Spring Break! (Part Four)

Part Four
We also ate dinner at the campement the second night- a tiny hostel-like place in teh village I’d walked to the day before. We got directions from the guys at the visitor’s center- they said to basically follow the road until we got to the trees, and it’d be there. The village was pretty small anyway, we’d be sure to find it. We let them know ahead of time how many of us there were so they could prepare for eleven hungry tourists- they said to show up around eight or nine.

“Eight or nine” is after dark, a detail that had been worrying me but not too much until we actually started walking down the road. The same dark road without any light at all that allowed us to see the stars so beautifully the night before. We used our cell phones as flashlights to see the ground. The problem is that when the road is made of sand and the ground is made of sand, you can’t tell where to turn off- we’d almost passed the village entirely before a man caught up with us with a flashlight lamp-torche telling us toubabs we’d missed the road. We thanked him and started walking straight across what could have been someone’s yard, aiming for what few lights we could see before the same man and his friend caught up to us and said they’d show us the way. It was kind of embarrassing, but we were all frustrated from a long day at the bird park and then arguing about prices and then trying to find our way to this campement, so we ended up just following the men. The same few girls who had been the “coordinators” of this entire trip went first, politely chatting with our guides.
I could barely see when we finally made it to the campement- the pale flourescent lights were so harsh it took a while for our eyes to adjust. We ended up in what looked to me like a grey concrete room with two long tables- the first table was occupied by a bunch of French people who might as well have been on a picnic in a park- next to their table was a cooler which contained I assumed some wine because already consumed what looked like most of a bottle and were being raucous and jolly. It threw us off. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a group of French seniors having a picnic. As we sat and waited for our dinner, one of the guys picked up a shell from the table and pretended it was a telephone to call me, and as we had a conversation his friend pretended to remonte-control drive the cockroach that was crawling across the floor. The two women were taking lots of flash photos. It was very surreal. Dinner was good too- I don’t think any of us had eaten lunch, and only a few had paid the overexpensive hotel breakfast, a few others I know had eaten fruit from St. Louis, so we were able to all finish our dinners. And our guide came back to lead us to the main road where we stargazed our way back to the hotel.


The next morning we played the Celebrities Game on the way to the Dunes.