Arrival to Senegal

The Senegalese customs agent looks at me skeptically while I hand him my papers and try my best ‘don’t arrest me for doing nothing’ smile. I’m getting pretty good at that one.

“Where are you staying in Senegal.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m staying with my brother, I don’t know the address.”

One of the most frustrating things about entering or leaving most countries, with the exception of the EU, is that they insist that you put the address of where you’re staying on the customs card. Nine times out of ten I don’t know the address of where I’m staying, so this is an exercise in pleasant fiction for both of us. I put down the name of a prominent hotel, they pretend to read it and care, stamp my card, passport, and we all go on our merry way. This bothered me when I first started out, but now I just take it as pretty standard procedure.

“I’m staying at the Hilton.”

“Dakar does not have a Hilton.”

“Right. Hang on.”

I dig in my bag, looking for the number Jordan gave me to call. I really don’t want to end up in African jail just because I don’t know where we’re staying. My tablet has Jordan’s email open, and I notice a small postscript that I hadn’t read before.

“P.S. Tell the border guards you’re staying at Plage d’Ngor.” I breathe a deep sigh of relief.

“I’m staying at Plage d’Ngor.”

“Very good sir.” The customs agent has startlingly white teeth, and stamps my passport with a grin. “Have a pleasant stay.”

I knew before customs that Senegal was going to be a madhouse. I’ve always been slightly dubious of Africa, for the obvious reasons of plague, war, famine, and general insanity. This was only reinforced for me by the behavior of the rest of the passengers of my airplane as we landed.

Before the plane had even begun to slow down from the descent and landing, people had jumped out of their seats and were pulling things from the overhead bins. This doesn’t sound crazy until you realize that the airplane was literally just in the air seconds ago, and the pilot is hitting the brakes trying to make sure that you don’t tear off the other side of the runway, and maybe the cargo shouldn’t be making that harder by moving around. Also the fact that since we’re all locked in the cabin until the plane stops anyway, all this jumping up and moving around is utterly pointless.

After passing through customs, I managed to retrieve my bag without incident, and waving off all the offers of “assistance” I make my way through the crowd into the cool night air.

My last minute flight into Dakar got us in around 1 am, and I was distinctly not expecting the airport to be filled with people at that hour, but it was packed. Outside was even worse. A low fence separated the outgoing passengers from literally hundreds of cab drivers, family members, and friendly ‘baggage handlers’. I search the crowd of ebony for a white face and finally pick out Jordan’s trademark cowboy hat and Viking beard.

I had planned to be in Israel after Turkey, but if there’s one thing this trip has taught me it is that things don’t always go according to plan, and sometimes the plan changes, whether you want it to or not.

I had tossed around the idea of going to Senegal as part of my trip, and seeing Jordan off on his cross Atlantic trip, (If you don’t know about this, you should check out www.oarnorthwest.com) but had initially dismissed the idea because of the variability of his schedule. There was no guarantee that I’d be there for the actual departure, and I felt that I might be in the way of he and his team getting ready for the row. We’d kept in touch over email, and sometime while I’d been traveling in Turkey, I realized that me not going to Senegal for those reasons was stupid, and that I wanted to see my brother and wish him well on his adventure.

So I decided to go. Two weeks later, on New Years Day, 2013, I found myself in Senegal, an honorary member of OAR Northwest’s support crew.

Jordan and I embraced. The four months since I’d seen him last were the longest we’d spent apart in the four years since I moved up to Washington to go to school. It felt like forever.

“Welcome to Senegal DW. What do you think so far?”

“It’s pretty wild bro. I almost didn’t get in.”

“Yeah, well you haven’t seen anything yet, let’s get out of here.” Grabbing my bags, we headed down the darkened streets of Dakar.   

-Doug