Long story short - the posts from 2011 are from the original attempt with my friends to go to the "Race" group of the Bamako rally, to which I (D, real name David ;)) didn't manage to go in the end. Any posts starting October '12 are from the 2012 attempt with me and the wife :)
Do note, I use all kinds of colorful language, and am politically incorrect. You have been warned.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Dakar.

Aaaah, Dakar. The fabled party-town of West Africa, the home of the Paris-Dakar rally and one of the largest cities in the region.

Surprisingly, not a dump (for values of West Africa).

As we got off the boat, the only thing we could process was a shower. The hotel not being far, it was our first stop.
At this point in time, I need to spend some time on mentioning the hotel situation in the region. They seem to get stars based on the amount of bribes they give to the inspectors (if such a thing exists anyway), and reality seems to bear very little resemblance to the pictures that they post on the Internet. Say, our hotel out here - http://www.hotel-faidherbe.com/ - 3* you say? Sure. One of them is a brown dwarf, the other a late-stage G5 sun on the brink of collapse, and the third one is a little confused and isn't quite sure if it's a star, a planet or perhaps a unicorn.

Unfortunately, this managed to escape the astronomers working reception, because the walk-in rate for a room starts at 75 EUR. :) BUT! It's clean, it has a pool and air-conditioning, and that's really all that we cared about at that point in time.

Oh, and they washed our car! I didn't remember it was actually dark browny in reality, I thought it was "red dust".

Having done what was REALLY needed and feeling quite perky, we bounced off to the shipping agent to get the car processed - only to find out that we needed several wads ("wad" - take 10 of the largest banknotes of the country, put 9 of them together, wrap the 10th one around them and staple them together) of local money as they don't take Euros. Uhhh... Ok, let's do the paperwork today, and pay and do the customs tomorrow - we have plenty of time.

While the LandRover teams went through the process (and got on the plane at the end of the day - there's something to be said for working for an Airline and being able to travel on "stand-by" tickets), we went in search of a cash machine/exchange office. After getting into the most decrepit taxy in town (and that's a competition!), driven by a man who must have failed kindergarten several times and had about as much sense of direction as a drunk chicken, we managed to find a shady guy to convert the rest of our Mauritanian Puffins (Ouiga...something in reality) at a horribly bad rate, and a few hundred EUR (at the normal rate) into several wads of CFA Francs. Thus equipped with funds, the logical next step was to spend some on souvenirs.

Now... You know how you're supposed to bargain? Well, I have no issue with that, and in most cases I do (I like to think so at least) reasonably well for a tourist, but some people our here apparently think that insanity is the order of the day, and start with what I can only assume is their annual income - and THAT pisses me off. 180 EUR for two small glass paintings? Oh Puh-lease brotha, you paid like 5000 CFA for one when you bought them!
We got what we wanted in the end, including a very nice 3-giraffe family, henceforth to be known as "Belinni", "Mimosa" and "Mai Tai". You'll get to see them (we hope) once they arrive with the car into Genoa on the 15th of March, or thereabouts.

Now, to close out this second-to-last live installment, I do need to make a recommendation. If you ever find yourselves in Dakar (which, with the soon-to-open Kempinski and Intercontinental resorts is not an impossible proposition, even for us), you simply MUST go to Chez Loutcha, preferably in a large, very hungry group and several times. It's simply magnificent food.


Now, next steps: One more "live" entry - "Car goes on the boat, we go on a plane", then we start adding the pictures.
And after all that is done... We'll take the stories from the blog, add pictures to them, add some 3rd party content from one of the other teams - and put out a nice .pfd file titled:

"Budapest-Bamako (Destination Bissau) or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Border controls" - an "Idiots guide for Offroading" for and by people that should not be Offroading."

Catchy, right?



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