""Teranga"" Top 5 Page for this destination Dakar by bambino36

The city

Dakar, Senegal's capital, is located in the most western point of the African continent.

Walking through the city

The minute I came out to the streets, a crowd of street salesmen was struggling, sweating and shouting, in an almost breathless frequency, words that I couldn't understand... then came the "bonjour" and "ça va?", and the questions about what I would like to buy. Rough hands showing me tribal masks, with an useless but frequent chase, promising the most wonderful pieces ever made. An endless world of art without an artist...
Walking through the city it turns clear the shock between tradition and imported.

The cars
Long lines of Peugeot 205 and some other forgotten heroes of the french automobile industry stuck the city streets. And that turned the streets somehow interesting when the traffic was stucked...
After the first hour I realized that for how much preparation I did, I would never be prepared for such a chaos...

The buildings have an european architectonic style. After visiting the Presidential Palace, the Commerce Chamber and the railway station, I found "shelter" in the "Place de la Independance" where I found some ATM's!!!

The Presidential Palace

I was in Dakar only for one weekend and there are some things I will never forget.
When we saw this building everyone crossed the road to take some pics... however suddendly an armed guard came over and, while moving his machine gun, told us it was forbbiden to take pictures to the palace... right...

Beach near Dakar

The storm

But the strongest memory, in fact, was something that happened a couple of hours before leaving the country. It started to rain during the night. So much that around 8 AM the street in front of the French Naval Base had so much water, roughly around 1 meter high. The rain didn't stop and it seemed like the sky was falling down. But the driver (Mamadou N'Diae) managed to drive our rented Jeep out of the blocked roads

The mosque

This was my first time in a muslim country and of course I got surprised when I heard, in the afternoon, the speakers of the mosque in arab and then the city completely stopped... the first time was really awkward to me...

The market near Lac Rose

Mamadou N'Diae

We've rent a jeep at Hertz, but due to the problems with insurance companies they also gave us a driver. Poor guy...
Anyway he loved us because everytime we went to the ship we gave him a basket filled of fruit or some food... I even gave him a pair of shoes. In the last day we gave him the money that we didn't use which in total was, converting to euros, around 80€. After all was the double of his salary. But in the end it touched me when he started to cry when we left...