We’ve been in Senegal for a few days now and after our escapades in the desert for the last month it feels pretty good to be back in a lush green land again. Mauritania and Senegal are divided by the Senegal river which forms the start of the greenery of West Africa. Literally one minute you are riding along with sand dunes on either side and then the next you see green grassy fields on the banks of the river and more birds than we know, warthog run out across the road in front of you and cows replace camels on the side of the road!
This crossing marked the end of our North African leg and the start of our travels through West Africa.
We’ve really landed on our feet here in Dakar as we have ended up house sitting for parents of a friend. It’s a fantastic house literally on the beach. It’s taken a bit for us to get used to having our own rooms and even toilets, we even have a housekeeper who comes 3 days a week to make sure we are fed and our clothes are cleaned and ironed! I don’t think we will manage the road again so easily after this. It’s really quite something to be in a real family home again, it makes a change from camping and rough hotels and makes you feel more civilised again!
While here in Dakar we have been taking the time to sort out our visas for the next few countries and getting the bikes serviced again after their hard life in the desert. Again we have landed on our feet in that respect as the Nigerian transit visa we applied for (our most expensive to date at 100 Euros each!!!!) was given to us with no hassles and we have in fact been given 3 month open tourist visas without having to produce a letter of invitation and a bunch of other stuff we were expecting! Perhaps not particularly good value for money… but it’s a worry taken care of.
While we were chilling out to live music on Sunday night at a Moroccan guy’s restaurant next to the beach a brand spanking new factory special KTM rolled up outside. After admiring the rider’s trick bike for a bit we asked him for some recommendations for a KTM mechanic and he told us about a friend of his who does it in his spare time… what a find it proved to be! We arrived at the mechanic’s house and the first thing he does is hand us each a beer! Iba really knows his KTMs and does enduro races on his own trick bike here in Senegal.
It really has been great so far here in Senegal and we will write more soon about the cool nightlife and the live bands we have been to see here.
There are no pictures yet as Keith’s camera got sand in it in our last couple days in the desert and we have only just managed to take it apart and clean it, however we will get back snapping and uploading pretty soon.
Another change we have made about the website is that we have tried to simplify the bar on the right AND we have introduced tweets to our blog posts! Tweets are “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) that we post to our Twitter website and are also put up on our blog. Think of them like short facebook status messages.
We’ve added these tweets to our website because we noticed that quite a few of you are visiting the site every day… but we don’t always have a new post for you to read, however now you will be able to see some more frequently updated status messages to know what we are up to.
In addition we are going to break a bit with the way we have been blogging and try and get a new post out every 2-3 days but not try and keep exactly with our current timeline instead we will try and give you all the stories and the good stuff of what we have been up to. Our tweets and our route page will still give you more of our live activity and current location!