It was still early morning and I had dozed off while keeping vigil on our route. ‘I seem to have lost the way,” said my friend. ‘I was following the track for a while but the salt flats seemed smoother to drive on …”
Looming around us were baobabs, the largely leafless, bulbous-trunked trees that locals say were stuck in the ground upside down by the devil. They looked as if they were made from elephant hide, grey and tremendous, casting their great fingers up to the sky.
The headlights picked up a shape ahead, a donkey pulling a wooden cart, piled with salt and millet, which came to a stop beside us. ‘Excuse me,” I said in French to the two passengers, wondering what language they spoke. ‘Can you tell us where the road is?” The young men politely pointed to the north. ‘Follow the telegraph wires,” one said. ‘That’ll show you the way.”
We were travelling through the Siné-Saloum region, south of Dakar, to the Siné-Saloum delta. The area is a jigsaw of salt flats and shallow waterways that eventually give way to the rolling waters of the Atlantic and although there is a road — a red gravel route that snakes inland from the coast and between several villages — it’s not a very comfortable one.
About three hours after we had set off from Dakar we turned off at a tiny junction where a sign pointed us to Collines de Niassam Lodge, an eco-lodge on the edge of the warm delta waters at Palmarin. The sun was just about up as we arrived and we were greeted with coffee and freshly baked bread. Just to remind myself I was in the tropics, I washed them down with a glass of baobab juice made from the seed pods of the tree: cream in colour, strangely grainy and supposedly with powerful stomach-settling properties.
Tough, proper travelling
The baobab trees were to be our home for the next few days. Although tree hotels might be popular in the east of the continent, out here in the wild west they are something of a rarity. This is Senegal’s first and so far only tree hotel — a handful of beautifully crafted wooden cabins perched in the wide branches of the baobab trees. Almost everything inside the rooms has been
made in the local area.
Sparkling Indian Ocean coastline
West Africa has long been popular with backpackers who travel around the region through Mali, Ghana and Burkina Faso in rickety bush taxis, sleep in fleapit hostels and revel in the fact that this is tough, proper travelling. More recently, however, tourists have made their way tentatively to Dakar, perched on the western tip of the continent, for its thriving music scene, which has produced musicians such as Youssou N’Dour and Baaba Maal.
As East and Southern Africa have traditionally attracted the wealthier tourists, lured by the big game and sparkling Indian Ocean coastline, West Africa was left with a lot of bad PR, not helped by civil wars.
But what goes on in countries hundreds or thousands of kilometres to the north or south should not put people off Senegal’s charms. Not only is its culture thriving and quite unlike anywhere else in Africa, some interesting small hotels are opening up. The Collines de Niassam was built by a French couple eight years ago. Its electricity comes from solar panels and almost all its food is grown in the hotel garden or supplied locally.
We soon discovered that the food is exceptional — local fish known as capitaine cooked with bissap (hibiscus flower) was my favourite — prepared by a laughing storm of a woman who, if asked nicely, would divulge her culinary secrets.
But the choice of where to sleep posed a problem. In one of the round houses on stilts perched above the shallow, lapping waters of the delta? Or high up in the branches of these magical baobab trees? When I saw that the treehouse bathroom was encased in a wooden cabin around the trunk of the tree — you take a shower snuggled up against the baobab — my mind was made up.
The stairs leading to the bedroom wind up its trunk, past the second-floor ‘living room” — a hammock and breakfast table mid-way up the branches — and to the room cradled at the top of the branches, with a four-poster bed.
We soon settled into a chilled-out lifestyle for a few days. It is easy to do nothing — the silence that hangs over the delta can pleasantly stupefy a visitor after the hectic pace of Dakar — but there is a range of things to do in the area. We were invited to watch a traditional wrestling match in a nearby village, where the whole community gathers and, with drums and song, cheers on the young men. We were also offered the more indulgent option of a flight in a microlight plane above the salt planes to see the salt wells sitting like coloured inkpots across the land.
We opted for kayaking in the mangrove lagoons with a local guide, Pierre. We paddled through the clear, narrow waterways before arriving at an island with pristine white sand. We pulled our kayaks ashore and Pierre picked oysters from the mangrove roots for us to roast on a fire and eat, admiring the setting sun. A monkey cackled at us from the high branches of a baobab tree. For the wild west, things seemed very easy and gentle from where I was sitting. —