Welcome to Senegal

In the years, months and days leading up my departure on this trip I spoke to many people about it and most of them reacted with a sort of flat, hollow "wow" revealing the uncertainty they felt about where exactly on a map of the globe the country of Africa was.

I realised quickly that this trip was something I would be doing by myself, for myself and that I couldn't rely on others to motivate me to do it. Most people couldn't relate to it enough to be interested, let alone impressed.

Of those that did show some interest, two distinct camps formed. Those who thought I was going on a sort-of exotic, intrepid and indulgent holiday and those who thought I was going to die. In reality, the experience so far had been somewhere in between. It was no holiday: it was much, much harder work than my day-to-day existence back at home. But I wasn't going to die. I was fairly sure of that.

That sunny afternoon on the happy side of the Senegal River as I laughed out loud with a couple of Italian amateur comedians I was reminded that the slog was worth it and if I stopped for a moment, squinted and looked carefully from a particular angle I might observe that I was actually having fun.

Filippo and Valerio (the latter taking great pleasure in explaining that the former's name was an amalgam of the Latin words for "love" and "horse") had, like me, earmarked Zebrabar in Saint-Louis as their final destination for that day and as they had no GPS I offered to act as local guide. A little gang was formed and I was appointed leader.

Leaving the border along a freshly resurfaced and crisply lined bitumen road we found a country showing off a level of prosperity many times greater than its cousin, Mauritania, to the north (both were administered as a single entity under French colonial rule). The cars here seemed to be in slightly better shape (Renault sedans being the de facto national car here rather than the ironically iconic Mauritanian Mercs) and it seemed the people were in better condition, too.

I saw people exercising alongside the roads lined with greenery—fit, young men preparing and planning to achieve their own international dreams of football stardom in Europe. There was colour and life everywhere. On first impression, despite still being strongly under the influence of Islam, Senegal gave me my very first taste of the rich, African vibrancy that I had come looking for.

I was pleased to discover that the Italians weren't put off by a bit of dirt when my GPS suggested we abandon the well sign-posted route along the main road to the once bustling colonial port town of Saint-Louis and duck off along a more direct and presumably more expedient twin-track across the lowlands beside the river.

With the afternoon marching on and dusk on its heels we took a chance and sped along the straight track towards the setting sun but it wasn't long before all three of us were brought to an abrupt stop in deep, black clay. The "road" had very quickly deteriorated into a marsh and what looked like a hard surface of dried mud concealed a cruel, natural booby trap.

Situations like these are daunting when faced alone (or if on a small Honda road bike, judged by the size of Filippo's eyes) but in a group they're a mere inconvenience, a laugh and the basis of a good story to be told over the evening's beers (another luxury available in Senegal that I was keen to indulge in having gone without for weeks in more austere Morocco and Mauritania).

It took us half an hour of team-work to extract the three bikes and get back to something hard enough to ride on, after which we sheepishly returned to the main road and followed the signs to Saint Louis.

Unfortunately, all the excitement had proven too much for my front wheel and it was looking a bit flat on the bottom again. As darkness fell we limped into town, stopping every few kilometres so that I could inflate the tyre with my portable compressor by the light of Valerio's headlight and hoping we could make it all the way to Zebrabar (a little way out and on the other side of town) before I had to get the patch kit out.

So far I wasn't proving to be much of a leader (more a liability) so Valerio took the reins and relied on his enquiries with locals to guide us to the location of that night's lodgings (and dinner). We stopped every few minutes down one dead-end or another for him to ask for directions in his traveller's French delivered with an accent so thick that I couldn't discern it from Italian.

His results weren't much better than mine, the highlight being an incident which resulted in his front wheel making its way into a small lagoon after he narrowly avoided riding off the edge of a destroyed bridge. We lost some more time going down sandy, village lanes trying to find a way across the river delta that we knew lay between us and the satisfaction of a shower and a meal.

We started to feel a little doubtful that we'd make it at all. Valerio laughed off one local's attempt to sell us directions for 10,000 CFA (about €15 or a month of his wages) at a time when I would've been much more suggestible (casting more doubt on Valerio's appointment as navigator-in-chief). Refusing the offer proved to be the right decision because we happened across a tin sign for Zebrabar just a few minutes later. With great excitement and alcoholic anticipation we putted our way along the little land-bridge across the water and into the compound on the other side—my front tyre by then totally flat and me having given up on keeping it inflated, rim be damned.

Zebrabar was a wonderful, peaceful refuge in idyllic natural surrounds on the shores of a large lagoon. Run by a European ex-pat family (Swiss, I believe) it was built in 1996 and since then has offered many a weary over-lander and their just as weary motorbikes, trucks, cars and bicycles a chance to relax and recuperate before tackling their onward journeys—an opportunity I was going to make the most of.

We had a couple of days before we needed to be in Dakar to get our temporary vehicle imports stamped so we took some time to fiddle with our bikes, scoff delicious Senegalese dinners and explore the historic if dilapidated town of Saint-Louis (which felt like a kind of West African take on what I imagined Havana to be).

Over those few days our little trio formed its firm, male bonds through a deep and sacred exploration of the foundational topics of bikes, beers, boobs and bum-jokes.