One more night in Les Mamelles, Dakar

We had to return to Dakar after St Louis to collect our Malian visas, and had previously booked the same Belgian-run place that Barnes had sorted for the first night. It was expensive but was a clean place and was quite nice to be out in the suburbs (Les Mamelles - "the hills"). Collected the visas with no problem - unlike our Ghana visas; read previous blogs - and I went to take a few pictures of the coastline. Quite impressive cliff drops into the Atlantic. A man appeared from nowhere and said I had to pay for a photography visa. I knew I didn't need any photo visas for the whole trip and walked off. "I'm joking man! Take my picture!", so I did, then quickly left. I refuse to get my camera pinched 5 days in!

Took one of the falling-apart, yellow/black taxis to our hotel, going past the new Radisson Hotel being built on the cliffside of Dakar (looks about 7-star) and the new monument that the Senegalese Goverment has commissioned on the hillside overlooking the city centre. Its a huge 150 ft sculpture of a man, woman and child portraying freedom or something. Double standards when you see all the homeless and begging children darting inbetween traffic. But maybe that's politics in general, not even African politics.

At the hotel got chatting to a lovely, fat, racist South African, who was about to fly to Burkina to do sort some gold mining business - "Bloody ragheads", "the locals haven't seen soap!" Charming fellow! We wandered up to the lighthouse for an awesome view across the whole city. Shame we didn't catch it at sunset, that wouldv'e been incredible! There are a lot of keep-fit fanatics in Senegal, football on the tiny beaches, tonnes of joggers, men doing sit ups by railings and using car axles and tires as weights! Pigskins boys!

Got chatting to a lady on the way back from the lighthouse, who invited us for some food later on. The boys were in a shop, but I said we'd come by. The food in the hotel was nice but out of our budget, and so we ended up having some nice (cheap) beef skewers from a BBQ at this hidden restaurant. Hit the sack early, as we had to get down to The Gambia the next day - and knew how unreliable transport was, as well as knowing we'd have to cross a border; in my experience sometimes easy, other times not so much...