After Dakar, my first impression of St. Louis was: so chill. Neighborhood streets are just sand, not paved. Caitlin and Djibo live in an apartment that could also be described as a collection of rooms off a central courtyard that's open to the sky. (Hard to describe, but a living arrangement familiar to me from Thailand.)
They cook in the living room/courtyard over a single burner on a propane canister and eat from one shared serving platter on a mat on the floor, Senegalese style. Caitlin cooked a Senegalese dish (mafe, peanut sauce) and even made a vegetarian version for me; we also made some Western food like noodles and scrambled eggs, but still ate Senegalese-style from a shared platter on the floor; and I got to try lots of other Senegalese things, like this very certain type of millet you eat with a certain type of yogurt, and this other kind of millet you eat with milk, and you can't do it the other way around; and that's just how it is.
Caitlin also took me to visit the prison where Djibo works - totally laidback, with many of the prisoners going out to work for the day and then ambling back inside in the evening, and relatives stopping by to drop off food for family members in prison. Apparently, some prisoners even get permission to leave for Magal, the big yearly pilgrimmage to Touba.
Saw the full moon from St. Louis, in a clear sky over peaceful, sandy streets.
My second day, we went to the Parc National des Oiseaux du Djoudj, a.k.a. the famous bird park. Djibo organized a driver/guide for the day, who also took us on a boat ride through a seriously bird-populated lake: egrets, cormorants, herons, other birds whose French names we didn't understand, but definitely some species familiar to me as the ones that migrate south from Germany in the fall - how cool to find out where it is they end up.
But beyond all that: pelicans. Pelicans beyond number, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pelicans, almost all of them standing all squeezed together on this enormous concrete slab that serves as their nest: Pelicans, apparently, don't mind close quarters. (And our guide said whenever you see a pelican alone, it's because it's sick and doesn't want to infect the flock.) Words don't do it justice - I'll try to get a chance to post pictures at some point.
After the pelican lake the guide said, Now we're going somewhere else. Okay. None of us really understood where. (Well, Djibo probably did, but he didn't share.) It turned out where we went was... the Mauritanian border. To look at a dam that keeps salt water out of the Senegal River, which marks the border.
We walked up to the river and Djibo said, That was the Senegal border back there. What? But we don't have visas! Well, Mauritania doesn't start until the other side of the river. We were in a sort of no man's land between, but nobody at the Senegalese border station cared, and we wandered around for a bit looking at some really huge lizards.
Next day, we headed out "after lunch," which in Senegalese life turned out to mean 5 p.m., for Touba, to visit Caitlin's host family from when she studied abroad, and to check out the Grand Magal, a yearly pilgrimmage in which most of Senegal piles into Touba to visit the mosque and pay their respect to the founder of the Mouride Sufi brotherhood, to which a large percentage of the country belongs. (Sorry, vague because I have no time to look up statistics right now, but I do know that he was simultaneously a religious teacher and an important leader in the resistance to the colonial French.)
Mysterious 2 1/2-hour wait at the garage (bus station), where lots of people wanted to go to Touba, and lots of "sept place" cars were standing around, but no one was going. Mystery. Finally we banded together with a group of four Senegalese adults and managed to get a car.
Okay, I heard the phrase "sept place" (literally "seven seats") a lot before coming here, but no one warned me that a sept place is in fact a normal station wagon (generally in an impressively battered state), converted to seat a driver and seven passengers. Eight people in a station wagon! But at least we weren't in one of the overcrowded minibuses with people hanging off every which way - or the things that looked like dump trucks, but were packed to spilling over with people. Oh good lord.
Arrived Touba after midnight, hot, sweaty and exhausted, traffic crawling nearly to a standstill as we got into the city. Like I said, pretty much the whole country comes in time for the holiday on Thursday.
Touba, so hot, so full of people. Even the horse carts that generally seem to tansport goods were given over to transporting people. And everywhere, cows tied up to posts, just prior to being slaughtered for feasts. I even met a camel, who was also imminently to be slaughtered. Which was weird.
We stayed with Caitlin's friends Ibrahima and Adji, some of the most hospitable people I've ever met. Ibrahima just kept telling Cait and Kerry (and me, by the end) that this is their home, and they're part of the family. And not in a way like some people might just say that, but like he really meant it.
I'm out of time for now, but I'm going to try to come to the internet cafe one more time before we leave Dakar, and write the rest... Leggi leggi (see you later)!
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