Petite Côte, continued

Night 1, Day 2:
The sun set over our Atlantic-facing dessert drinks, and a long and slender minute hand smiled a friendly smile as it pushed the group of us, living somewhere between the reckless energy of our youth and a solemn, contented appreciation of the most simple things, up layer after layer of seashell-lined blocks, until we had had just the right amount and pulled our pillows from our rooms to the balcony to join Bob Dylan under the stars.
Eventually the half of me that was awake built up the energy to split off enough to tuck the rest of me into bed, beside Renee, under a denim-topped-fashion mosquito net.
I woke to the smell of salt water, carefully took in a classic breakfast of the last nescafé our holiday had in store and bread, preparing each bite for the trek it was about to fuel with butter, jam, and a lecture about it’s important place as part of the most important meal of the day. I was happy to wipe the crumbs from my mouth with a feeling of mutual contented closure between myself and Toubab Dialo, to follow the pull of an empty coast, just flaunting the exotic indefiniteness of its natural beauty. Our welcome had yet to be worn out, so Dylan stepped on a sleeping cat at the bottom of the stairs. It told him to leave with quite the knee-jerk, emotional, and oh-so-catty response of shrieking and reminding him how to behave if he valued his skin (which he apparently should have been reminded of earlier that morning, when he applied sunscreen everywhere except the backs of his legs).
Setting off for the coast, we were met by many requests to guide us but, as per usual, the most helpful was the friendly pharmacist, who directed us to the less windy, more direct road. And so we moved on south, poking at dead jellyfish, playing word games, and wading into the ocean when moved to. As for the jellyfish, even after the trip, I have yet to find the French word for them, and am thus inclined to call them nothing other than poissons de la confiture. Teehee.
The next seven or so kilometers of coast we had to ourselves, but by the time two massive fishing ropes being pulled by a swarm of strength peeked out, Popenguine was near. When you want to find the center of a city of any size in Senegal, just look for the mosque and walk towards it. Fortunately, an old woman doing some sort of work on the rocks directed us up to the road, as our eagerness had overlooked the fact that the route would not go through on the rocks. Onward and into the city, inadvertently disguised as walking candles of sweat, past Wade’s “second palace,” back to the beach and past a row of hotels, both in order and fallen into the sand, we found the villa where we would settle in and extend our stay for the next two nights.
As I ran out to the ocean for a dip, then rummaged around the villa in excitement about the balcony, kitchen, and bissap left by unknown travelers who are who knows where now, my stomach tapped it’s little tummy foot patiently. The folks up at the restaurant balcony noticed the neglectful way I was treating my stomach and beckoned my appetite. The food was terrific; it was calamari for me again, this time in form of a salad. Power outages in Senegal are common enough to be counted on every day, but not reliable enough to show up at the same time each night (though I not-so-secretly revel in the peacefulness of them). That night, the power went out as we walked into town to get the makings of a dinner, and stayed out passed our buying preparing, and midway into eating our sort-of-spaghetti-and-Gazelle dinner.
Inside the room, where the base of the bed was nothing short of a three-foot-tall block of poured concrete (I can only come up with completely ridiculous reasoning for this, guessing that whoever did it was determined to present a creative challenge to anyone who might ever try to remodel the room), the heat was a little much, so I cozied up in strange Barbie-animal sheets on the couch-thing in the living room.

