In To Africa

We have landed in Dakar.  We have passed through customs.  Now we wait for our one and only piece of checked baggage.  It is 2am local time.  We are reminded of our last adventure in Tanzania - where we waited for our luggage, two weeks later reunited with it.  And we wait.

By 3am the baggage handlers have unloaded the Air Portugal plane...and there is no bag for us.  So we make the all too familiar walk to the African baggage office.  Kim utilizes her French spectacularly!  We get a confirmation that the search is on...should be here tomorrow, probably "delayed" in transit - it will be okay.  Do we believe them?  What choice do we have!  Luckily we have learned from previous trips; we have most of the essentials - except large bottles of sun screen and toothpaste, but we can make do!

Next was the adventure of finding a taxi to take us to our hotel - now it is 3:30am.  As you walk out of the airport the mass of taxi drivers offer you "deals".  We know (we think) how much a ride should cost.  First driver says 20 euro - about 4 times what we think it should be.  So we walk away after a bit of negotiating.  Then another driver comes by - 5000CFA (about C$10) more like what we expected.  Deal done, we walk towards a cab and get handed off to the actual driver.  We hop in the back seat and hands start flying into the car - beggars.  Kim fends them off until the driver finally gets in and we drive off.

Imagine driving on a road with no street lights, no lines and lots of pot holes and other obstacles - oh and add to that the wind shield has a "grease" film on it distorting vision.  The taxi wouldn't/couldn't go over about 30 km/h - which might have been best.  When we started seeing signs for the centre of Dakar we were both relieved that we weren't going to run our of gas, get a flat tire or get pawned off on to another taxi - which we were both thinking.

Pull up to our hotel at 4am and there are 8 Italian guys checking in ahead of us (ladies, its Kim, and let me clarify that usually 8 young Italian men would be welcome but picture very loud and carrying more luggage than I would take to New York for a month).  By the time we get to our room it is about 4:30.  We are exhausted.  We were hoping to get a start to the day at a reasonable time, but decided to sleep in!!

Next - our first day in Dakar and the aggressive local intent on making his living off tourists...