30th December 2012

St Louis Blues.

19^th December to 26^th December

We passed through the Senegal police bridge toll and then to the customs officer. He kept us waiting for about 45 minutes and then told us that he had no authority to allow us to bring in our van for more than 2 days and we would then have to go to the customs at Dakar docks some 400 km away to get our Carnet de passage stamped so we could continue. This is more than a serious inconvenience ,and quite unnecessary it is really difficult to make the journey in the time allowed and if we got stopped by the police exceeding that time we could have our vehicle impounded.At the superb Zebrabar, south of St Louis, Martin, the owner was able to use the services of a ‘helper’ to secure us a further 5 days but the services of the helperwas not free. Since then, a new ‘regulation’ was introduced and we got our Carnet stamped at the border here without any need to travel to Dakar.

                    St Louis 

As we had a few days we also enjoyed the charming small city of St Louis, once the centre of the French Aero Postale Service, a network of sea planes that provided an airmail service all around Africa and much of the world. There isn’t much to say beside that this city seems to have many of the charms of an African city but less of the pressures.

 

We have been here for over a week, spending Christmas here was a real treat! The Zebrabar is set in the National Parc and it is not uncommon to see all manner of exotic wildlife, fabulous birds, troops of Barbary apes, and more reptiles than you can shake a stick at. We’ve been on a boat trip around the park, Noel was rather nervous at the boat being so low down in the water but the lagoon was quite shallow. ‘Tosh’ the dog, accompanied us on the boat with his Dutch owners, Mike and Marion. Also with us were Lorenzo and Kevin our biker friends whom we met in Mauritania.

 

Kevin and Ping with the boatman

 

 

Tosh being carried on to the boat

We had a wonderful Swiss Christmas dinner hosted by the owners of the Zebrabar, Ursula and Martin, in the charming dining room – the palm tree decked with tasteful Christmas tinsel, tea lights and candles all made it quite festive.

 

                                     Happy Swiss Christmas dinner

It is so beautiful, relaxed and tranquil here, whilst we are cacooned in this paradise, we are aware that out of here, there is real part of the country where the poverty, dirt, dust, awful badly maintained roads and stench of rubbish seems to be all around. There is the ever presence of plastic bottles, blue plastic bags, anything plastic piled along the road side, skimming on the surface water of the lagoon and living amongst this are smiling, helpful people just trying to scratch a living eg selling you 4 cloves of garlic for 100CFA (about 5 pence) or the local fisherman trying to flog their daily catch at inflated price to the tourists.

 We have another puncture(#6)!, so it is another visit to a “pneu” shop. We may need to buy a couple of new tyres, but we might do this when we get to The Gambia, which is our next stop (and they speak English!).

Happy New Year to you all, keep the emails coming.
Ping and Noel