toubab dialo, senegal
a plan in africa stands as much chance as a fart in a hurricane: even if it's well-executed, there are so many external variables to contend with that the whole act becomes captive to chance. such was yesterday's 7-hour trip to the bank.
the first part of the plan went seamlessly: get taxi to rufisque, arrive, withdraw money. check. but my new ami samba wanted to do some investigation into prices for an upcoming journey i have to make towards the malian border. we went from chauffeur to chauffeur, inquiring into prices for the journey that should be in the cfa 5000-10000 range. each offer included an extra zero and i helped samba by either laughing or grimacing at each offer. yet have no fear, samba assured me, we would get better prices la-bàs.
la-bàs didn't turn out to be so much la-bàs as it did dakar. specifially, the gare-routière. picture a square kilometer of cars, buses, and vans that would receive shudders on any american highway with the attendant smells of various petrol products. sprinkle on top of that a mélange of aggressive touts, indifferent chauffeurs, peddlers of fake watches, duffel bags, cigarrettes, oranges, and knock-off q-tips. not to be left out, bien sûr, would be an oppressive sun, swarms of flies, and the occasional pour soul missing a limb and just looking for a little change. that's right: i took a monday field trip to the seventh circle of hell.
to make matters worse, we negotiated a reasonable fair and i handed the money over to an indifferent man wearing a conical vietnamese hat with the expectation that i had just arranged a pick-up for wednesday. to make this long-rendition of a short story shorter, this was not the arrangement that had been made. we had just booked an immediate passage to tambacounda.
we explained the situation to the man and we would get our refund-so soon as two more people arrived to take our place. this meant an hour of sitting/standing in the soleil while i shot the hatted-man viscious looks and recited the panoply of english curse words not entirely under my breath. two more passengers eventually arrived, we got our money and left, only to take the slowest, most crowded bus possible back towards rufisque.
at one point, after the hour wait through dakar traffic, the chauffeur and attendant had gone awol for a good 20 minutes while we all waited impatiently and sweated profusely. it turns out that the gendarmes had told the chauffeur that his permit was invalid and demanded a bribe to clear things up. such is africa: just when you can't imagine your own discomfort any greater, you see someone who loses a days meager wages because of the whim of a hungry official.
this perspective pacified my frustration and the bush taxi we took back to town seemed to be a reward for an unpleasant day: an endless expanse of baobab's against the pink hue of the day's last hour of light and the warm breeze coming off the atlantic. samba and i walked back down towards the beach, less like returned passengers than disheveled seafarers. somewhere during this odyssey i decided to stay an extra day doing nothing more than swimming, reading, and eating delicious seafood. tomorrow: the gare-routière and tambacounda, bien sûr.
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