the candy trail …

[ NOTE: this rant is only one brief moment of the journey and doesn't reflect my feelings towards Senegal, Africa, etc, but rather to show that not everyday on the road is great - sometimes things go wrong and also to show my own personal madness and being the honest egg that I am I have included it here ]

Here I am enjoying yet again the ambience of another grotty, overpriced hotel room bombarded by traffic from the front and bleeping goats from the back. Non-stop is the noise. Scooters, trucks, taxi, all battered and some really banged up and most bleeching smoke and horns. The clip clop of donkey carts the only soothing sound amid this miracle of noise and smoke.

On a main road; and if I was not here then it’s just mud and puddle, trash and stench and broken sewers, swarms of demented flies and street junk amid people that claims to be the route typical of this town. The place is a fuckin’ mess – like so much of the modern urban world. My guidebook says it’s worth a couple to days to soak up the urban charm – like fuck, more like inhale the hell of filth and hopelessness; having seen a huge chunk of the world I can said that is just another shit-hole equal in elegance to any fucked mess in India or Africa or elsewhere.

Unlike other towns in Senegal - like the mega-friendly holy city of Touba - here the people barely notice you: the lone white face; they seem happy to sleep or sit by the side of the road bored as fuck, watching another day pass.

I mean, as I entered the town I saw a completely naked black man standing in the street with a large limp penis and nobody even looked at him !!! – so what chance do I stand? I swear: I felt black, anonymous. I wonder would nakedness have worked for me? Maybe if I was juggling an elephant – maybe 7 elephants, then all eyes would’ve said - Hi, white man.

I chose this cheap hotel cos there was little choice … and at $17 you could do worse – like last night – but here the prices are largely for doubles and thus as I travel solo I could travel cheaper as two: anyone care to join me in a tour of West Africa’s worse hotels? I didn’t think so; so long, MRP, ya sucker.

The bottom line is this: French West Africa is overpriced, uses a currency called the CFA, supported by France, that makes the country for a backpacker often close to European prices at mucher lower standards …

This $20 room here will cost you $5 – 7 in SE Asia; and it will have a fan – it’s hot and humid, a very simple bathroom attached, maybe … or usually a shared squat bog where the other guests are so lazy as not to flush it but leave turds for the next to disperse. Off course, constant noise is included in the price. And for sure – mosquitoes and flies past as the local wildlife (but one look out the window at the traffic will verify much more wild-life as scooters zip and weave endlessly and if your wondering why I’m not describing the scenes outside it’s cos I’ve chained and padlocked the balcony doors close as they don’t lock and the “closed” door now offers a little noise reduction; otherwise you could swear I’m sleeping on the street). Often the water stops when you most want a shower – luckily a bucket of water can be found by the management. So far in Senegal there have been no power outages …

Coming from orderly and clean (sometimes dirty-air) Seoul – Korea recently, it had taken a while to get used to urban Africa again, and I’d forgotten how smelly, wretched and filthy African urban centers can be – mostly the sprawling chaotic suburbs but Mauritania takes all the awards including highest rubbish mounds in streets and more wrecked cars than street lamps awards … But don’t get me wrong: I love Africa.

This is my third time here, and remember I come from New Zealand and so the crap that I spew here now about the state around me is the truth of this small moment: the price I pay to travel, to get local, to see and experience urban Africa as it really is; besides I can’t afford $50 – 100 rooms to lock myself away. This is it; take it, inhale deeply, glad to be here! Will you join me?

Hours later, after a siesta & a meal in a fly-blown bar – fuckers on my face, in my beer – with kitsch painted pics of hip boys and hot chicks, of tribal bare-breasts in jungle and a true African hunting his dinner, I ate chicken shwarma that has now forced itself out prematurely … another rush to the loo and hell, this one tasted so good, well, obviously not that great, that I ate another for dinner at the same place, and had a few of beers.

I get home to this room along the dusty, dirty, hectic streets and a few people finally notice that I’m juggling elephants and say, Hi white man. Bonjour, Cava?

Inside my festering suite I undress before the sweats hit in and enter the bathroom to slip savagely on the floor coming cracking down on elbow and ribs and think fuck, I’m okay, what a fall, ouch; lucky I’ve had a few beers to ease the fall. The fall in a puddle without drain; the room a humid, relentless squeal and shit I think maybe it would been best to stay longer at the bar … the hooker in the wheelchair was cute - and she waved to me: will you join me?

*

PS: One week later: Have to say that Senegal has been really great but that my ribs still hurt from the fall to the floor and yes, the electricity went down that night I wrote, with a massive thunderstorm – but anyway I’m now staying in a nice hotel – very nice for $30, to use their in-room internet to upload this story, to have A/C, a real bathroom with hot water and towels!, a good bed and much needed sleep. But mostly I’ve waited out the weekend here in Ziguinchor cos the fuckin’ ATM ate my Visa card yesterday morning and I have to wait til Monday to see if I can retrieve it …

The ups and downs of travel are endless fun … the perfect honeymoon: will you join me?

