La Fleuve

Mauritania on the left. Senegal on the right. Women washing clothes. Men washing goats. Fishermen in pirogues. Children waving ballistically. “Toubab! Toubab!”. Kingfishers. Herons. Boobs. Goat stampedes. Laundry blowing in the wind. Mosque towers. Dusty villages. Barack Obama tee-shirts. Barack Obama underpants.  Camels. Sweltering heat. Withering mielie fields. Sardine paste. Wind. Exhaustion. The Senegal River.

Above all else it’s the place where ‘Sunburn: McAlpine in Africa’ finally became an apt title. My transparent thighs haven’t seen as much sun since I was seven and my mother used to dress me in lumo ball-crushers to ridicule me with her friends. They are white no more – they have taken on a worrying purple hue. Now the nightly moths gravitate towards Tough Guys torso instead. The only part of me aching more than my seared legs and tendonitic shoulders is my bottom after sitting in the bottom of a damp pirogue for six solid days. Haemorrhoids are strongly on the cards.

It took four days and three towns to organise but eventually we managed to convince a crew to take us upstream for roughly 160kms from Matam to Bakel. The fact that no one knew of any crew who had ever gone this far had its perks and drawbacks. The perks being that it was exciting and felt pretty intrepid of us. The drawbacks being that our crew had no idea about anything. From the length of time it would take to how far the next village we could camp in would be. And they seemed to have had a bizarre obsession with the number ‘six’ as every departure and arrival time was estimated as ‘six o’clock’ which, needless to say, proved wildy optimistic on both fronts. Not such a problem for them – two guys with the combined upper body strength of a baby hippopotamus. More of a problem for Tough Guy and myself – two guys with the combined sunburn of all of Margate in December. Worse still, not only did we have the natural flow of the river to fight but also found ourselves with an unremitting adversary in ‘the Harmattan’ – the wind that blows across the Sahara from East to West and has been known to kick up enough dust to completely block out the sun for days. She wipes her arse with ‘the Cape Doctor’. And did likewise with our pirogue.

Despite all these frustrations the time we spent paddling up the River were some of the most spectacular I’ve ever experienced. There was the plethora of exotic birds swarming all over the banks in every shape and colour imaginable. Tough Guy was throwing out names like ‘red-breasted bee-eater’, ‘Senegal cuckle’ and – dubiously – ‘Green Parrot’. He shed light on many ornithological questions. He also shed light on why exactly he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Then there were the people we encountered along the way. The Pulaar that inhabit most of the riverbank on the Senegalese side are famous for their hospitality and yet we were still regularly blown away by the constant offers of food, accommodation and gifts we received at every stop. Massive grins of straight, pearly-white teeth at every stop – and not once was anything ever asked in return. There were the subtle differences between the Senegal and Mauritanian sides with Mauritania’s towns obviously smaller, dustier, less developed with less imposing mosques. Even the mielie fields on the Mauritanian side just seemed to be that much more buggered. And the language: Arabic on the Mauritanian side, Pulaar on the Senegalese. Finally there was the tranquillity of the river itself at sunrise and sunset when the wind had died down and the only sound was the chirping of nesting birds and the splash of the ores in the glassy water.

Weird. Obscure. Untouched.

Words cannot do it justice.

        

We also have some killer short films that many have earmarked for the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year so check out the 'Footage from the Journey' Section. David Attenborough is said to be retiring as a result.