colonial town, and they’ve been restoring some of the more dilapidated buildings. Viewed from the south, up the river, you could easily mistake it for a French city, or maybe part of New Orleans, apart from the pirogues and goats in the foreground. St Louis was once a stop-off point for seaplanes travelling from France to South America, and from St Louis, which at the time was the capital of what are now Senegal and Mauritania, they crossed to Brazil, which would have been pretty terrifying in the early years of flying. Hence the town has a museum, which is interesting and well laid out, although exclusively in French. Many of the pictures show aeroplanes lying on their backs with bent propellers, due to various mishaps. When flying over the Spanish-run territories, the aeroplanes carried Moorish translators, in case they crashed or broke down. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the celebrated children’s author, who lived near Agadir in Morocco, was well commemorated here as he was involved in some of these flights.

We needed to change some money, so found a bank who took our travellers’ cheques. Then we stopped off for lunch in a little café. I had a Senegalese speciality, which included some fish, and what were probably vegetables, although one rather alarmingly appeared to have a bone in it. Despite the uncertainty it was quite pleasant. I’m told Abby’s prawn curry was great. Sitting in the café we could easily have been in the Caribbean.

The bridge from the city to the “mainland” to the east was built by Gustav Eiffel, using his trademark iron girders, and was interesting to walk across. From here we headed back through the town, and walked across the other bridge and onto the Atlantic beach on the west side of the spit. This was heaving with children playing, swimming, kicking footballs, and answering the call of nature with cheerful abandon. In fact, the beach was somewhat of a minefield, arguably more dangerous than the Mauritanian border to walk across, in terms of stepping on unpleasant things; neither did it smell that wonderful! A couple of children mischievously threw sand at us, but we were quite glad it was just sand. The beach was busier than Blackpool on a bank holiday, so we walked back onto the dusty street we’d driven down yesterday. At some point we acquired the village oddball, who followed us around for a while, but we lost him back in the fish market and walked back to the campsite.

We’d decided to head about half an hour south to a place called Zebrabar, which is a retreat in a nature reserve which was recommended by somebody on a Land Rover forum in the UK. Whilst on foot we’d worked out our route back through the town in terms of avoiding one-way streets, but as we left the city limits we were stopped first by a policeman, then by an army checkpoint. The army guy sized up the truck, told us our front number plate was too high up (yeah, right), couldn’t find any fault with the rest of our truck or paperwork, so decided to charge us CFA 3,000 (around ₤3) anyway, just because he felt like it. We said firmly no, he argued for a while, so we got a book out and started to make ourselves comfortable. About 5 minutes later he let us go. I have to say, this does get a bit annoying after a while, but hopefully in a couple of months I’ll be used to it.

Zebrabar is easy to find, partly because we had GPS coordinates for it, but mainly because it’s heavily signposted from the main road. You drive into the nature reserve off the main road from St Louis to Dakar, then take a few pistes for 15km or so. The camp is a large sandy area shaded by small trees, and you park up wherever you feel like. The only other people here are a couple of German guys, who were development workers in Chad and are now heading back, in a huge German ex-army truck, which is the only overland vehicle we’ve seen bigger than us in Africa. It’s wonderfully relaxed here, and they have canoes and windsurfers to lend out. If it’s not windy tomorrow we’d like to try kayaking, as we plan to stay here for another night, before heading down to Dakar on Thursday for Abby’s flight home. If it’s windy, they have a sailboat, but I’m not sure if it’s serviceable.

Sitting next to the truck, you can still smell a decidedly fishy smell, which I think is the legacy of driving through the St Louis fish market.

We talked to the German guys, who came here through Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. One of them said he thought Niger was a really friendly, laid back place, so it’s nice to hear some positive things about it; I do wonder whether people confuse it with Nigeria, which is next door, and very different. I certainly feel more positive about visiting it on the basis of his recommendation. He also said he thought the Senegal-Guinea Bissau border was best avoided, due to insurgency from Senegalese rebels, who have been known to steal vehicles, including a UNESCO 4x4 (which they did give back at least). He stayed nearby and could hear the artillery fire on the border at night. Consequently it makes more sense for us to drive east through Gambia and then down to the Guinea border instead. We could then enter Guinea-Bissau through Guinea, or we could miss it out altogether. Possibly the latter, as we don’t have visas, and it would save the hassle of getting them.

On top of the Zebrabar bar building is a four story observation tower they’ve built out of girders and rebar. It feels a bit temporary when you climb down from the top, and hums and groans in the wind, but whoever made it has done a great job and has a flair for welding, including little fish, pelicans and the word Zebrabar in the balcony! I’ve been up there and taken some photos, and there’s mobile reception at the top, so shortly I’ll nip up and try to get a signal to post the blog (which we write in advance), as there’s no direct internet access here. Hence no photos today, sorry! Observant readers will have noticed a bit of a blog double bill yesterday, as we didn’t have web access for a while, so if you missed out, check out the Nouakchott Day 2 post further down.

PS: Trying unsuccessfully to get a mobile signal on the top of the observation tower I could see a squadron of pelicans slowly undulating in the breeze as they crossed the setting sun. This is better than sitting in traffic on the M4!