Senegal at last

I had a major fear as I walked down the gangplank of the cruise ship and stepped into Africa. As a kid I was severely eaten alive by mosquitoes when I was camping in the Everglades. My whole face, neck and mouth swelled up so much that I could not breathe and my parents had to take me to the emergency room. I had been thinking about this all the way here and now the acid test was coming up for me.

I told my friend about my fears and he got very serious with me. He walked me off the pier and over to the sandy beach area. We stood there for a couple of hours while he told me his ideas about the mind and body connection and how I could overcome my mosquito phobia and allergy by just thinking the problem away. He was very convincing of the power to control your body with your mind and he gave me many examples of historical mind body experiences from the world at large and from his own experiences. He convinced me. I spent about an hour meditating on not reacting to mosquito bites. Previously any bite I got swelled way up, was very itchy and lasted for days if not longer making my life miserable. When I was ready we walked away from the beach until the wind died down enough for a mosquito to land on my arm. We sat and watched it bite me and fill up with blood then just as it got ready to fly away he told me to kill it. I killed it with a quick swat. Then we watched the bite area and he talked me through meditation to first acknowledge the sensory signals from the bite and then to reject them with my mind. I followed his instructions and to my surprise I was able to ignore the bite. I did get a small red dot from it but it did not swell up into a goose egg and it stopped itching almost right away. It worked! I had overcome mosquitoes at last. This gave me great comfort as I headed into thick mosquito country all over Africa. We put up our tent on the beach after we ate some food and we slept until dawn.

In the morning we headed into town for some food and to look around. We found lots of small coffee shops and coffee stands all over town. There was also the smell of freshly baked french bread permeating the air. We picked out a small shop with a cute young girl running it and had our coffee and bread with jam. It was very good. After breakfast we split up because my friend was heading off on some private mission that I didn't even want to hear about since he was just released from prison for drug dealing. I wanted no part of anything that might put me in a local prison.

I walked around town. There was a lot of poverty evident by the hand built shacks with flattened cans as roofing material. The people were all very nice and friendly but I attracted a lot of attention as I walked around town. Not many white tourists walked around the slums of Dakar I guess so I was a bit of an aberration walking casually around their neighborhoods. I always liked getting off the beaten track and this was definitely off the beaten track. The downtown area was very sprawling. It spread out seemingly forever as I walked around. For the next few days I just wandered around eating here and there when I got hungry and saw or smelled something good. I enjoyed myself.

Then I saw a travel agent window with posters of African animals and birds offering a river tour of Gambia. I was interested and a lazy riverboat tour sounded good to me so I went in to talk to the agent. He sold me the tickets and made all the arrangements for somebody to come by my hotel to pick me up in the morning.

I was picked up on time and taken to a boat in the harbor. We sailed out of the crowded harbor and went South. A short time later we went through customs again and then we were transferred to a different boat, a riverboat. I was shown my "room" which was a hammock in a corner and given a tour of the small boat. It made me think "African Queen" all the way. I was surprised that it wasn't named that. There were only about fifteen passengers total. Most of them were French or English. I was the only American. We chatted and got to know each other a bit as the boat headed up river. It anchored for the night just before the sun went down. It was pleasant talking to the other passengers. We drank a lot and then crashed for the night. The boat was moving again before the sun came up. For three days we went up and down the river and only saw a few birds. We stopped at a few villages along the way that sold junk for tourists and served us some of our meals. The tourist junk never interests me. The food was good though. It was mostly meat stews with starches on the side and lots of French bread. I gobbled it and enjoyed relaxing. It was disappointing not to see any animals like in the posters for this trip but I found out in the next year or so how Africans kill anything that moves and eat it or sell it. There was no sense of conservation at all until I got to Uganda a year later.

My tour came to an end and I was transported right back to my hotel in Dakar. My trip to Gambia was a nice introduction to Africa for me. Low key and relaxing but not much else.

I was wandering around Dakar a few nights later when I came across an area of town that was clearly the red light district so to speak. There were girls working the streets and men getting drunk and raising hell. Lots of tiny little hotels dotted the area and small bars were serving beer and spirits. I walked around watching and then stopped for a beer or two. Nobody paid much attention to me. I got up later and continued my walk. I saw one girl that caught me eye. She looked really good compared to a lot of these tired looking women. This girl had a hot young body and was dressed nicely and she was not acting so much like a street walker. She saw me looking at her and she marched right over to me. I continued walking as she tried to hustle me to take her to a hotel. I insisted I was not interested but she kept after me. She finally grabbed me and kissed me and tried to stroke my crotch. I copped a small feel at first but then I backed away and asked her to leave me alone. She kept following me and started to yell at me for abusing her. I finally lost her and went back to my hotel. A couple of hours later there was a knock on my hotel room door. I answered the door and there were about ten police officers outside my door and the same girl was standing behind them. She accused me of raping her. The police were very nice and polite to me. The told me they had to respond to her charges but wanted my side of the story. I told them she just confronted me on the street against my wishes and that if anybody was assaulted it was me not her. They kind of laughed at that. Then I said alright if she says I raped her she must have seen me naked and ask her what my tattoo looks like. they asked her and she looked caught off guard. She described a tattoo just because she felt she had to. Then I showed the police that I do not have any tattoos so it must have been some other guy. They agreed. However, they decided to fine me for kissing her which I had admitted I did when she kissed me. They charged me a couple of bucks for a fine and they left. The girl was furious. The police made sure she left but as soon as they were gone I left the hotel and moved to a different one because I did not want her coming back again now that she knew where I was. Not that the only white kid in town would be hard to find mind you. The police obviously found me quickly. I left town the next morning because the whole incident left a bad taste in my mouth.

I hitch hiked out of town and headed East. My plan was to go to Mali and see Timbuktu. There was almost no traffic and I found getting a ride was slow. So I started to walk down the road. The road was quickly just an overgrown trail. Once the City of Dakar came to an end there was not much out there. I just walked on. I saw more birds and lizards then I had seen on my Gambia riverboat trip as I walked along the road. At night I would put up my tent and read or just sit and look out at the sky full of stars. I finally caught a ride with an American woman driving along the road.

She was a Peace Corps worker. She took me to her place out in the middle of nowhere and told me that she was losing it mentally from being so lonely. She had made a request to the office to be relieved of her commitment so that she could go home. I did my best to cheer her up. We had a good time for a few days. It turned out she would be my last sexual contact for quite a few months. I saw lots of evidence of sexually transmitted diseases everywhere I looked so far in Africa. I did not want to catch anything so I ended up just abstaining for the most part. She asked me to leave because she was afraid that if she enjoyed her time with me she would be even worse when I left like she knew I would. I was up front about my goals. I did see one weird antelope while I was at her place. It would be the only one I saw for a long time. My vision of an Africa full of animals was quickly fading to black. I left on foot from her place after a nice full breakfast.

I walked for days. No vehicles at all came down the road in either direction. The countryside quickly turned from lush green tropical jungles to arid brown dry hot grasslands with almost no trees. Then it turned into mostly desert. I was worried about water but I kept going. Eventually I came to the border and went across to the Mali side and put up my tent to get a good night's sleep. I enjoyed walking like this and ended up walking for thousands of miles over the next couple of years. I read a book and fell sound asleep.