As Gambia lies entirely within Senegal, we travelled through Gambia to enter Senegal for a 2nd time, to avoid having to head far inland around Gambia.
The border crossing from Gambia back into Senegal didn’t start too well when I forgot to switch from English to French when greeting the first border guard we saw. He didn’t seem too impressed by my cheery “Good Morning”.
It went better after that, although Lenny was subjected to a very thorough search (plus side, we found a handy drawer under the passengers seat which we didn’t know was there; the customs officer failed to find this amusing) which delayed us getting to south Senegal.
We drove on to Ziguinchor (pronounced Zig-in-chore), the capital of the Casamance region.
The region is cut off from the rest of Senegal by Gambia and we told there’s a sense that the wealth and resources in the region go to northern Senegal and the capital Dakar in particular.
A long-standing independence movement since the 1980s has been brutally repressed by the Senegal government, with 2,000 people killed and many 1,000s of people displaced from their homes.
The leaders of the independence movement declared a ceasefire in 2014 and there has been relative calm since then.
We took a stunning ride on the impossibly wide and complex Casamance river system, lined with mangroves and learnt a bit about the way of life, including the unbelievable volumes of dried fish which is air dried and transported to Senegal’s neighbours to the west (Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Fishermen spend up to 3 months out at sea catching huge fish which they either sell at ports or keep on ice in the boat, sharing more of the limited space with their catch.
We also visited a remote island with very rustic tree houses, apparently very popular with young Spanish tourists.
Our guide told us about the Joola Ferry in 2002, the world’s second worst non-military disaster, which we were ashamed to say we hadn’t heard of. An estimated 1,860 people perished in the Atlantic when the criminally overloaded ship between Ziguinchor and Dakar sunk on September 26th 2002. The capacity of the ship was 536. The fact that many of the people killed were from the Casamance and the ship was owned by the Senegalese government obviously worsened relations between the independence movement and the government.
Due South 
Loving your blog people! I can’t recall ever hearing about the news about that sinking ship!? Did you notice the colour of people’s teeth in that region. The fluor in the river supposedly make them turn to a rusty colour.