Senegal in Pictures: I

I was honestly starting to think this would never happen, but:

My pictures from my trip to Senegal, in January 2012, are now fully sorted, edited, uploaded, organized, captioned... in short, finally ready to share! It only took 1 3/4 years, how 'bout that?

Here's "Senegal I – Ngor and Dakar" in which our intrepid heroine lands in Senegal, gets to know the friendly beachside village of Ngor, meets a lot of her friend Kap's friends, meets a lot of goats, plus photographs vegetables, juices, boats and a surprisingly number of colorful clotheslines.

SENEGAL I - Ngor and Dakar

More coming soon! Next up will be "Senegal II – Saint-Louis, Djoudj and Touba"

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As a curious side note, as I was putting my Senegal albums together, I also glanced back at the my photo albums from my trip to India in late 2010 and discovered that these two trips apparently generated precisely the same volume of photo-album-worthy photos. All together my India albums include 238 photos and my Senegal albums, once I post them all, will include 237 photos. Seriously! That struck me as a fascinating coincidence, which then caused me to wax a little lyrical about the ties that connect those two trips...

The trips I took to both India and Senegal were of similar length (about 3 1/2 weeks), of similar significance to me (a big trip to a very different place, a chance to get outside myself and my daily life and really experience something different, an amazing opportunity to visit friends locally and get to know people, not just be a tourist on a beach or something).

Also, though not by design, these two trips ended up forming neat bookends to what became my "Year of Travel" in 2011.

Between the big trips to India in December 2010 and Senegal in January 2012, I traveled to Switzerland, western Germany, England, the US, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands, western Germany again, Belgium, the Baltic Sea, Italy and western Germany yet again for German Christmas. Throughout, I experimented with working from abroad, orchestrating half-work/half-travel weeks that allowed me to stay present professionally despite being physically absent from Berlin. All together I was away and traveling fully 1/4 of that year.

And it was an awesome year, though the pace did eventually get tiring and I slowed down again. And entirely by accident, that Year of Travel slotted itself neatly between these two very different yet similarly resonant trips, to India and to Senegal.