Postcards from Dakar: Trip to Lac Rose

I had an uneventful Thursday and Friday and then a group outing on Saturday that was pretty good. We piled on a bus and headed out of the city to Keur Moussa, which is a Catholic monastery. We got a tour of the grounds, where we saw lots of orchards and gardens, workshops where the monks make koras, (traditional African stringed instruments made from calabashes), and a brief glimpse of some crazy awesome blue bird that gave me Australia flashbacks. After that we went to mass, which was all in French and Wolof, but the music was nice and there was a very cool painting behind the altar in the sanctuary. After mass we were supposed to have lunch, but it wasn’t ready yet so we went on a little tour of an agricultural school associated with the monastery to kill some time (more orchards and gardens).

Lunch was totally worth the wait, though. I ate my very first pamplemousse (grapefruit), and it was quite tasty. Lunch itself was rice with meat, onion sauce, and baguettes, which is a very common meal here, second only to ceebujen, but this place did it up right. We were all stuffed and satisfied after eating all that, but then they brought us dessert, which is not something that usually happens at lunch. We had a kind of sorbet, which was really just frozen pineapple and ditkah juices, and some kind of chocolate oatmeal cookies that were probably made by Nabisco. It was great because one was really fresh and local and the other was really comforting and familiar, and both were delicious. I ate so much that afternoon that I skipped dinner that night.

We left Keur Moussa after lunch to go Lac Rose, or so we thought. We ended up making a pit stop at Le Village des Tortues, which means “Turtle Village” and which is basically a zoo for turtles and tortoises. None of us had any idea that we were going to be stopping there, and it was sort of bizarre to find yourself face to face with an enormous tortoise when you thought that you were going to be chilling at a pink lake, but it was pretty cool. The teeny tiny baby turtles were cute, and one of the big older ones (the oldest one? Maybe?) was hilariously named Bill Clinton.

After Le Village des Tortues, we finally made our way to Lac Rose. Lac Rose is a super-salty lake, and because of all the salt and minerals and probably algae in it, it looks pink in high sunlight. The water sort of feels sort of oily, or like lotion or something, because there’s so much stuff in it. We didn’t go swimming in it, but that is something people do. Because it’s so salty, you float without having to make any effort, like in the Dead Sea. Lac Rose is also an important place for salt mining, and we saw a few people with their boats and their piles of salt on the beach.

We didn’t stay for very long because Lac Rose attracts tourists, which in turn attracts pushy souvenir salesmen. It’s sort of off-putting to try and take in this cool natural phenomenon with a guy shoving cheap jewelry and sand paintings in your face, and Awa, Josephine, and Waly were like, “Get off the bus, take your pictures, and get back on.” Which was okay, because if you’re not going to go swimming or start haggling for souvenirs, there’s not much more to do at Lac Rose.

Our last stop was at these sand dunes on one side of the lake, where were took a bunch of pictures that made it look like we were stranded in the middle of a desert and where, if you’re willing to shell out some dough, you can take camel rides. After a little while there, we emptied out our shoes and headed back home. I was exhausted and spent the rest of the night at home, where I fell asleep on the couch watching the truly awful movie “Underworld: The rise of the Lycans.”