Fuad November 22nd Day 61 Senegal

We’re In The Endgame Now

“Is it Monday or Tuesday,” Tosin asked on this fine Thursday morning as we packed to hit the road again. “What day is it?”

When you’re on the road long enough, your days change from Monday-Tuesday to we-move-day.

I’m writing this as we head out of Dakar, the city we’ve stayed the longest in the past 60 days. We spent 10 nights here — you count the nights, not the days.

We’re heading to Saint Louis. If you’re Nigerian, you’re thinking of 90 cubes of sugar sitting in a paper cuboid.

In Senegal, Saint -Louis is the name of a town north of Dakar. It’s the place where a woman named Penda Mbaye, first stood in a kitchen to make what we now know as Jollof Rice. It’s the ground zero of all of this.

There’s a story about this that you can read here.

I wonder what we’ll find, or more importantly, who we’ll find that’s as obsessed with the history as we are.

After Saint Louis, it’s long roads all the way. A long road to Bamako. We’ll look at the road that leads to Timbuktu, and sigh. Because we don’t have the time to take the treacherous road to Mansa Musa’s Desert Legend.

From Bamako, we’ll head to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. Then to Niamey in Niger. Then we’ll re-enter Nigeria through Sokoto. If we can, we’ll stop by to say hi to the Sultan.

Then we’ll head to Abuja. The last stretch of long road will take us back to Lagos, where we took off from September 22.

We’re going home.


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