It’s been a chilly windy morning. My landlady offered me coffee on the rooftop. Of course I agreed! What I got was a small sachet of instant coffee but at least it wasn’t Nescafé. The auberge I stay in has quite a nice view on the canal and the neighbouring island.

I went out in search for breakfast and more coffee, of less instant type. It’s a bit of a walk to where the food places are and I have marked the ones I was interested in on Google Maps. I had seen people using pins and saving places on Google Maps but I always wondered what’s the purpose, when you can always search for a place. Now, with all the old guidebooks that I have and cross-referencing information with the internet, I wonder how on Earth can one survive with Google Maps pins.

So I walked down the island with my possible eating places pinned out the first choice was a breakfast joint called Aux délices du fleuve. I went there mainly because the guidebook promised espresso. On the very street where river delicacies where served I saw a small tented shack with a small crowd around it. A lady was selling baguettes with fillings. You know what they say about food – go after the crowds. So I did. I watched what I can have. I saw beans, I saw green peas, I saw fried egg with onions, I saw a sauce that later turned out to be mayonnaise with mustard and some spices, I saw fried chipsy things sprinkled into the baguettes. I waited for my turn.

It’s difficult to say when my turn was, people were just approaching and saying things and I kindly waited to speak or maybe until madame will turn my direction, which is not always granted. But she did and I had a half baguette with 2 scrambled eggs (she called it omelette) fried with onions and the mayonnaise sauce as a spread and the mysterious chipsy sprinkled on top of the eggs. It was 800cfa, tasty.

I decided to continue to my coffee shop but it was closed. I started looking further and ended up in Ndar Ndar which is a coffee shop (double espresso, not very good, for 1500cfa) and a music shop. I know a bit about African music but there were a lot CDs of artists that I never heard of so I wrote them down. I also soundhounded a couple of songs that played. The man behind the counter also showed me a selection of CDRs with mixtapes that he does. But he didn’t have any tracklist and the CDRs at 4000cfa are not cheap. Below the list of artists I wrote down. I skipped the more famous ones like Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré and Boubacar Traoré.

Elage Diouf – Dama le Nob
Dawda Jobarteh
Wasis Diop TOXU
Bani Adama AL beta
Thelonious Monk
Sékou Kouyaté
Sékouba Bambino
Dip Doundou Guide
Makkan J
Ballena Gurumbe
Kankamusa
Kouyaté Sory Kandia
Ami Moira
Kaabi
Sékouba Fatako
One Pac & Fellows
Baptiste Trotignon & Minino Garay
Bembeya Jazz National
Fodé Kouyate

Happy streaming! If you’re more into CDs, a lot of African artists have their Bandcamp pages where you can buy them and also in digital format.

Coffee done, I went to stroll around. The main island is long and narrow and without any obvious sights except soaking the atmosphere of the old French colonial capital there isn’t much to do. I walked about, peeping at African masks. Unlike masks and I have quite a lot of them at home so I wasn’t going to buy anything.

There are many children begging for money on the streets. Perhaps what was going on the border wasn’t a coincidence? I know it’s Islam and alms is its pillar but the sight of the children is a a depressing sight.

Boubacar

I snapped a photo of a group of students standing and chatting. I snap most of the photos using a Pixel 2XL phone and they look quite good. Phone has the advantage of being able to snap quickly without the subject of the photo noticing. But the peoples of Senegal are sharp! They saw me. I walked away and stood by the canal taking photos of the fishing boats when someone approached me. And that’s how I met Boubacar.

