Saint Louis to Dakar
We left St Louis this morning at 8 a.m. to get to Dakar. The journey was relatively straight forward, once we got away from the precincts of St Louis.
We were stopped and fined by the gendarmes twice. The first occasion was for parking in a spot they directed us into. The second was just a shakedown. They quoted “luggage violation” – having a fridge! One thick looking policeman seem to insist that the steering wheel should be on the left hand side, or at least that what I thought. Other violations were that the truck licence plate was too high or the wrong reflective tape was used. All this was going on near a main police station.
While they were shaking our perfectly maintained trucks down, impossibly derelict vehicles were trundling past missing windows, doors, passengers hanging off the back etc. Probably 90% of them would be impounded and scrapped in Europe. Hey ho, corruption, innit!
The shakedowns took up a lot of time so we had to cancel our detour to Lac Rose and headed straight to our campsite in Dakar instead.
The traffic is wild. It’s similar to traffic in most Africa cities; give or take no quarter. Kamikaze pilots would feel right at home here. The last city I visited that was as mad as this was Cairo at the beginning of the year.
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