Day 12: Sunday, September 11th, Ile De Ngor

Today, I woke up late. We were supposed to be at Cresp by 11, and I ended up being 20 minutes late. However, it was quite worth it because I was given a huge breakfast, of the usual bread and butter, plus left-over chicken from last night’s dinner. Chicken has never tasted so good. Anyway, being late to Cresp wasn’t a problem, as we wouldn’t end up leaving till about 1245. We took a 5 minute taxi ride down to an overcrowded beach where the ferries were leaving from. Note: Compared to Boston, New York, or any American city, taxis here are extremely cheap. For example, yesterday, we took a 30 minute ride to downtown Dakar which only cost 1500CFA, or $3 US. Split that between four people and you get a very small amount to pay for a taxi. However, a lot of the time, the phrase “you get what you pay for” becomes apparent. For example, you might be lucky if you get a cab with windows and doors that open, side-view mirrors, and a driver who isn’t a total maniac. During the past two cab rides, I have experienced “bottoming out”, driving over median strips, nearly getting in five accidents, and coming very close to hitting numerous pedestrians.

Anyway, back to the overcrowded beach. Most people there weren’t buying ferry tickets, they were just kind of hanging out. So we got our tickets quickly 500CFA ($1) round trip, and got in line to get our life jackets. We were then stuck in to a boat with about 70 other people. If you have seen my pictures from the beginning of my trip, you might have seen long fishing boats that look like long, wide canoes. So, they packed about 100 people in a boat with a small 40HP motor, and we embarked. The journey across to the island in our low-riding boat took about two minutes, and we arrived to find almost as many people there as the beach we had departed from. We went off in search of another beach. This island was very small, but we managed to find a beach with less people, but you still might consider it quite crowded. After all, it was Sunday and the temp was about 90 degrees; conditions that would motivate people to come to a beach.

The beach was way too hot, and way too cramped to sit or lay comfortably, so I spent most of the time in the water. Without waves, we just kind of swam around. The water was incredibly salty, thus making it really easy to float and tread water. I don’t know the reason for the high salinity, but I’m definitely curious.

We left the beach at around 1630, and took a ferry and a taxi back to Yoff. After getting out of the taxi, a few of us walked back to my house and we went to our beach here and watched the sunset from the ocean, which was refreshing. I definitely prefer ours beach to any others that we’ve been to here.

After a strange dinner of what we thought was yogurt and millet, Rich and I went to Cresp to hang out for a while. After a few emails (the internet was finally working) we came home because we were both exhausted.