Here to There

Note: Hey Everyone, I am actually home now. I got back last weekend, but I wrote this one before leaving and I have enough material for another blog or two before wrapping it up.

Caroline and I's travel started off in Dakar, with two other volunteers, Delaney and Britney, who were leaving the following day. We went to the île de Gorée aboard the noble sea vessel “Beer.” I loved how the name of the boat didn’t have any letters before it. Not the “SS Beer”, just “Beer.” The other boat we took during the trip was called the “Osama” so the boat namers of Senegal clearly have a problem.

Travel in Africa can best be described as cheap and uncomfortable. So for only 15 dollars, you can travel in a taxi for 10 hours from Dakar down to Casamance (Southern Senegal), but you have to share said taxi with seven other people, and it’s about the size of a station wagon. So it’s incredibly cheap, but you are sitting butt to butt, knee to knee, for a very long time. We started out with a ride like this from Dakar to Ziguinchor, in Casamance. It took us briefly through The Gambia, which is the small country that is completely surrounded by Senegal. While passing through Gambia, the taxi needed to cross the Gambia River to continue the trek, so there was a ferry that the taxis and the other cars boarded to cross.

While waiting on the ferry, we spotted an Osama Bin Laden supporter, manifesting his support in a sticker on his taxi.

I’ve seen a few Bin Laden stickers in taxis, and it’s always kind of frightening to think that the drivers share a similar mentality…but the people that were waiting for the ferry with us were very nice, and they really took a shine to Caroline.

The whole trip was basically planned with a copy of a Lonely Planet travel guide, which helped us find places to stay while we traveled. While in Ziguinchor, the hotel that we wanted to stay in (which had a pool and reportedly hot water) was full, but the dive hotel right across the street had rooms available, and, check it out, air conditioning!

The room did have a great view of the pool at the hotel we wanted to stay at across the street.

So the next day we took a bus to Cap Skiring, a coastal town with a great beach,

you just have to share it with some livestock

There was also a festival in town that we think was celebrating Mardi Gras? We ran into a bunch of cross dressers on the street who also had flour all over their faces so they would appear white. So it was like they were cross-race-dressing. It was a huge shock to us, just because Senegalese people are normally so conservative, but Casamance feels like a completely different country than the rest of Senegal.

There has been a lot of attention in Casamance because there is a separatist movement composed of rebel groups near the Southern border. Though the travel guides do warn travelers to this region about potential violence, and some things we read about the area made it seem very active, we didn’t see anything while we were there that would indicate an active violent movement. So, don’t count out Casamance in next year’s family vacation plans! Possible advertising schemes: “Casamance: no longer violent!” “Great food, no coups!”

Animist Museum

When Caroline and I traveled to Southern Senegal, we stopped by the coastal town of Cap Skiring. There was a tour guide there that had been recommended by some past volunteers, and their advice was literally “look for Abib”. At first we thought the chances of us finding this Abib fellow amongst all the people of town would be slim, but as we were walking down the street, Abib actually found us, and asked us if we were friends with the previous volunteers who came to Casamance. He is a practicing Animist and offered to take us on a tour of an Animist museum (In Casamance, there is much more religious diversity, with a higher population of more traditional African religions such as Animism, which is a stark contrast from the north which is almost completely Muslim). First off, it wasn’t a traditional museum. It was more of a trail through the woods, with periodic stops by enormous trees (fromage trees. Fromage is French for cheese. The French colonized Senegal in the early 1900s, and I guess named some trees after cheese?) which had exhibits leaning against them.

Some exhibits were more cultural, and dealt with traditional instruments, and agriculture techniques, and others were more religious in nature. These are some pictures from the more cultural tradition end of things.

A Senegalese guitar like instrument

Here is something used to gracefully climb trees

And here is me ascending the tree as gracefully as a forest lemur. What a natural!

This is a device used to catch fish in shallow water. You put this little cage over top of it and reach through the whole on the top to grab the fish.

In the middle of the museum were some Animist elements. Here is a picture of what is called a fetish. It is a pile of bones that the Animists use to communicate with the dead.

