Malika proved to be a nice place, our hostel/brothel was just off the beach. We managed to get a bit of surfing done, despite the locals warning us about the dangerous waters - complete wth whirl pools apparently, something I havent experienced in my short time in surfing. Granted there was a strong current and some pretty heavy waves but the Africans aren’t known for their love of the sea, so it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. During our time in Malika I started to overcome my obvious distrust of absolutely everyone, anyone that has travelled in Morocco or similar countries will know what I mean. Every conversation always has a punchline be it ‘buy my stuff’ or ‘pay my bribe’, it was nice to finally meet some genuine people.
After Malika we said au-revoir to Claude and Begnat, and headed to Dakar in an attempt to attain a Malian visa and hopefully surf some of the much coveted reef breaks. After a bit/allot of driving round we found somewhere to stay close to the wealthy suburbs of Ngor & Yoff. There wasn’t much surf about so we generally lazed around, eventually we decided to paddle around the headland (point Almedies, Africas most Westerly point) for about half an hour. Outside of a Club Med resort we found some surfers who had just finished because the tide had got dangerously low. Having a quick look we agreed and headed back in, during the return to beach I managed to get bashed into a ton of sea urchins and dinged my board on the rocks.
The next day we decided to have a day off from surfing and headed into Dakar itself. It’s certainly a very interesting city with allot more hustlers than white folk, needless to say we got a lot of hassle and I didnt dare get my camera out once. It is very different from most African cities and has a wealthy european feel to it. We did manage to buy a few CD’s of Senegalese music which will help with the long driving. One clever hustler did ask whether I needed any money changing, having some left over Mauritanian Ouguiya I said yes, hoping to get some preferential black market exchange rates. Instead he just took me into a major bank and waited in the queue with me, I informed him that I could probably of had the intelligence to work that out myself and left him to it.
In an attempt to make a whole day of Dakar we grabbed a couple of sneaky beers and then went in search of the bus station, which would hopefully get us home later on. This proved to be a bad idea and resulted in Tute being pick pocketed for a fiver by some not so light fingered criminals. We had a good laugh about this after but decided to abandon the evening and back to the compound.
On our last day we went out for a meal with the plan being to maybe hit a local night club afterwards. The waitress told us of the best local club just down the road, which she was going to later, allot later, the club apparently only gets going at 2am! Here we are at about 7:30 already on the second beer. So we set ourselves the challenge of at least being in there at 2. We stayed in the local bars, which by now are quite familiar until about ten, grabbed a can of Red Bull and hit the club. We were pretty much the first in there, and without going into too much detail, quite a few beers and some terrible dancing later we had managed until about 2:30. This is when the auto-homing device kicked in and we opted to leave. Tute managed to hail a cab and demanded that the driver take him to the nearest Chawarma (Kebab) joint, needless to say he was kicked out a hundred meters down the road.
The next day was one of the worst of my life, the biggest headache / hangover ever. In 40 degree heat this is a brutal thing, and not only that one of my urchin spines had gone septic and my foot had swollen to a big red blob. Literally stumbling and stinking into the Malian embassy we picked up our Passports complete with Visa’s from the now regretful looking Malian Lady. Back on the road and a few wrong turns later the hangover wagon was back in the countryside and onto the quiet little village of Yayeme where we nursed our aching heads.
