In which the Author Realizes he needs to polish up on his Clichés…

You know, they say (I’ll refrain from the obligatory joke about not knowing who “they” is for the moment) that the journey of a thousand miles isn’t the destination. Or maybe it’s the single step is the whole point. But when you really think about it, that better not be one step too small for man or else you end up falling in between the pirogue and the pier. And why would mankind want to take a giant leap away from paradise?

Confused? So am I. But such is the life at the Campement de Espana, the favorite resting place on my long weekend-long (wait, what?) trip to the Sine-Saloum Delta region of Senegal. If you want to find it on a map, it’s the big green thing between the Petit-Cote (a.k.a. Paradise) and the Gambia (a.k.a. the world’s biggest joke on Africa). If you want to find it in a picture, you can click on one of my picture links over there ------->. I highly recommend it, as it’s a beautiful place.

This trip ranks up there with one of the best weekend trips I’ve ever taken (yes, I know it’s hard to believe but it was even better than that trip through the sulfurous pits of Hell after being dragged (drug?) across sand paper also known as Bakel – not that Bakel was a bad trip or anything…it just hurt). As such, I feel it necessary to share as much of it with you as possible (oh no, you’re thinking…this one’s never going to end!). So we’ll start from the beginning, but keep it short, giving you the highlights:

Ndagane
UFOs, rooms numbered “bonheur” and “chance” (which is French for “happytime” and “lucky” – surreptitious sounding names for rooms that were definitely not rented hourly), and feeling insulted by a man who said we were (I am not making this up) “not real Americans,” nevermind the blue passport that I was waving around in front of him. I might as well light that on fire and throw it into the river because apparently real Americans don’t haggle for a half hour to get $10 off of the price of a pirogue. Evidently the real Americans were the people who payed $230 for a boat ride ACROSS THE FREAKING RIVER (no joke, a piroguerer told us). You see people, you may think you’re doing a good deed and contributing to the local economy when you pay that much for a boat that should cost you no more than $20, but really you're just making the rest of us look bad for being so damn cheap.

Dionouar
The evergreen trees growing on a sandbar protecting a village in Africa should have been our first clue that our trip was about to get a lot weirder (I mean who ever heard of fir trees growing in a tropical climate???). Our second clue should have been the fact that there was nothing at all to eat in the entire village except for the following: bread, canned pineapple, la Vache qui Rit (which is African for “cream cheese that doesn’t go bad even if you leave it out in the African heat for days and days”), and…sardines, sardines, it seems I’ve forgotten my sardines again. Sardines, in fact, are the new tuna (it’s true, you can ask Africa). So for a good 24 hours, which if you’re counting is 6 or 8 meals (depending on if I get my mid-morning pre-lunch snack), that’s all we ate. I’m dead serious. Maybe the mix of old cheese, canned pineapple and sardines created some sort of hallucinogen, but a semi-sleepless night spent sleeping on the ground in a fir-forest in Africa on a sandbar sounded like a good idea (say that ten times fast).

How did it go you ask? Well, I wore my sweatshirt for the first time since coming to Africa (and you thought it was going to be useless. Looks like I get the last laugh now! HA!), and woke up early enough to catch an African sunrise (which depending on how you feel before dawn is either incredibly lucky of me or incredibly unlucky of me). And the rumors are true: sunrises ARE better in Africa. But no amount of out of place trees could have prepared me for the sheer lack of common sense that was:

Foundiougne
The story here is the Campement de Espana. If this were a news story, it would probably be a feature, and the lede (or lead if you’re not a journalist with a spelling problem) would read something like this: If Senegal were the world (there’s no reason to think that), then the Campement de Espana would be Senegal.

By that I mean: it’s Senegal’s Senegal. The place where weird things happen and are completely commonplace. Where goats are tied onto a 7-place by the baker’s dozen (which by the way included a bike and 4 large bags of stuff). Where evil hoards of evil goats roam the streets eating garbage. Where dogs and cats (and goats) all eat together from the same bowl of ceebujen in harmony! (Gasp!!!). Check your common sense at the door folks because we don’t need none of that newfangled reason here. We got our goats and that does us just fine thank you very much. That sort of place.

It’s run by a guy from the Canary Islands with three teeth and a named of Fransisco. He speaks a mélange of French, Spanish, English, and Wolof, alternating between the four as he sees fit and whenever he chooses. But he is the friendliest guy we met on our trip, almost to the point where it was ennerving: “No gracias Fransisco, the four baskets of bread we have on our table are more than enough. But thank you, merci beaucoup.” And “well, if they don’t have poisson at the market tonight then yeah I guess you can kill a chicken for us. But only do what’s most convenient for you.” (notes: these are actual conversations, not made up I promise; and killing a chicken would have been most convenient – but c’est ca l’Afrique eh?).

The place itself resembled a village in a dusty western – it had its good, it had its bad, and it had its ugly. We (or rather I) decided to pay homage to these Westerns in a series of photographs I have just titled “homage to these westerns.” You can find those over there ------> (though without the title…I still haven’t figured out how to sub-title an album and probably never will).

This is an actual photo of an actual map from the Campement de Espana to the Gare routiere in Foundiougne drawn by Francisco. Note the absolute lack of labels, or even direction. In fact, if we were to follow this map, we would have ended up going the exact opposite direction of where we wanted to go. But then again maybe he’s just crazy like Leonardo Da Vinci. (yes, I kept the map, my Handy-Dandy Notebook is starting to become a sort of carry-all for anything and everything that I feel goes in there, maps, factures, bus tickets, anything interesting is either getting written or shoved in the Handy-Dandy Notebook)

I know this can all seem rather harsh, so I would like to say that Francisco was the kindest, most generous, and easy-goingest proprietor I’ve had to deal with and I would feel personally insulted if anyone who went to Foundiougne didn’t stay at his place. If you’re in the area, go to the Campement de Espana. On top of all this, it’s the cheapest place in town.

And that, as they say, is the end of the line. The final countdown. The ultimate sacrifice. The 1000^th mile. The moon.

Love,
Jake