Senegalese Wrestling

As on most weekends in Dakar, today there was a wrestling match. Having missed the service at the Keur Moussa Monastery outside the city we decided to go to the match. This, I thought, would make up for not experiencing the African music with Gregorian chanting in Wolof.

Here is what happened in pictures:

We enter. It's 4pm. The drummers are already going near the goal post in the arena. Shortly after we are seated a group of ladies shows up and makes itself comfortable in white plastic chairs.
The rink is empty. White sandbags mark the perimeter. The ladies near the goal post start chanting into a mic. A small crowd hangs out in the sun waiting.
One by one the wrestlers arrive in the far corner of the arena. They each kneel in the sand at the doorway and, I'm guessing here, pray before entering.
Then they make their way into the sandbox and kneel down. Their team hangs out while they pray to not have their ass kicked during the match. A sheet is pulled over each player while he rubs sand into his nether-regions (I'm guessing this is what happens under the sheet. Why else cover up?)
Some wrestlers walk along the perimeter of the rink and kneel in each corner or throw something or rub sand on them or put their hands to their head. Whatever floats your boat. We begin to notice that there are a lot of wrestlers showing up.
At around 6pm they line up to find out the order of their matches. Meanwhile more wrestlers arrive and go through their routine of entering the arena and rink. The bleechers begin to fill up.
A troupe of well dressed ladies shows up. Among them is a very important man. I know this because he has printed a banner of himself and hired two people to carry it around the arena behind his posse. They are seated at the front, near the action. The music is still blarring.
The wrestlers don't stop moving. They walk continuously along the edge of the rink, some dance, some run, most walk.
The official dancers begin.
Four hours of waiting later the wrestling begins.
No one seems to care about the sport though.
Everyone is watching the dancing. When they are done their routine some of the well dressed ladies from the privileged seats at the front get up and dance.
Three matches at a time happen. The first few rounds last less than five minutes. Eliminations are quick.
Finally, the cameras turn on the wrestlers. We leave. At midnight we catch a glimpse of the match on TV. It's live.

Mauritania

Essaouira prides itself on the fact that Jimi Hendrix visited in the 60s. Rumor has it he tried to buy the town. Rumor also has it that his Castles in the Sand was inspired by the remains of a fort on the beach (the album came out the year before he visited). No one ever points out that he was only in Morocco for a week and in Essaouira for probably no more than 3 days. I am willing to bet he spent most of that time high out of his mind at the hippie commune downwind. The commune is now back to being a regular town. No hippies here. Lots of windsurfers and kite surfers though.

We hit Essaouira and decided a few days in that we were going to skip the rest of Morocco and make for the border. Of course then we met a couple with a little kid from the States on the bus that lived in Agadir. they would have been interesting to hang out with since they were in Morocco to Witness.... I'm pretty sure of this because after we got off the bus in Agadir we prayed for our trip before they took off home and we got on another bus to Dakhla.

Dakhla is the furthest south you can go without a visa in your passport. Dakhla is windy and surprisingly enough not scorching hot. You'd expect a bit more heat from a Saharan city. The city sprawls out along the ocean and was a Spanish outpost until 1975 when the Mauritanians took it over. Four years later it became a Moroccan city. Coming into town tourists have to constantly show their passport. We had to make ten photocopies of our passport in Agadir to leave at each of the checkpoints before we got to the city.

The Sahara Hotel organized our ride to Mauritania with a fellow named Omar. The taxi stand consisted of two Mercedes' (the car of choice in all of Africa) parked near the police check point. I would have missed it on my own. Then we did what everyone does here, wait. It is expected. Everyone always talks as if they are going to leave at a specific hour but then you get there and end up waiting a few hours for more people to show up and fill up the car. We waited for two hours and finally had two more passengers, a man and a woman. The woman took it upon herself to feed us bread, yogurt and cookies while the driver squinted his way to the border.

The border is a formality, one which in my case led to people pointing out where I was born politely but with a definite intend to judge... at least that's what it felt like. It became a discussion topic among the driver and other passengers who whispered for a while.

The Mauritanian officals take a three hour lunch break that begins at noon and ended just as we got across the 4km of mined no-man's-land (an area strewn with shells of cars). Crossing the border is not where the formalities end. They end about 2km up the road at a hut on the side of the road with four army officials sifting through your bags. The army officials were all in their twenties and all very much asleep when we entered the hut. the guy looking through my belongings didn't really want to continue once he came across the shampoo bottle that had busted and smeared my clothes. After the search, we switched drivers here for Nouakchot.

Parts of the road across the Sahara are along the shimmery coast. For the most part though the ride is through the heat of the sand on a one lane highway. No air con and the wind felt like a huge hairdryer set to high blowing at you from all directions. Six more hours from the border to the capital. The city looked different from anything we were used to in Morocco. There are sandbanks that serve as sidewalks and most of the cars (although Mercedes') were basically junk on wheels. No street signs. Men in long lose blue or white robes and women in veils that looked like saris wrapped around their clothes. 11pm and the driver was angry at not being able to find the street we were looking for in the city centre. Finally we did find it but then he demanded a ridiculously high price for driving us there from the car park. The people from the Menata guesthouse came out to try and help us negotiate.

Nouakchot is calm and relaxed. The best burger outside London and North American can be had here (with an egg on it and plenty of mayo). The few sidewalks that exist are paved with seashells mixed into the concrete. The port de peche on the coast is an amazing sight of life and colour in and out of the water. Not much else to see in the capital as far as sights go. There are no banks that take traveller's cheques. The city has only two ATMs, one takes visa only and the one that takes all creditcards doesn't work yet, it may next month according to the security guard. The work week is from Sunday to Thursday. There are lots of poor people but also lots of shiny new SUVs. Slavery was officially outlawed in 1980 but there are probably still places where it exists. Alcohol is illegal but still available at high end places. They found oil off the coast of the capital (which is 5km inland). Mauritania is a US ally.

We are leaving tomorrow to be robbed at the southern border crossing of Rosso.