Adventures with Angela: That Day!

Back in Dakar, we decided that Thursday would be the best day to go out to Gorée Island because there are always less people on a weekday than the weekend. We decided not to rush the morning and take the 12:15 ferry out, have lunch and spend the afternoon on the island. Although it’s only a 15 minute drive from Mermoz to the port, we decided to grab a taxi at 11am so we could get our tickets early and walk around downtown a little bit while we waited for the ferry. We hail a taxi and off we go, but then the taxi turns away from the Corniche (the road that follows the coast and has almost no traffic). Hum… maybe there’s an accident or something? Then he doesn’t take the other road that goes straight downtown, which would be faster than the Corniche if there wasn't a huge market halfway down that always impedes traffic. He heads towards where I teach… Hum… well he can technically turn right just after the university and get downtown from there, but then he doesn’t do that either. I finally ask him why he’s going the wrong direction, but he just says everything is fine and I’m thinking it’s a good thing we’re not in a hurry. Then he continues going the wrong direction, heading out of town? 10 more minutes go by and I ask him again why we’re going the wrong way and if he could please turn around. He refuses and we end up in the notoriously bad traffic at the HLM market. I’m thoroughly annoyed at this point, especially because he’s still going the wrong way, so now we’re sitting in traffic waiting to go farther in the wrong direction! Then I hear him ask another taxi driver going the other direction where the port for the ferry is! I was super annoyed at that point because he had said he knew where it was, and then when I suspected he didn’t know and tried to guide him, he refused to listen to me, still pretending he knew where he was going. We get all the way to the other side of town and he finally decides to go towards downtown, taking the highway, which is bumper to bumper traffic.

It was quite hot out, the fumes from the big trucks were killing us, and a trip that would normally take 15 minutes ended up taking an hour and a half, so we missed the ferry. This was the first time I’d ever done it, but I refused to pay him what we had negotiated and only gave him half while lecturing him on why he shouldn’t lie and say he knows where something is when he doesn’t, nor refuse to listen to his passengers (he was obviously quite young).

Because the ferry takes a break at the lunch hour, we weren’t going to be able to go at all that day because we wouldn’t have time to visit everything before they started closing. That meant we’d have to go on Saturday when it’s super busy. Oh well, we decided to hit a couple of museums. We went to IFAN: Musée de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire or IFAN Museum of African Arts, one of the oldest art museums in West Africa. The building it is housed in was converted to a museum by Senghor in 1960 when the IFAN (Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire), which was founded by the French in 1936, was transferred to the University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD). Because it is one of the most prestigious centers for studying African culture, it houses some of the most important collections from Francophone Africa.  While we were there we saw masks, statues, clothes, jewelry, tapestries, and weaponry from all over West Africa.

Pre-colonial West African Empires

They labeled everything saying which people group/ancient kingdom the piece came from; the Wolof, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, Kangaba, The Kingdoms of Mali and Ghana, etc. and the corresponding modern-day country; Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, Senegal, The Gambia, etc. The collection was very interesting and I’m glad we had the time to go!

At that point we hadn’t had any lunch, so we decided to go to a well-known western café not too far from there for a bite to eat and to decide what to do next. Over a hot turkey, cheese, and bell pepper wrap we decided we should stop at the Senghor museum, then go to the small mall across the street and get some bissap gelato before having dinner on the water. We taxied to the Senghor museum, just to find that it was closed because a pipe had burst… darn. It just wasn’t our day! Oh well, we had bissap gelato to get to, so we walked across to the mall just to find that the gelateria didn’t have half of their gelato that day and the bissap was one that they were missing L Man! 3 strikes, you’re out! We decided that our best bet at this point would be to throw in the towel, go downstairs to the restaurant on the water, have a cocktail and go home! Oh well… every trip has to have that one day when everything goes wrong!

When all else fails, go for cocktails!

Adventures with Angela: Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary

We rose bright and early Wednesday morning in order to get breakfast before our 7:30am departure for the Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary. The hotel had it posted that their continental breakfast started at 7am, so we figured we could get a quick breakfast in before having to head out. Unfortunately, that sign was apparently just for show, because when I went for breakfast, no one was even stirring and nothing had been set up. I was not a happy camper. I mean, I don’t blame them for not setting breakfast up until later because it’s very rare that people are up that early and want to eat, but don’t have a giant sign in the lobby saying that breakfast starts at 7am if it doesn’t! Just post a sign saying it starts at 8am so people know not to be able to have breakfast. Humph.

Moving on. Our guide was there to pick us up at 7:25am and we were off to the famous bird park, a 45 minute drive from Saint Louis. Djoudj is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (and so is the old colonial part of Saint Louis, so that’s two checks off my list!!!!) and, encompassing 16,000 hectares (40k acres), is one of the largest bird sanctuaries in the world. It is in the northernmost part of Senegal, with part of the park actually located in Mauritania. It’s the most famous for the flamingos and pelicans, but in the high season 350 different bird species can be seen there. We were at the very end of the season so there weren’t very many birds there at all. The park is the first migration stopover after those that are migrating down from Europe cross the Sahara, so the high season is of course in the fall and winter. Throughout the migration season, the park will host about 1.5 million migratory birds! The guide told us that the park would be closing in two weeks because even the small amount of birds that were still there would be gone. We almost didn’t go because I had been told there wouldn’t be much to see, but we decided to go anyway, even if just for the nice boat ride through the wetlands.

The reason we had left so early was because the boat tour is two hours long and by the time 11am comes around it’s pretty hot and miserable, so we’d wanted to be done by then. We arrived at about 8:45, which was perfect timing because the first large boat was going to leave at 9am. We were just behind a small busload of French tourists, so when we pulled up our guide rushed us to the boat so we’d get on before the group. We took the front bench and our guide sat with the park rangers/guides at the very front of the boat facing us. The guide we brought ended up being the guide for the whole boat. He did a pretty good job of sighting birds and explaining everything to everyone, and I translated for Angela. One of the rangers heard me translating and was listening in because I think he tries to do some of the tours in English. The hard part about translating in this particular setting is that I don’t know what all the birds are called in English… I needed my cousin Morgan, who is a bird expert and would have been able to give us all that information in English! I did the best I could with the pelicans, egrets, cranes, and the different non-aviary animals we saw on the shorelines as well.

The stars of the show are of course the pelicans, although the park is also famous for its flamingos, but they had all already left. The huge pelicans were the first thing we saw when we pushed away from the dock. I didn’t know that pelicans fished together in groups and that they synchronized their movements while doing so, so that was such an interesting thing to witness! We learned that they live and fish in groups like that and that if you see a pelican off fishing on its own, it’s most likely because it’s not feeling well and doesn’t want to get the rest of its flock sick! Smart birds! I also loved seeing their take-offs and landings on the water. They hop along the water with their giant feet as they’re taking off/landing, which is fun to watch. In some spots we could look up and see a whole group of them flying in circles high above us. Apparently they do so to aide in digestion.

We also saw other birds including some egrets, cranes, and smaller golden eagles. One bird I found pretty cool was what they called the “snake bird” because when it was in the water, all you could see was its long neck that looked like a snake. Along the shoreline we saw a couple of large lizards and crocodiles and a bunch of warthog families enjoying the water. The female warthogs all had about 4 babies with them when we saw them, and the males were huge! Besides the warthogs, lizards, and crocodiles, the only other thing we saw on the banks were some long-horns. The weather was perfect, with clear skies and not too much heat, so we enjoyed floating around trying to catch a glimpse of different birds that were still in the area, but mostly watching the pelicans!

Our boat tour finished about 11 as we’d planned and we headed straight back to Saint Louis. We had a 3pm shared taxi back to Dakar, so when we arrived back into Saint Louis we had the driver drop us off at a restaurant on the water so we could have a leisurely lunch. We originally planned to have lunch back at the hotel, but after the breakfast fiasco, I wasn’t inclined to give them any more of my money, so Angela and I shared some different seafood pasta dishes in town before we headed back to the hotel, then back to Dakar.

 

Mmmm.... Lunch!