OK, we’re definitely getting off the primary tourist trail here. Saint-Louis is a crumbling old French colonial town, actually the first French town in West Africa and thus a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s mostly on an island with a little bit of tourist infrastructure, close to a couple of national parks. It’s sufficiently off the tourist grid that there’s almost no English spoken here. As a former French colony, French is widespread – a grade school we stopped by is taught entirely in French – so Mark got plenty of practice.

Basically we wanted to see more of Senegal than just Dakar and the beaches to the south, so here we are. In no small part it’s an experiment to see if we can enjoy – not just survive, but enjoy – travel that’s not so easy or comfortable. Three days later and yeah, we can enjoy it. Don’t need to do a lot of it or necessarily all that often, and it helps knowing we have a couple weeks of nice beaches after this. But we enjoyed Saint-Louis.

First, though, on the way north to Saint-Louis we took a detour to see Lac Rose, a shallow lagoon with a salt content that’s supposedly 10 times that of the ocean and that somehow gives the water a pinkish hue. It’s listed in Lonely Planet as one of the top seven highlights of Senegal, so it must be good, right? Well … let’s just say I was glad we didn’t go too far out of our way to see it. To be fair, Lonely Planet says it “can only be enjoyed when the light is right.” Presumably it wasn’t right during our stop. And that makes the top seven sights for Senegal!

Then it was on up to Saint-Louis. Impressions? Dusty. Really, really dusty. The town is right on the Atlantic coast, but except for the relatively cool temperatures, it felt more desert-like. The sand was just everywhere, in the air, on the streets, on your clothes, in your lungs. And it is most definitely a poor, crumbling town. Goats walking around everywhere, tiny little desolate stores, kids with old ragged clothes. Buildings all but falling down, except for the ones that had fallen down. At one point we walked from our comparatively upscale neighborhood into the more traditional fishing village area and that was really, really poor and dirty and smelly, with trash everywhere.

We stayed in the nicest hotel in town, running at about $73 a night. When I say wood floors, don’t think polished or shiny or anything; they were planks. It had an AC unit, but after a couple hours it would start dripping heavily – water just running, really – so we couldn’t use it all night. The breakfast that was included consisted of bread, butter, jam, and coffee or tea. No complaints, though: for $2.50 you could get a couple fried eggs to go with it, so we survived.

Still, there was a lot to like. It felt like a genuinely safe place, and we didn’t have any issues at all walking around. People wanted to sell us stuff, but they weren’t too pushy and sometimes they were downright friendly. It’s fun just walking around the town, watching life play out. You could walk from end to end on the island in maybe an hour, so it was a manageable place.

As in Dakar, we were honestly surprised and impressed by the food. The first day we got into town mid-afternoon and went right to a restaurant suggested by the guy working at our hotel. They pointed to a table and asked “Chicken or fish?” OK, that makes perusing the menu easy. I took chicken, Mark took fish, and they were both great; not just really good, but great. Mine was something like a Jamaican jerk chicken with a great onion sauce, the traditional Senegalese sauce. Along with a couple glasses of perfectly acceptable rosé wine and you have yourself a fine lunch.

Other meals were notable, too. There’s a Chez Peggy restaurant run, not surprisingly, by Peggy, a French native who somehow landed here. (She was visiting with friends the night we stopped so never got to ask her.) The food was great there, too, including the steak tartare, which seemed a little – OK, a lot – risky in the depths of Africa. But I figured hell, she’s French, she knows what she’s doing. And right in our hotel was a tapas restaurant whose proprietor was an honest-to-God Spaniard. Again, some great food including a bowl of gazpacho that was just about perfect.

The main outing was a trip out to the Oiseaux du Djoudj National Park, a huge bird sanctuary. It was a long ride out there, but to be honest we didn’t see many interesting birds. Thousands of pelicans and a lot of cormorants. A few warthogs and even some crocodiles, but the fun was mostly just riding in the boat with a few other tourists enjoying remote Senegal.

From Saint-Louis we had arranged for the same driver who took us up here to take us back to Dakar, where we’re catching a flight to the beaches in the southern part of the country. (Because The Gambia separates northern Senegal from southern Senegal, you can’t just drive down there.) He was to pick us up at 10 so we’d have plenty of time in the sometimes horrible traffic near Dakar to catch our 6:00 PM flight, but when we got up I asked Mark “Do we have his phone number in case he just doesn’t show up?”

