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11.04.04

Overland Trip To Senagal 2004, Day 12: Saint-Louis

Thomas Morgan
2006-04-26 13:17:35

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We slept in big time. I woke periodically throughout the night for various reasons. A dog barking, kids yelling, birds chirping, goats, donkeys, cars. Frenchy’s ability to sleep through it all is remarkable. It was 11.15 when I woke up for good. I showered and brushed my teeth and we prepared for a day out in the town. Our number one aim was something that’s extremely rare in this part of the world – a supermarket. The kind with items shelved and priced in an organised fashion. I was quite fed up with the little boutiques with everything crammed behind the counter, unlabelled and unpriced. We didn’t find it and didn’t know where we were or where we were going. Maybe we’d go to the beach, or cross the bridge onto the mainland and buy a bus ticket to Dakar for tomorrow. We ended up passing a young bloke on the street, all friendly and how are you, said he was putting on a concert tonight and asking us to come back to his shop where he’ll give us his business card. We should never have gone. About twenty minutes and 16.000 CFA later we walked out with a bunch of crap we didn’t need an officially a pair of suckers. I suppose it could have been worse – we could have just paid everything he asked for everything he offered. As it was we had a nice ashtray, a wooden turtle and four necklaces that were never 16.000CFA, but it was bound to happen at some point. We walked around the town aimlessly, fending off several street hustlers, eventually ending up at the head of the island sitting on a bench near a Cantonese restaurant.

I struggled, and am still struggling, with an immensely irritating piece of sand in my eye. We bought deodorant, biscuits and tinned pineapple from a little, typical shop. Dakar loomed on the horizon. Tomorrow, we reach then end, and while we have made one or two poor decisions, we’ve done well to have nothing stolen or damaged or lost. If we can make it in and out of Dakar similarly, we’ll have done well. Dinner was couscous made just for us.