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Hanging with the coolest rasta – Goree, Senegal

When I first waved back to him I was cautious. Too many strangers in Dakar had ulterior motives, and this guy from the distance seemed to be another. But this wasn’t Dakar. It was the island of Goree, 3 km offshore of the monster city.

In Dakar I was warned. In Dakar I saw: guys suddenly coming up to you – not the salespeople who were persisent and frequent – but the hustlers,  the slime of the city. “Remember me?” is often the con-pick-up line -to which I replied in a ballistic mood – “Don’t even fuckin’ talk to me”; but others I was more polite too, chatty, even knowing I was giving them nothing and knowing they wanted everything.

The con artist; the scammer, will win your confident and then you get tricked – I’d been there a number of times before, across the world but fortunately caught on … And so I didn’t give a shit. Worse were the groups of men that just grabbed at you – not me, but a Latino-New-York couple that I’d befriended had, fending and shouting them away.

And so I approachd this half-naked dread-locked guy mid-morning with interest and with my radar on as he welcomed me into his home.

His home was a bunker, a room within a huge concrete fortification that once guarded this French colony, protecting the mainland. A fortress complex that was first occupied by Dutch then French then English then French finally as Europe scrambled to ravage Africa, setting up bases to dominate trade – often gold, ivory & slaves – across the continent. The bunker complex Douaba lived in dated from the 1920s and saw use during Vichy France’s cooperation with Nazi Germany. Such was the island – weaved and tangled, brutalized by history, including a pretty colonial port town that was the departure point, the point of no return for slaves.

Along the long open tunnel entrance he’d stuck sculptures – junk that had been washed ashore – pegs – scandals – wires – bottles – clothes – cellphone cases – cans – anything stuck to a painted board – and as we entered the bunker entrance we took the main door – thick steel, door to the right, steps also below, as this was the observation turret for the mighty guns in the emplacement nearby. His room was small, overwhelming concrete, but cool, clattered by clothes hanging, a bed, another on the floor with mossie net, collected water containers, graffiti and posters and wooden carvings, the bunkers slits mostly covered where they looked to the ocean and let in a breeze … Basic and simple as it was it was the coolest fuckin’ house/place to live that I’ve seen in years …

Out thru a door was a balcony – a concrete hole, a drop down to the cliffs and the swell of the sea, a tiny ledge with a slumped deckchair and rope net to stop you tumbling, and there we first really talked, wide ocean empty, about ourseleves and our visions; we had similar outlooks on life, and connected immediately.

Daouda is an artist, a musican, a Rasta-looking-guy – and a Baye Fall; one who follows the teachings of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the 19th century Muslim Sufi leader of Senegal, and his most famous disciple, Cheikh Ibra Fall. Across the country their images are everywhere like graffiti, cool like some spiritual rappers stenciled with a spray-can, these two veiled men, one in white, the other in black; even buses and shop signs have their names and / or images across them. These sufis – Muslim holy men - despite having been dead sometime, the botherhoods they founded still dominate the spiritual, political and economic circles of Sengal today. I later visited the tomb in Touba where Amadou Bamba lies, and the holy city where his direct-descendent resides today as one of Senegal’s foremost links between the people and God.

Daouda said that he was allowed to stay free in this bunker as were other artists across the point of the island, where numerous fortifications existed, as the government allowed it and so there was quite a rustic, bohemian grouping within the castel of Goree.

When I’d bought a copy of his CD – TouBamba – Un Jour Nouveau (A New Day) – which he’d played as we chatted overlooking the ocean, I said good-bye to then encounter other Rasta-artists living under the actual gun emplacement.

But … as it happened I met Daouda again later, wandering around – now dressed, off course – and invited him to drink beer in a café down the road to chat some more; he was only into Fanta. And so as I drank beer – for hours – and we ate pizza as we talked deeped about the beauty of the simple life, of the consumerism traps of modern life, of travel as the teacher – for he had at age 17, now 32, been across most of West Africa – Mali, Guinea-Bissau, etc, worked in a hotel for 7 years and spoke excellent English for a guy who you would assume did not (… and of course he spoke French and was spoke Mandinka, hailing from the south of Senegal in the lush Casamance region).

Our visions of the striding artist were shared; he’d had a wealthy black American woman wanting to take him away as other did other local groupie-beauties – but no, he stayed here. And while he went to the Dakar to play gigs with his 7 piece band, of which he is the leader/the singer/songwriter, he found that the city life did nothing for him – it was all about being an artist in the right environment, amid nature living a true, simple, sincere life.

Everytime I said something deep – yes, I am capable of thinking after a few drinks – he replied, Thank You. Our mutual understanding was intense: we were brother artists living for our art and God allowed us to meet that day for one my most inspiring days in Africa, EVER.

Daouda & MRP chillin’ on Goree

VIDEO: Daouda Diabaté AKA TouBamba - ”Les Titans”

More about Daouda ( in French )