Road notes: Day 2, West Africa / Day 128, Africa crossing

Dakar / 0 miles

Woke up to a lavish breakfast spread put on by the surprisingly (as it doesn’t look like much from the outside) hip and excellent Hotel Internationale. An awful location as you can’t really walk anywhere with a sense of security, but the hotel itself is a nice surprise.

Took my time organizing things, sleeping in a bit, decompressing, and then went upstairs to my hotel’s rooftop eatery and an amazing lavish, expansive breakfast spread, included with the rate (about $65, Dakar isn’t cheap). From the outside drabness of the property, and from the non-walkable location, I wasn’t expecting much so was pleasantly surprised to find that the hotel is very well designed, almost hip in a way, with a happy staff of youngsters that smothered me with “Bonjours!”

Downloaded the local ride app — “Heetch” — as Uber doesn’t operate here. The map feature/the call to the rider, works very well. The only difference with Uber is you pay the rider in cash whatever amount the app says the ride would cost.

Rode out to the Airport, almost 50 minutes out of town on a tolled Expressway, with Bassinu, my Ride driver. On the way we stopped to fill my fuel tank bladder with some gas in order to have some for the motorcycle (emptied the tank prior to shipping it.). Arriving at the main terminal, we discovered that the cargo warehouse was another 5 or so miles away. An airport employee very kindly led us to it, driving ahead of us.

At the Cargo office, Jean and Omar, 2 airline employees let me know that it was Ascension Day, a holiday here in Senegal (and around the world.). Customs… is closed! But all wasn’t in vain. I was able to get some of the documentation process out of the way, pay an $80 processing fee, and even setup a “fixer deal” to short circuit my Customs work tomorrow. The guys even tried real hard — even driving over to the Customs office where there were a couple of people — and trying to get them to call in the chief to process my docs.

On the way back, Bassinu played different Senagalese music, Yousindor as well as several others. In his limited English, but far better than my limited French, he’d try to tell me about where the music was from. He’d mention the artist’s names and seemed a bit crestfallen that, with the exception of Yousin n Dor (sp?), I hadn’t heard of any of them.