A quick tour of Dakar by scooter

With only a few weeks left in Dakar, I thought I better try and sell my scooter. I advertised it on a local expat website and have managed to find a buyer quite quickly, which meant that last weekend was my last chance to explore the city on two wheels. So on Saturday I took a trip around town, to see some places I'd not been to before, and to revisit some favourite places, taking some pics along the way. So here's a little photo-montage of my day exploring the 'sites' of Dakar; (from the top, view of city from corniche d'est, fishermen's pirogues, beach at anse de bernard, lighthouse, the Grand Mosque, Dakar railway station, roundabout with sculpture, view of city from corniche d'ouest and finally - my house in Mermoz).

The beach at Anse Bernard is where I ended up on my first weekend in Dakar when I knew no-one here - hard to believe that it's only 10 months ago.

The last picture is of my house in Mermoz. Unfortunately it looks like I am going to have to move out a week before I finish here in Dakar, so I'll need to find alternative accomodation for just 1 week, which is a shame. It's been a nice place to live, just about 15 minutes by scooter into the office, with the only real downside being the planes coming in a few feet overhead to land at the main airport.

One other intermittent problem has been power cuts, but then that seems to be the case everywhere in Dakar. We haven't had any for a while, but there was another one on Saturday evening - I went out on our terrace, from where I can see 'the statue' and despite all the houses around us being in darkness, the statue itself was as brightly lit as usual - good to see someone's got their priorities right!

Scootering aound Dakar

I’m mobile now – finally bought myself a scooter (see pic), so now every morning rather than negotiating with a taxi driver I just get on my scooter, drive along the corniche and into town. Its only about ten minutes into the office, and so long as the rain holds off (which it has so far), very pleasant, with nice views of the Atlantic ocean off to my right. Just have to be aware of the trafiic around me – apparently my scooter has a special feature which makes me completely invisible to taxi drivers! After work I can drive straight from the office to the club Atlantique for a swim, before going home again along the corniche, with views of the sun setting over the ocean.
In the office I have been working on getting some of the projects moving. The main work this week has been on a Food Voucher programme. This is a relatively new initiative for WFP – rather than distributing food, the idea is to give those in need vouchers which can be exchanged for food at local stores. This can be useful where the problem is high food prices rather than lack of food. One of the advantages of this approach is that it can help stabilize and inject liquidity into the local economy, and can also offer cost savings as there is no need to transport large quantities of food across what are often long distances. A number of pilot programmes have been run and it is expected that this will become an increasingly important way of distributing aid to those in need. I have been looking at how IT can support these programmes, as there are no real solutions available at the moment.
Ramadan starts at the weekend – either on Saturday or Sunday, depending on sightings of the moon. Of course this means that the local Muslims (by far the majority of the population here) will be fasting during the day, so I would imagine the atmosphere will be quite different.
Despite being here in Francophone West Africa where cricket is completely unknown , I’ve been able to follow the Ashes series as well, via TMS on the internet. Apologies to any readers who don't know what cricket is, and also to any Autsralians reading this (Salma?) - but right now listening to a frankly unbelievable comeback by England following the dismal performance in the last test – at this rate they’re actually in danger of winning the series.