Monday, June 05, 2006

Ngor

I went to the beach again yesterday. Seems like a good tradition to keep for the summer: Sunday = Beach day. We'll see. But this time, we were a bit more adventurous and went to a beach frequented mostly by locals, as opposed to tourists. I went with my coworker, Karina and my host brother, Papis, who showed us how to get there. We had to park on the outskirts of the village and walk through bunch of little winding corridors to get to the coast. From there, we got on a boat packed full of people to cross over the channel to the island. There had to have been at least 50 people in this tiny motorboat and we were the last to board and so were in the front, which meant that by the time we arrived on the island, we'd pretty much already been swimming because so much water had splashed in on us on the way over. But, somehow, the boat made it across with everyone in it. To their credit, they did make sure everyone had life jackets. And it wasn't a very long - it only took about 5 minutes to cross.

Anyways, the beach was pretty crowded and there were a lot of people milling around trying to sell various things, but the majority of people there were young Senegalese folks who spent most of the time playing in the water. The island itself is small and mostly populated by either wealthy Senegalese or people with time shares. The houses are pretty big and very nice, with little hidden gardens and balconies. A pretty awesome place to vacation if it weren't for the boatfulls of people who come to use the beach everyday :)

Getting back across at the end of the day was a bit more harrowing, beacuse so many people wanted to get on the boat and so we had to fight for a life jacket and a seat. And then, people were rushing to get off and I thought I was going to end up back in the water. It's weird, although the pace of life is much slower here in many ways, there are certain instances (mostly those dealing with transportation - on the boat, in cars and busses) where people seem to be in such a hurry that it becomes really dangerous and a little frightening.

2 Comments:

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