Once over the border we drove through the bush to join the main road between Kaolack and Tambacounda and were surprised to see a car with two white people in it going the other way. We carried on but an hour or so later we saw them in our mirrors and they stopped after overtaking us and flagged us down. They were trying to get to the national park in Senegal but thought that the bush road was better than driving down the main road which was in very bad repair. Somehow they hadn’t realised that they would end up in The Gambia by going due south!! We camped with them in the bush that night and they shared some very strong but rather yummy goats cheese with us that they had made and brought with them from France.
Still needing a stamp for our passports, the next morning we spent an hour or so at Kounpemtoum trying to:
a) find someone to ask directions to the police station
b) find someone at the police station who was awake
c) explain the situation in very bad French
d) request a stamp
e) wait around for the right person to arrive
f) explain it all again
g) get fobbed off with some rubbish about going to the next town
h) fend off hords of kids all with their grubby hands out asking for ‘Cadeau’
We repeated the exercise at three different towns and eventually manage to obtain a passage stamp allowing us to ‘proceed straight to the border’ ... ok so we wild camped that night and went over the border the next afternoon but at least we weren’t illegal anymore!
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Oz gets up close and personal with a few thousand termites and a local boy proudly shows off his home made toy car. Click on any image to enlarge. |
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The road from where we joined up to Tambacounda was really, really awful but once past Tambacounda it was brand new – thanks to the Dutch who were overseeing the resurfacing. But we couldn’t understand why the new road with its shiny smooth surface was a 30 km an hour with no overtaking... then we started seeing the crashes! In this part of the world there are no laws about loading a vehicle or even weigh limits so there are bound to be accidents but when you combine this with the fact there are no driving tests either then it’s a recipe for disaster. Anyone can jump into a huge over-laden lorry and hurtle up the road without really knowing what they are doing and manage to chat away on their mobile phones at the same time – no wonder we kept seeing accidents!
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Click on any image to enlarge. |
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At the bush camp that night Oz developed a rather bad tummy so we didn’t leave the bush until quite late. I wanted to get him into an hotel and a relative level of comfort so he could recover quicker. As I drove towards the border I kept glancing over at a rather green looking Oz hoping that I wouldn’t have to do any emergency stops for him along the way!
Arriving at the border town of Naye, I left Oz in the Mog and went in search of customs people and exit stamps. The guy didn’t even look at our transit stamps for Senegal but the customs guy told me off for using a carnet for Senegal - I played innocent and pretended I didn’t know anything about it!!
The Mali side was easy as we already had our visas but the Mali customs man didn’t want us to use our RAC carnet so we had to buy a local carnet for the Mog – this is different to my friends Craig and Barbara’s experience a few weeks before. Still, the local carnet is valid for one month and we had saved the same cost by managing to use the carnet in Senegal when we shouldn’t have so, all in all, it was much easier for me to agree to it – especially when I had a poorly Oz in the Mog to worry about! No-one wanted to even look at the Mog let alone ask for gifts so we glided swiftly into Mali, waving a glad goodbye to Senegal.
