My trip to Senegal started oddly. The only other options were a 40 hour bus ride or ridiculous and expensive flights to hubs like Istanbul or Paris or Addis Ababa. The flight on Air Senegal was direct and cheap, so I booked it without a second thought. Boarding the airplane, a Boeing , I noticed that of the 50 or so passengers, only 4 were not white, and 2 of those were part of a 30 person basketball team from South Africa. Then I noticed the flight crew were all white, speaking English with odd accents and wearing tags attached to necklaces with Blue written all over it.
They were Romanian, and the plane had been leased from the Romanian company Blue Air, which explained the accents. The lease issue aside, the flight was uneventful and 3 hours later we landed at the very modern airport where Immigration, Customs and bag retrieval took less than 15 minutes.
The road to Dakar, a modern highway with toll booths, lanes, a basketball stadium at one end and neither people nor animals venturing onto the road, was a pleasure to drive for the 45 minutes it took. My hotel is in the center of Dakar, in an area known as The Plateau. The streets are straight, traffic lights abound, but are routinely ignored, high rises of up to 10 stories were on all sides and there must be regular garbage collection as I saw no rubbish lining the roads like in Ghana or Ethiopia.
I walked around frequently, finding a 40 minute circular route taking me past the Presidential Palace, beside the major market street and along the main avenue named after the first president, Leopoldo Seder Senghor, which is now lined with banks. Walking felt safe in this area of Dakar. Certainly vendors tried to sell me everything under the sun — fruit, made-to-measure clothes and sunglasses seemed their favourites- and beggars asked me for money, but none were persistent. Finding a safe path presented more of a challenge.
The sidewalks served as makeshift parking spots, perches for beggars and temporary stalls for artists, shoe salesmen and mannequins, everything except pedestrian walkways. For that, I and most others, walked on the streets, but the cars were quite tolerant of this, with gentle toots on the horn to warn us they were coming from behind.
