Zebrabar

I failed to get onto the internet last night to send the blog; despite spending some time in the wind at the top of the tower, the vaguaries of the mobile network here proved too challenging. Today’s our second day at Zebrabar, which is a perfect venue for chilling out for a while.

Last night we ate with the other handful of people staying here. The set menu was salad (heaven only knows where they get the lettuce), followed by a very nice meat stew with gnocchi, and a cake & custard desert – very pleasant. The table was quite cosmopolitan, with ourselves, 2 French, and 4 Germans, so we conversed in three different languages. The German guy I was talking to yesterday, Bjorn, speaks English and French very fluently, but we all spoke all three languages with varying degrees of success. It was a nice evening with good company.

This morning I wandered down to the beach and noticed several crabs mooching around. They dig burrows, and if you stray too close, they skedaddle down their burrows, and after a few minutes, tentatively come back out again. They have one white claw much larger than the other, and seem to favour the shoreline rather than the sea. I took some photos of them.

We then took a walk into the nature reserve, which consists of spits of sandy land with small trees and shrubs, surrounded by sea inlets. The first thing we noticed was that there are crabs everywhere! They hang around in great gangs, picking through the sand for morsels of food, and move sideways as a cloud if you approach. So my encounter this morning was fairly tame. Sometimes they arm-wrestle with their large white claws, but some of them are left-clawed, and some of them are right-clawed, and if they pick a fight with a crab of the opposite claw, they can’t really get to grips with each other. The larger crabs also try to displace smaller ones from their burrows, usually successfully.

Around the reserve there are all manner of wading birds, including Goliath Herons, which are quite huge. We also saw squirrel-like animals, but sandy in colour and with smaller bodies and tails than Grey squirrels; maybe ground squirrels? And a few geckos and other lizards. There are some villages scattered around the reserve, so we saw a few people going about their daily business, plus children playing with an old surfboard on the beach.

At one point we were beckoned over by a plump middle-aged lady who was cutting and drying fish by the sea. With her was her daughter, probably late teens or early twenties, who talked to us in French and a bit of English. Her grandfather was also in a block-built hut nearby, and two younger girls were lounging around on the sand. Her father was out fishing in a pirogue. She said they have to go some distance to catch the fish.

Back at Zebrabar, we helped ourselves to drinks: they have an honesty bar, where you take drinks straight out of the fridge, and write what you’ve taken in a book, to pay for it all at the end. We returned to the truck and Abby sewed, while I messed around with some mechanical bits – making sure the brake drums were properly adjusted, and replacing the exciter wire to the starter motor which gave us problems the other day. The underside of the truck is thick with dust and sand, which at least lets you work out where the oil is leaking from. I also went round tightening up anything which had worked loose on the rough roads in the last few days.

The afternoon’s activity was canoeing. Zebrabar have a couple of canoes and some windsurfers which you can just help yourself to. We chose a Canadian, which in hindsight was probably not the best choice, as it had some fairly big holes in which you could get your finger through, so we had to stop to empty out the water frequently. We paddled up the creek for a while, passing some children playing on the beach, and then paddled rather more quickly back again with the wind and surf behind us. We were overtaken by some tourists in a pirogue, presumably visiting the nature reserve, who gave us a cheer! The water’s too sandy to see very far through, but as we paddled along, we frequently saw shoals of little fish swimming around us, sometimes jumping out of the water.

I’ve been taking lots of photographs today, but apart from that we’re just relaxing really. It’s nice to be in such a peaceful, idyllic place. The people who own Zebrabar have managed to get a really good balance here; there are little things to do, like perusing their paperback library, lying in their hammocks, using their boats or looking at the view from the lookout tower, which make it very calm and relaxing but still captivate your interest. It’s a large enough site that you don’t really come across the other people staying here much, but there’s a bar area to congregate in if you want to be sociable.

Tomorrow, Abby flies back home late at night from Dakar airport, so we are going to drive to a village near the airport which should have a campsite, from where it should be relatively easy to get taxis into both Dakar and the airport when needed. Staying in Dakar itself didn’t seem that appealing, although Bjorn reckons it’s a much nicer city than the guide books suggest. We’ll be eating with the others again tonight, and aiming for an early start in the morning.