Sure enough, 10:00 comes and there’s no driver. Mark has someone at the hotel call and he explains that there was some problem and he wasn’t going to make it up there. Yikes! Fortunately, in a poor country like this there’s always someone willing to drive you wherever you want to go, so we ended up in a nicer car with a driver who charged us less. That’s rolling with the punches.

And as promised, the traffic getting into Dakar was absolutely horrible. We’d been flying down the coast for a few hours and were wondering what we were going to do with all the time we’d have waiting in the airport when traffic just suddenly came to a halt. Dead stop. Over 90 minutes or even longer we might have traveled a mile. Maybe. At one point the driver tried a side road, but that wasn’t moving either. And then, suddenly, after maybe two hours the traffic opened up so we could get to the airport in time for a two-hour delay in our flight. Ugh.

We’re still enjoying Senegal but I’m just glad that for several days after we get to the beach we don’t have any travel scheduled.

We’ve finally made it into deep Africa. Up until now our African visits on this adventure have been strictly North Africa, Tunisia and Morocco. Prior to this we did a vacation in 2000 to South Africa and Lesotho, and I did some work related travel in a couple African countries a decade ago, but this is our first trip together into what you might call “real Africa.”

Our goal that first day was Independence Square, which Lonely Planet describes as “the beating heart of the city.” Oh my God, we thought after walking two-and-a-half hours to get there, if this is the beating heart of the city we should just pack up and go back home. If we had a home, that is. There was really nothing there, just a dead, dry, dusty expanse with some 1960-vintage architecture. We were late for lunch by then so we ate at an OK-looking place just off the Square, and that wasn’t much to write home about either; my sausage, in fact, was pretty much inedible.

From there, though, things got a lot better. To our enormous surprise, food was one of the highlights of our stay. Relying heavily on TripAdvisor, on our first night we found this nice little restaurant/bar, downstairs from a pretty ordinary café; it felt like we were back on the East Coast. Then we had a great Lebanese meal the second night, and the third we spent at an ocean-side restaurant not far from our hotel. I would not have expected three genuinely good meals at three separate restaurants in Dakar, but there you go.

There were also a few sights worth seeing. On that first long walk into downtown Dakar we walked past the African Renaissance Monument. We’d read about it in our guidebook, but were still somewhat agog by the experience. The Monument is a 160-foot statue of an African family atop a 320-foot hill. The statue was built by a North Korean company and the people have that very Stalinesque superhuman quality that we’ve come to know from Communist styles. The body types are almost cartoonish; it’s not clear that there are many men in the world with muscles like that or many women with breasts that large and … outspoken. And of course in Islamic culture depictions of humans is considered idolatrous and the nearly nude figures go a bit far even for less doctrinaire Moslems. Still, it is the largest statue in all of Africa and it makes quite the impression.

By far the bigger deal, though, is the Île de Gorée, an island designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in commemoration of the role it played in the West African slave trade. You access the island via a 30-minute ferry boat ride from Dakar, but the island feels like a world apart. While Dakar is intense and hyper and teeming, Gorée is quiet, meditative, and peaceful. No cars, no paved roads, but still a living, thriving community of about a thousand people filled with crumbling colonial architecture and attractive art displays. And memories.

The island, you see, was a hub of slave trade management. While there is some controversy as to just how important the island was as an actual shipping site for slaves to the New World, it was at a minimum an important place for the management of the slave industry. The House of Slaves museum is in an 18th century home, where the family lived upstairs and the slaves were kept in grim cells below, waiting to be shipped westbound. Even if this was not, in fact, a key departure spot for the 20 million slaves shipped from West Africa, it stands as a powerful symbol of the evils inflicted on the African people.

That was our four-day stop in Dakar. We were there for some national holiday, so one day was pretty much lost. Surprisingly good food, surprisingly poor air quality, and our first taste of what you could call the real Africa. From here we head north to Saint-Louis, an old colonial town on the northern border with Mauritania, and then we head south for some beach time. We’re eager to see how we feel about Africa in a couple of weeks.