Most often, a maribout (pronounced “mariboo”) is present and he sits beside the bones and claims to translate what is being said by the dead. There are maribouts in Muslim culture too, and their presence in West African Islam is a relic from previous African religions. Next, Abib showed us something really freaky. It was this scarecrow thing with the skull of a bull that was dressed as a woman.

He said that if there is no rain for a while, they sacrifice a black bull to it, and then it will rain. I imagine a clever maribout would probably check the local weather forcast just before the sacrifice. Caroline and I were trying to remain focused on what he was saying, but standing next to that thing really gave us the willies. Being alone in the woods didn’t help the situation, and I felt for a second that we were those two people who always die at the beginning of a horror movie.

Afterwards, we stopped by a little village and Abib showed us how cross-village communication is possible. Here it is

To deliver a message, the large metal drum is taken out of the hut and hit an appropriate amount of times to deliver a message to the adjacent village. However, strangely enough, in this remote African village I actually had a couple bars of cell phone reception. More so than a couple places in my hometown in Marlyand….

And finally, this wasn't part of the museum, but we found one of those huge African termite mounds.

This concluded our day at Cap Skiring and we traveled to the town of Zuiginchor before heading back to Dakar by boat the next day.

On a really sad note, my long time friend Delaney has left Senegal. To quote Michael Scott "it feels like someone took my heart and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears". She arrived a little before me back in August and we immediately became friends, and we were the only people left in Senegal from that original group of volunteers back in September. Life here isn’t always easy, and there are many times when you need a friend who can relate to your problems when Senegalese life presents its many challenges. She is a great friend and I will miss her so very much.

Guest Blog

So today I thought since Caroline is visiting, she could write a blog about something about our travels to southern Senegal (Casamance region). Voila:

I’ve been home for one day, and my favorite story that I’ve been telling to debrief friends and family on how my trip to Senegal was, is of the boat ride that Steve and I took from Zuiginchor to Dakar. We bought fourth-class (the lowest class) tickets because they were the cheapest, and we figured that the level of discomfort that we would experience in the lowest class would be on par with the rest of our travels.

The boat that we took was named “Osama,” and like its name indicated, it was evil. Our fourth-class tickets landed us in the basement of the boat in a room with about 70 other members of our caste. Until it got cold, Steve and I enjoyed sitting out on the deck with a few other volunteers, soaking up some sun and comparing travel stories. The other volunteers were smart enough to spend five dollars more for third-class tickets that included showers and beds. We split with the other volunteers when it got cold and we were forced down into our
basement seats with the luxury of a flat-screen television that played French-dubbed, awful American movies.

I took a Dramamine so that I would be able to sleep and avoid motion sickness, but Steve was wide awake and stuck in his chair between me (asleep) and a weird couple. We called them a weird couple because the guy looked like Kevin Federline and the girl smelled strongly of
smoke and alcohol. However, the weird couple didn’t really act weird. In fact, everyone in our fourth-class area acted much the same. We all tried to sleep. Some people were retching and puking in plastic bags, stuck in their seats. While others were able to sleep and snored loudly.

Steve had one moment of hope when Return of the Jedi came on the TV. However, just as his favorite scene came on, the Ewoks’ fight scene, the TV was turned off. An hour later after Steve beat me in the Smart Dots game (he cheated), the weird girl asked Steve for a stick of gum.
Steve got the gum from me and I gave her a piece begrudgingly. I told Steve he should have told her he didn’t have any. Throughout the trip, Steve and I were able to recognize when we got mad at each other for circumstantial reasons, like being stuck in a room full of retching snorers, or whenever we were hangry (angry because we were hungry).

Steve ended up reading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in different hallways of the ship, and in my Dramamine-induced state, I was able to sleep most of the night. That’s how we made it from Zuiginchor to Dakar aboard the noble Osama.

Thanks Caroline! Here's a picture of her on the roof of our house in Saint-Louis

Also, stay tuned for the next blog, in which I will explain this picture: