Spring Break trip to Kedagou

Over spring break we went to Kedagou in the South of Senegal, about ten hours by car. I was really excited to go somewhere that was off the tourist track, and see parts of Senegal that are really different from Dakar. We got lucky because my friend’s host Mom had a friend who was willing to drive us down to the opposite side of the country for the equivalent of $30 each. This did mean though that we fit eight people plus luggage in a small seven passenger car, but that also made it an adventure and we definitely bonded having to sit in pretty much a giant pile for 10 hours together. Also the main road seemed to be optional, or it just had so many potholes that we’d sometimes drive off the road and take a detour through something that wasn’t a road and then get back on the road. We originally thought we were going to be doing the whole drive in one day, but our driver decided he didn’t want to drive that far in one day so we ended up stopping in this random village and he talked with this random nice man who let us sleep on his floor for the equivilant of 4 dollars each. Which was better than getting a hotel there, which would have been way more expensive and probably a very similar experience, but with mosquito nets.

This is when started to really feel the fact that we were no longer in Dakar where there was a nice ocean breeze… It was HOT. The next morning our driver passed us onto another driver because he apparently didn’t feel like driving the rest of the way, so we went in a sept place (like a taxi with seven seats) and drove the rest of the way there.

inside of one of the homes in a village

 It was about 102 degrees in Kedagou every day, and this was the kind of hot where you just want to not move and drink cold water all day and take a shower every hour. definitely roughed it on this trip though, but we had such a great group that all just went with the flow and were positive about everything, even hiking 14k up steep mountains in 102 heat with no water. We stayed in little campements, or little villages and we always had some really nice old man that ran the place and would get all excited to make us breakfast and treated us like grandchildren. There we took outdoor showers which was actually wonderful, especially since one of the places was right next to a nice mountain. We hired a guide for the first three days and then another guide for another area for the next two days, did tons of hiking straight up mountains and through some pretty nature. I’m here during dry season, so everything was really dry and apparently Senegal looks completely different in rainy season because everything is green and blooming. We hiked to lots of villages where we made some adorable little friends, and even hiked to Guinea, which may or may not have been illegal.

Moms carry their babies on their back in senegal

One of my highlights on this trip was the fact that once in Kedagou, we sat on the roof of the car every time we drove anywhere, or in the back of a truck. Driving through the national park which is all natural habitat, nothing like a zoo, we probably spent over three hours on the roof, hot wind in the face and driving through beautiful landscapes, and I remember thinking many times that this just couldn’t be real life. Sometimes the car would just randomly over heat and die and if we were lucky it would die in a shady spot.

This trip made me realize how much different Dakar is from the rest of Senegal, especially the rural areas. My host sister just told me that she’d never been inside one of those huts before, and many people from Dakar don’t seem to know much about the rural areas. We visited a lot of villages that seem to be much more isolated from other villages and from western culture. We got to stop and hang out with some adorable kids too which was pretty cool. There are water holes between villages, and this was much more of the kinds of areas that most people probably think of when they think of African villages. It was so interesting to see this part of Senegal and meet people from this region, because their culture and way of life is so incredibly different. I’ll be doing a rural stay in about a week for ten days, so I’ll go into detail about rural life in that post.

After this trip, Dakar feels like a rich city and my host family’s house feels like a 5 star hotel since it has running water and a toilet! I have a whole new appreciation for cold clean drinking water after this trip. There were several times when we would be hiking out somewhere isolated where it got really hot and we ran out of water, or had to share the last little bit of what we had between all of us. Sometimes we’d all just stop talking in order to conserve our energy until we could get water again. At one point I felt like my body was kicking into survival mode, water was all I could think about and at one point I was tempted to try and find a leaf and suck the water out of it. When we got back to the campement, despite being completely exsausted and drained from the heat, me and two other friends hiked to the next village to get some cold water for the group. I was ready to do just about anything for water, and water definitely never has tasted so good then after that!

Food here was a lot of the same thing, lots of carbs and sauces. A nice old man at our campement made us Ceebu jen (national Senegalese plate that most people eat for lunch) and it was delicious, but COVERED in flies that wouldn’t go away. I think my body is used to eating things that flies have been all over though so it’s all good. The way back was pretty funny cause we kept stopping because the tires would either go out or something else was wrong with the car. In one of the villages I went to use the bathroom with my friend which was in the middle of this village area, and this giant group of about 50-60 women were grouped together and started drumming on some buckets and dragged us in and we danced in the middle of this African dance circle for about 5 minutes.