First day out from Cape Verde.

I spent the day still recovering from yesterdays food poisoning episode so did not participate in todays tour. The ship docked at Port Grande in the city of Mindelo on the island of San Vincente one of 10 volcanic islands that make up the country of Cape Verde, located in the central Atlantic Ocean. From Nina's description the town still had an African feel, with lots of dark skinned people wearing wonderful brightly coloured clothes. There was a general more prosperous feel probably coming from the lack of rubbish and better maintained buildings and roadways. A wonderful example of the effort that the island community has put into building things is the top 5 km section of the road to Mount Verde at over 2500ft. This road is made of hand laid flat stones, providing a relative flat driving surface and is in good conditions. However as a passenger trying to take photos from the bus is was extremely bumpy. We could not find out why this construction technique was used as a hot-mix road would have been a lot less work. See the photo labelled "Rocky Road".

Today was supposed to be a celebration of my 77th birthday, but alas, I ate something at lunch so spent the afternoon in bed trying to recover. Hence I did not really appreciate the nice chocolate birthday cake the ships galley provided and the celebratory dinner that Nina had arranged was cancelled.

Today we had a bus tour of the city of Dakar, a place made famous in western countries, by the Paris-Dakar rally. But sadly for a petrol head like myself we saw almost nothing that reflected the days of the rally. Why the "almost" ? Like all the previous places we have visited on this trip Dakar has uncountable hordes of motorcycles but all with small engines and designed as city transport. But in Dakar I caught glimpses of a small number of high powered rally style bikes, the rider of one of these even pulled a wheelie in a crowded street while crossing an intersection; just for the benefit of us tourists you understand.

The Gambia, as it is called, (wiki entry click here) is an unlikely country, as it occupies a thin strip of land each side of The Gambia River from its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean deep into the East Coast of Africa forming a narrow intrusion into the country of Senegal. It is immediately evident that it is a poor country and depending on your information source its major source of foreign income is peanuts and the tourist trade. Given the evident lack of wealth we were surprised to see that the streets were relatively clear of rubbish. Note the photo of the man with a donkey cart. There are many of these combinations of man-cart-donkey(s) and they are the first line of defence, they pick up the rubbish in the streets and from piles of rubbish made by home owners and business owners. It is then consolidated into special rubbish trucks.