Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Best Worst Day Ever

As family trip planner, this is the day I have been most stressed about: getting from northern Senegal down to the beach on Dec 31. It's about a 4 hour ride down to Saly, and I assume it will be just as boring and hot and dusty as the ride up, with the added advantage of arriving to the beach too late and too tired to do anything fun for New Year's Eve. On paper, it's looking to be the worst day of the trip, and I vaguely dread it.

So imagine my surprise when it turns out to be one of my favorite days of the vacation -- one of those magical, go-with-the-flow days where everything just turns out right, and the whole thing feels like a treasure we've stumbled upon instead of canned tourism. I love it. Our guide from yesterday, Ismaïla, has promised two of the Italian guys who were with us at Djoudj that he would take them down to the Dakar area in a day outing that involves a 4x4 ride down the beach.


At first he quotes us a very high price -- high enough that instead of negotiating, we just shrug and say no. It's not anything we've heard about, and doesn't sound so intriguing, so we figure we'll just save the money and go directly by taxi. But since he's already promised the two Italian guys he'd take them, anything he can get from us is straight profit, and so he comes back to us, lowers the price drastically, and finally with about as much enthusiasm as we had for the taxi, we shrug and say, "OK, why not?" We like Ismaïla and the Italian guys a lot, so for only an extra $50 or so, it seems like it will be more pleasant and less hassle than having to find our own taxi. Out of sheer laziness is born a fabulous day.

First they drive us through a market, which is a great way to see and photograph it. By the time we work our way through here, and I get my colorful photos, I'm already considering the day a huge success.

 
 
 
 
 
 

And once we hit the beach, we give up all pretense of normal road rules. I propose the following for the official national motto: Senegal, where safety rules fly out the window -- but your kids don't.


This Atlantic beach is just gorgeous and virtually unpopulated. We absolutely fly down it, and it's like being on a superhighway, but one where there's no traffic and what makes it so super is the view. Once in a while we see a cart going to or from market, but that's just about it for hours.

 

There are two small villages with fishing boats, and we stop near one of them for a lunch break.


The local kids come up and stare and beg for a while, until a) we realize we're not going to drink all the sodas the guide brought for us, so we let them have the bottles b) we use the girls as icebreakers and have them do some gymnastics tricks, and c) we start taking photos of them and showing them the results on the digital camera screens. We can't take the photos fast enough, which is a lovely change of pace from the women in this country who generally try to avoid being in our pictures.


After hours of just hooting and hollering and switching places depending on who needs a break from the wind, we head off the beach to go inland to see the Lac Rose (Pink Lake). It is not actually pink at this time of year, but we do get to see them gathering salt -- both rock and fleur de sel (a salt that is derived from evaporating the foam that collects at the edges of the lake in which the salt is naturally pulverized to a fine, soft powder).

 

We have a drink in a Senegalese dive together with our Italian friends Davide and Stefano before heading our separate ways for the last little bit of the trip. For a Worst Day, it's been pretty much the Best.

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