Senegal

My trip to Senegal has come to an end and I am now heading to the Netherlands to spend some quality time with a good friend. My summation of Senegal is: Great food, friendly people, rich culture, great music and dance. Ooh! and I almost forgot, chaos! having grown up in Kenya I can not say the chaos came as a huge shock to me, there is a certain level of chaos in developing countries that toughens you up a bit so I wasn't fazed that much.

Traffic was crazy and road rules (what's that again?) did not seem to exist, I actually got bumped by a car on my first day in Senegal. This one driver was backing up without looking and before I knew it I felt this bump on my arm that was  more startling than painful. I was shaken for a few minutes but later on I was able to laugh about it.

All in all, my trip was good and I can not complain. The biggest highlight of the trip was of course seeing my friend getting married and being part of the wedding, I just love weddings!

I managed to check out Goree Island which was a slave trading centre back in the days. Seeing the holding cells of the slaves and hearing the history of the slave trade was depressing to say the least but I am glad I got to see Goree. The tour guide who was showing us around was telling us that because Goree is a UNESCO World Heritage site, they have tried to leave the Island as it was hundreds of years ago to preserve the history so any development in the Island is prohibited. I got to see the door of no return but thank God I was able to return!

Goree Island

Overview of some of the houses at Goree

Door of no return

Friendly folks

I also got to see the pink lake which unfortunately wasn't pink on the day we visited. The lake is pink due to a bacteria that's present in the lake, the bacteria produces a red pigment and that's what gives the lake a pink color. Apparently it had been raining so that's why the  lake was not pink at the time of our visit, sucks! but I did get to see salt in  it's most natural form. I wish I knew I could have got some in a small bag or something. When we were at the lake there was a french pharmaceutical company that had apparently come to buy the salt. The company from what I heard end up selling the salt at crazy high prices in France, I wonder how much it costs them to buy the salt in the first place, hmmmm?

Salt in it's natural form at the pink lake.

During the excursion to the pink lake we got to drive along the beach and on the sand dunes. It was quite an experience! I have to say driving on those sand dunes was scary as hell, I kept thinking I would get thrown off somehow. It was a lot of fun though.

Hanging on tight!

Heading along the beach from the sand dunes

The African Renaissance Monument was another site I got to see. I had seen the monument in pictures and had heard that it was larger than the statue of Liberty so I was pretty excited to see it in person. We got to the monument late at night and one of the guards let us in which was pretty cool. I didn't even know you could go in! If you look closely at the man's head you can see some sort of band around the top of the head, when we went inside the monument we went up and got to observe the city below from that band on the man's head.

African Renaissance Monument