Boubacar is a 25-year-old student of accounting on his last year before graduating. He lives on the other side of the canal. He started obviously asking me why I take pictures, what I’m doing here. Sometimes it is difficult to explain to people what a tourist is. He was nevertheless quite curious and got more curious when I told him that the best fish I ever had was in Nigeria. He started telling me stories about fishermen. How they are locked in land due to the unusually strong wind blowing around lately. How they are split into 2 groups which go out to sea fishing on alternate days
How there is very little fish left (and fisheries of Senegal are supposed to be some of the world’s best) because the Chinese are coming with big vessels and taking everything at once. How the Mauritanians drowned car wrecks into the sea and fish liked those wrecks so much that they now live there and Mauritanian waters are so rich in fish and thank God the Senegalese have a deal with the Mauritanians and they can go fish there.

I left Boubacar although he offered to walk a bit with me and crossed over the canal to the district of N’dar where the fishermen live.

It’s in many ways a more interesting part of town because that’s where you can see life being lived. I walked to the other side of the peninsula (which is long and even narrower than the island of Saint Louis). There were boats and sea washing up the beach. Boubacar mentioned the sea is eating up the land and you can see a lot crumbled house walls. Is it the water?

Muhammad

I walked on down South, towards a part of town called Hydrobase. Three boys greeted me, one of them Muhammad. He asked me where I’m from. When I said I’m from Poland his face brightened with wide smile: “last world cup! Senegal 2 Poland 0!” If Muhammad was older – he was 14 – I’d buy him a beer. Muhammad’s favourite food is thiéboudienne, possibly Senegal’s national dish, an aromatic dish of spiced rice, fish and vegetables. Very tasty indeed. Interestingly, Muhammad doesn’t know my favourite food around: jollof rice. Now it’s a bit strange, I haven’t seen jollof rice on the menus in St Louis but I always thought it’s been invented in Senegal and became an almost national dish of Ghana and Nigeria. Possibly the best rice dish in the world, it’s spiced and with tomatoes.

Muhammad didn’t know ginger juice either. Jus gingembre is possibly my favourite non-alcoholic drink here, and indeed in all other African Francophone countries.

Muhammad and his friends soon split from me and I continued until the cemetery. The cemetery is interesting because of how graves are covered with fishing nets. I entered. The sight was astounding: so many wooden graves with nothing but wooden plaques with names. I took a picture and went deeper. Then things got weird. I heard a coin sound behind me and there was a man standing in the cemetery doorway and shaking coins in his hand, the way people do when they ask for money. I decided to walk up to him and talk and when I approached him and asked what’s up another older man showed up and all he said to me was “interdit, interdit” and showed me out. I have been asked out of many places but the cemetery?

I got a bit annoyed and decided to walk back up to the bridge. I passed many wall painting depicting muslim-looking men and women. Later I found out these are marks of marabou living in the house. I also passed a pelican sitting on the street. I don’t exactly know if the pelican was there by its own will.

Ibrahim

Back on the island I met… a Polish group tour. I first realised they were Polish when, standing by the small bus parked on the street side, their guide was announcing loudly “ladies and gentlemen, you have to be here at 5m; me, I’m leaving at 5pm”. Either she is one rowdy guide or the group is one rowdy bunch of people. One of the tourists was asking the guide “where is the wood? I want the wood carvings!” Then I saw a man approaching the tourist with a mask and I heard the him speaking “Antique? Antique my ass! 5000euros? Crazy!”

The group dispersed and the man with the mask – Ibrahim – came up to me saying that he came here from very far away on his motorcycle and if he only had visa he’d sell this mask which his father left for 5000euro in Holland, and he is selling the mask for 120euros. When I expressed my doubt that the mask is really so ancient he started kissing the ground and calling god that he’d never lie. But he didn’t know the age of the mask but it “surely must be 100 years or more”.

Now I have masks at home and I have seen many of them but I never bothered learning how to tell their age or even the tribes that could have made them. I noticed though that anytime something was introduced to me as “very very old” it was always in very bad shape, full of cracks and bruises, as if the wood couldn’t survive for long or simply as if the wood was never properly maintained. I of course left Ibrahim who claimed to return to the group when they were back at 5pm.

