Power, water, and internet have been hard to come by recently. They’ve even had trouble with the generator at school in addition to problems with internet at home, so again, sorry for the delay and the length. So this weekend a group of us decided to go on a trip to Lac Rose, which is a big tourist site because it’s sometimes pink because of the algae and it’s the finish line for the Paris-Dakar rally. It’s pink if the wind comes and the sun is at an angle and it hasn’t rained a lot. So really it should just be called the sometimes-pinkish/actually more red dirt colored lake. But all the same it was a great weekend. We started out doubting our choice since there was a huge rain storm Saturday morning and after going out the night before none of us were too eager to wake up bright and early. The roads wash out when it rains a lot here so we thought it may be rather difficult to get there, but the DimmDekk was running so we hopped on. We took the bus to Malika, only 20km away, but it took an hour to get there, an hour and a half for the return trip. Most of the roads aren’t paved and those that are have giant pot holes that fill with water and form large lakes in the road. Luckily, the Senegalese don’t let a little rain stop them, they trudge right through. We walked for a while to try to find our hotel in what seemed like a ghost town. The sometimes paved streets were lined with foundations yet to be completed with no real appearances of getting there in the near future. While walking, two little boys decided to try to scare Jess by shoving a live chicken in her face, it worked. She recoiled and ran for about 15 yards before turning around to see all of us laughing and the boys with huge smiles on their faces. They got exactly what they were looking for. We’re not really sure why Jess was so scared of the chicken. After walking for twenty minutes we found the beach and our hotel, the only finished building on the beach other than a house. The area is beautiful but underdeveloped because the water is so dangerous you can’t swim and the beach is eroding so a lot of the buildings on the beach have been overtaken by sand. Nonetheless, our hotel was nice by African standards and one of the beds even came equipped with a mosquito net. After checking in and telling them what we wanted for dinner (anything but rice of course) we started the trek to Lac Rose which involved taking a car rapide to the next town over, Keur Massar then negotiating a cab from there. We stopped in Keur Massar at a fast food restaurant after attempting to eat at a restaurant in Malika that only had chicken, nothing else. Senegalese fast food is delicious, on every menu there is a hamburger complet which comes with a fried egg, mustard, ketchup (sweeter than ours), piments (spicy peppers), and French fries all piled on top; they don’t really understand the concept of a side dish. I tend to get the hamburger, but chwarma is also quite good here, random, I know.
After satiating ourselves we argued with a few cab drivers and were on our way along some bumpy terrain to reach the lake. Once we got there we took a pirogue ride out on the lake then walked over to the deserted beach which was gorgeous. We also saw the salt-collecting. According to our pirogue guide there is 1.5 meters of salt on the floor of Lac Rose. Getting back to our hotel was quite a hassle since everyone was trying to over charge us for a taxi, so we rented out our own car rapide instead that we convinced to take us directly to our hotel. We had asked for dinner at eight, but of course upon our return they started cooking and we ate around nine. It was well worth the wait since we had pasta, onion sauce, potatoes, and fish. Pasta is hard to come by here and is usually pretty expensive. After dinner, we wanted to get away from the drum session that had started at our hotel and went down to the beach.
After a decent night’s sleep, considering we stuffed four people in each king-sized bed we awoke pretty early and went in search of breakfast which ended up being baguettes with Chocoleca (the chocolate peanut butter spread); I’ve gotten quite used to it. We spent the morning at the beach near our hotel then returned to centre-ville for lunch, more fast food since on Sundays a lot seems to be closed as far as restaurants go. We haven’t determined when the Senegalese actually take their day of rest since for Muslims it’s Fridays and Christians it’s Sunday; so they aren’t very productive from Thursday to Sunday, clearly a factor in my recent experiences with decrepit infrastructure and lack of power. We're hoping for increased effort towards restaurant management and productivity in general post-Ramadan.
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