Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Mangroves and the Big D Hits T

This morning, Tuesday, Sandy woke up smiling and I woke up running.  After nearly four weeks in Africa, it happened last night.  I don’t understand.  Yesterday, Sandy and I ate the same meals, sometimes from the same plate, ate peanuts from the same vendor, and drank the same drinks, bottled water and bottled beer.  It must be like Lake Wobegone where the women are strong and…

We cut our planned full day in the mangroves down to a half-day.  After a tiny breakfast of a piece of a baguette and instant coffee with sugar and powdered milk, we headed one-half hour south to Djifere on the tip of the peninsula in Amat’s pickup truck.  Before 10:00 we were in a pirogue with our skipper and his boatman on our way across the waves to the national park, its mangroves, its birds, and its villages.  I kept my tummy as calm as possible.

 

 

Three hours later we had seen a few birds and lots of mangroves.  The area is vast and distances are long in the park.  We both agreed that our time and money would have been better spent doing the same thing further up coast in Fadiot where we took a walking tour yesterday.  So, next time you’re working your way down the coast in Senegal, see Fadiot and its surroundings and skip Djifere and the park.

If you do head this way and you are open to simple clean accommodations, try the CALAO campement.  Amat, the owner, speaks passible English, thank God, and he is very helpful.  He is also a musician.  He lived for about ten in France and says he has travelled and performed throughout Europe.  Tonight we will try to get him to play the djembe as well as the 21 string Senegalese instrument that looks like a giant round gourd/guitar with the strings on the sides` of the neck.  Amat tells us it’s a cord and is played like a harp.