Day 3:
Another morning was devoted to the sea (devocean?? Eh?), as I’ve found is the perfect way to wake up. I think I will spend every morning I can for the rest of my life on water. On the table were four plates, each with a spoon and an adorably cut division of melon. After our pre-breakfast, we headed toward bread and coffee. As the group attempted to make plans for the day at breakfast, the cliff just beyond our area of beach kept interpolating itself between each bite Dylan took. As he gazed at the cliff and the rest of us buried our focuses in Accrobaobab (and peanut butter), everyone seemed to look up once in awhile and say, “Yeah, that would be a fun cliff to climb,” then return to the more serious, cultivated and adult idea of climbing giant trees. I warned him of the idea that was, oh-so-wrongly in my head that the chunk of rock in front of us held the same jungle-like density and labrynth effect of the mountain I climbed in Laos. Still, I completely agreed that it looked like fun. So why not give it a try? That we did, and it turned out to be nothing more than, as I should have guessed, paths and dried boscage through which it would be pretty hard to loose oneself, not to mention on a small enough scale. The view of the ocean and of the surrounding nature was unbelievable from the top, and along the way were shells of old military posts, deserted, weather-worn and covered in the names of curious tourists before us, proving that they had “been there!” in 2005 or 1998 or when they thought that Jesus saved.
Over the bump and on the other side sat immediately a small fishing village and a mosque poked out in the distance. Where there are people in Senegal, there are tiny boutiques that pack in a tremendous amount of uniform imported products that are considered indispensible to a Senegalese identity. These items include Magi bouillon, Sofi and/or Jadida margarine (and its less often seen counter of “real butter,” the first ingredient of which is vegetable fat), piles of onions, sacs of Asian rice, nescafé, sugar cubes, and usually, 1.5 L bottles of purified water for toubabs. But this was not a toubab village, and so we walked from place to place with no luck, other than meeting friendly folks along the way who offered us their own water, not knowing how tantalizing it was (we hadn’t brought any with us at the start). Near the far side of the village we found luck, loved the propieters of the boutique for it, and found that we were not in La Somone, but only a kilometer away. An hour and a half of walking brought us to a strange resort in what can really be described as the middle-of-the-most-nowhere I’ve ever been, not to La Somone, and to a solidified realization that “1 kilometer” in Senegal means “it isn’t far,” “maybe three or six or eight kilometers,” or, probably most accurately, “If you keep walking, you’ll get there.” So we filled up on more water and food and jumped back to the villa.
That night we met up with a fellow MSIDer who was staying in the area for break and some other WARC students who were sliding down the coast for a couple days of holiday, made dinner again, ate on the balcony by candlelight, and drank some homemade bissap.
Day 4:
Our next stop was Saly-Portugal, about 18 kilometers south, so we hopped on a bush taxi, got off at the end of the road leading into the city and walked west towards the ocean, where, among a melanged maze of boutiques, hotels, fanny-packed, bucket-hatted, neon-short-sporting tourists, and restaurants Senegalese and tourist-focused, we found the place where we would lay down our bags, rest our feet, and hop in the pool. We found the first of what would prove to be the best sort of Senegalese restaurant, meaning that when we walked in to the tiny shack with cloth-lined walls, a man looked at me and asked, “Fan ngeen dem?” or “Where are you going?” in Wolof, in surprise of seeing tourists attracted to communal plates of ceebujen with locals in lieu of pizzas costing quadrupal the price across the street. I told him, “Here, for good ceebujen.” And we ate. Lots.
Saly turned out to be “Daytona Beach” of Senegal, as one missionary I ran into described it (this may have also been the only other group of Americans I saw), and so our hotel was a little further from the ocean than it had been in Toubab Dialo or Popenguine, and the beach front was largely privately owned. Still, it wasn’t a bad idea to take advantage of the day to rest for cheap, on beach chairs at one of the resorts on the beach, where we found ourselves gifted with free drinks and obligatory people-watching. We had found ourselves in what seemed to be an obscure sort of never-land, where time and any outside reality don’t exist and where all of the seasoned paradise-seakers are eternally over-middle-aged, the only visible progression of time being measured in leather-tough wrinkles of skin folding over speedos and bikini bottoms. So I laid back in the shade of my umbrella, soaking up the beach-front wonders, the music from Joey’s ipod, and Richard Brautigan short stories, for hours until it was decided best to move back toward the hotel.

I'm going to attempt to describe my spring break.

Day 1: Toubab Dialo

A week ago, three lovely friends of mine and I left Dakar to engage on a week of relaxation and fun along the Petite Côte of Senegal. Our first destination was the northern most town of this segment of coast; a nice, welcoming, toursity (as would be all of the Petite Côte) chunk of coast.
After our sept place escaped the perma-traffic on the way out of the city, (where I finally got a taste of these bags of cookies, which are among the many things sold along road by people who walk between the cars selling products all day, and they're stale. I don't know why I was surprised by this, but I wasn't really disappointed. Anyway, just remember, if someone is walking around in the sun all day, carrying food that may have been made that morning and may have been made three days ago, keep the effects of nature in mind.) after having haggled an unhappily high price for the sept place in the first place, we zoomed on down to our completely seashell ordained Toubab oasis.
We promptly got some food in us and headed to the beach. After having explained at lunch to my friends that I will always have the spirit of an eighty-year-old woman, Joey and I ventured to a nearby establishment to ask for empty margarine tubs with which we could build sand castles. We raced back. "I am a child," I explained further. We had a great time playing around in the sand, when the first in a run, which would prove to surpass the week, of women selling the jewelry from oversized baskets atop their heads strolled over. The margarine buckets were left to some talibe kids who thought it looked like fun (and were much better at castle making) while I bought some necklaces.
We spent the evening trying to prepare for the relaxation we were in for by strolling along the local streets and beach taking photos and listening to goofy little goat bleats. The sun began to set, so we settled in at the place that was nice enough to give us buckets to play in the sand with, and kicked back with a dinner of local (ok, one of two Senegalese choices of) beer and fresh seafood on the beach. Really! Our table was set ON the sand, and we were facing the sunset and next to the djembe rhythm that is never far when in Senegal. I followed my spectacular calamari dinner with a banana crêpe and stargazing.
I would like to stop writing about how wonderful life is at this point, but I will have to continue with the rest of my week on a later day.

Ile de Madeleine

Last week I was lucky enough to make the hop from mainland Dakar to l'Ile de Madeleine, where there is a national park, perfect for bird watching, and baobabs, of varieties both miniature and enormous (the standard) are scattered about. The three other girls in my environmental class, my professor, the lovely Awa, an obligatory guide, and myself jumped into a pirogue, the little colorfully-painted wooden fishing boats, and bounced atop the ocean waves to the island.
The boat propelled forward with the push of waves, gliding just above the surface until it again smashed into contact, and little dropplets of salt water misted back, as if to fool us into thinking the ocean is gentle, only as a game until another massive push came from below and our toy boat was again flung through the air. Along with the boat bumped my mind, between the physical beauty around me and the question of whether or not I had accidentally stumbled into the world of mythology, with Poseidon just trying to impress us with the ease of his power, surrounded by what seemed to be the very islands Ulysses found so dangerously magnetizing.

Fortunately, the islands could only allure from afar, and we moved passed, stepping off the boat at only l'Ile de Madeleine, and I was able to leave Ulysses to deal with the modernist struggles of life by himself while I climbed baobab trees.




Baobabs have this fruit that makes some tasty smoothy-consistency juice: