Senegal: Dakar – monkeys, vultures and the po-po

We wanted to stay longer in wonderful St Louis, but the border officials gave us only 3 days import licence for Lenny, which can only be extended in the capital Dakar.

Annoying, but we had to drive the 250kms south to Dakar to get the extension and then back to St Louis to stay in the Djoudj National Park.

The drive was eventful with a monkey lollopping across the road and these vultures swooping in to devour a recently deceased goat.

We had a couple of Gendarmerie stops, nowhere near as frequent as in Mauritania, but at one stop my driver’s licence was held by the officer. We had to visit the police station, a mile or so away to pay a the 3,000 CFA (about £5) fine, as luggage on the back seat apparently is an infraction.

As the fine was small we couldn’t face disputing it, but it was annoying having to queue in the station, visit the office “only 1 person at a time”, get the receipt and then return it to the Gendarmerie up the road to retrieve my driving licence.

This however was nothing compared to the police incident once we arrived in Dakar.

At a really busy junction we heard a police whistle, but couldn’t see any police and had no way of knowing it was aimed at us.

At the next junction a motorbike traffic cop pulled up alongside us, frantically signalling for us to pull over. After shouting through the window in French, we understood he was annoyed we hadn’t stopped earlier for his whistle.

We apologised, he asked to see proof of ownership, insurance, driving licence and then took my licence and drove off on his motorbike, indicating we should follow his rapid U-turn across 3 lanes of traffic.

Of course that smooth manoeuvre was impossible with Lenny, so by the time we eventually turned Dodgy Cop was gone. We drove up and down the busy street a couple of times trying to spot him without success.

We asked some cops stood in a massive, busy roundabout what we should do and they recommended we return in a couple of hours, basically a brush off.

There was nothing we could do but drive on through the heavy Friday evening traffic to our hotel.

Once there we asked Umar, who greeted us and showed us our room, what we might do to get the licence back.

He dropped everything and said he’d accompany us to the nearest police station right then. We marched over there and after being passed to different offices and asked lots of questions, an off duty policeman agreed to “help”. Umar explained to us this “help” would come at a cost and was so kind to offer to translate and help us get the licence back.

Helpful Cop suggested we drive back to see if we could spot Dodgy who’d taken the licence. The problem being we couldn’t remember exactly where that was. So after Helpful got himself a snack, he and Umar squeezed into Lenny’s back seat along with our water canisters, sand ladders, winch, steering lock etc, we took a long and winding tour through the streets of Dakar.

We eventually found Dodgy and Helpful made a show of telling him off, but the way for it to be resolved was for us to hand over 10,000 CFA (about £15) to get the licence back, which was infuriating, bu we tried to focus on the positive; we had the licence back and all thanks to lovely Umar who by now had spent more than 2 hours with us.

However, all this meant we’d missed our chance to have Lenny’s import licence extended as the Customs Office was closed at weekends, so we had to stay in Dakar until Monday and postpone our booking in the National Park by 2 days. Luckily the hotel staff were very understanding and flexible.