I had lunch, thiéboudienne of course, and jus gingembre, it was very tasty. I went to a bar where they also served coffee. I was thinking I should have taken Ibrahim’s phone number just in case. I have a friend, Mirek, who was supposed to travel here with me, who’d always say when I travelled to Africa: “Bartek, I have €100, buy me something.” And I never did. He also mentioned trading wood carvings with Mali so I thought we could as well have Ibrahim’s contact even though he only had that one mask.

Fate had, I saw Ibrahim on a street. I asked him for phone number and it started. He said the things about visa, selling the mask for €5000 in Europe and for only €120 here. I said things about journey being long, no space in the rucksack. He said I’m so nice to him he will lower price to €100 just for me. I said things about not buying anything but the mask is nice and the journey being long. And Ibrahim continued lowering the price at one point telling me he lives far and he needs money for his fuel. €80, €50, me repeating journey is long, bag is heavy, €30, €20… I couldn’t believe my ears. He also mentioned I’m gonna sell this mask with such a profit. Sure buying for €20 selling for €5000… He finally went down as low as €15 and I no longer understood logic behind it. How do you ask for €120 and end up at €15 and I didn’t even want to buy it. Or maybe I should have? Such a bargain. Or if it was a hoax, the whole ancient antique thing, how do you ever negotiate next knowing price can go so much lower than originally asked for.

It was about 5pm and I thought it’s time to hit the beach proper at least bin order to see the sunset. Plage Hydrobase! But the beach is a few kms away, I could use a taxi.

Abdelkarim

First taxi said 2000cfa. Second taxi said 2000cfa, went down to 1500. Third taxi went down to 1000. And I was told all taxis go for 500!

A man came up to me asking for money. Dresses in a long gellabiyah, long beard, a turban, a picture of some marabou-looking oldman hanging on his neck and a proper alms bowl in his hand with some coins inside. I told him I can’t give him money when I can’t even pay for a taxi myself. He then said taxis to Hydrobase are 800-1000cfa but if I want it cheaper I have to cross the bridge to N’tar and take another vehicle, they call it kondolo, these are just regular cars which go for 100cfa per person but unlike taxis they don’t have license to operate.

This was a 100cfa worth of information, I have Abdelkarim the coin and crossed the bridge. As I was standing on the street trying to figure out which cars are kondolo, which aren’t a boy came up to me and started speaking English (!) and told me in order to get to Hydrobase I can take a bus no. 3. So much useful information! That’s why you always talk to people on the street!

Then I saw not even one kondolo but the whole station of kondolo, complete with supervisor who put me into the right car, suggested I pay for two seats (hint: I’m not even XL) and off we went.

The Hydrobase beach is wide, long, empty and very very dirty. Plastic is everywhere. You can literally see how ocean throws plastic on the beach. It’s a very sad view and it’s completed by the dust in the air which made the sunset very gray. Otherworld, edition Senegal.

Among this trash there was a pair of plastic beach loungers and two men were on them lively chatting. I thought a photo of them on those loungers would be perfectly absurd in the middle of this dirt but I decided to be nice and ask them for permission. The obvious questions followed, why do I want this photo, can they remove themselves from the photo. I insisted that they should stay, that I don’t need their faces, they can turn around. All for nothing, loungers were photographed empty. When one of them saw the pic he said it doesn’t look good and I got hope that they will enter back into the pic but he meant the back of the lounger should better be straightened up.

There were more people I chatted with.

There was a man who told me about marabous. He was selling tea and coffee on the street and had a sign saying “they left for Europe to work for them, we stay here to serve you”.

On my way back from dinner I went to buy water – I drank probably 5 liters today – and of the street children asked me to buy him milk. He was stuttering. I thought yes but then once I was inside the shop other children entered and started showing me what each of them wants, that is which biscuits. I left without buying anything.

And even after that, at 11pm, a guy managed to approach me speaking in English and following me. I had to ask him what he wanted and then he said he wants just to be friends. I told him tomorrow and he left.