chez nabou

toubab dialo, senegal

guide books are excellent places to start, but terrible places to finish. without the wisdom of the advanced scout team at lonely planet, i don't know how i could have possibly discovered the beautiful hostel of sobo bade or this pristine fishing village of toubab dialo. the description was enough to get me to haul my bag and negotiate dakar's unfriendly gare routière to come here. but had i entrusted myself completely to the advice of those three tiny paragraphs, who knows if i would have ventured beyond those walls.

but i did. hunger conspired with frugality to send me beyond the confines of sobo bade's kitchen yesterday, where i found a quaint local eatery in restaurant le rocher: chez nabou. nabou herself is a big, vibrantly dressed african mama straight out of central casting. she prepared my poulet and then gave me the traditional café touba. i don't know how exactly it happened, but a slow lunch turned into about five hours of sitting on their veranda, watching the waves hit la plage and lending minimal percussive support to my new friend samba, a djembe drummer.

when i returned for dinner a few hours later, i received an offer i couldn't refuse: a room with a full-sized bed and all three meals for cfa 9000 per night ($20). i accepted and am glad i did. while i slept well up the hill last night in the dorm across from a random french dude named diego, i don't think it'll hold a head lamp to the experience of getting to dine with real senegalese people and laying my head down to the soundtrack provided by the atlantic. the drawbacks may include no toilet (but there is a hole-and it's porcelain too!) and the fact that i have to bucket bathe (for retaining readership, there will be no youtube clips of yours truly engaging in this), but i say that if it's good enough for nabou and samba, then it's good enough for me.

a plus tard, mes amis.