The day starts with Moussa guiding us through the national park. The more than 200kms large forest and jungle is under the Unesco Protection since 1981 and is clearly a wonderful place for Hippos, gazelle, monkeys. We will need another visit to know whether the lion foot print are real …

Btw this is better here to enjoy the high price and low quality food from the restaurant; according to Moussa 12 local hunters have killed by the guards last Sunday because they killed a buffalo!

On the way, broken trucks dusty roads and African temperature for this 400kms stage.

The border crossing to Mali was less chaotic than expected (or we are getting used to it, the first border control guy even wanted us to stay over the weekend because we arrived friday afternoon only), and finally around 6:30pm we arrived in our destination country Mali! There are less than 1000 kilometers to go to Bamako and we are confident that the whole team will make it there on Sunday!

It was a long 550km stage today from Dakar to Niokolo Koba national park. The road was tarmac all the way to the NP entrance, but in some places with such huge potholes, it was worse than offroad driving. Imagine 20-30cm deep holes covering the whole width of the road and trucks, cars, buses, donkeys, goats, bycicles trying to go around them in creative ways.

We have changed our minds about Senegal and Senegalese people today. The farther you are from the coast, the more friendly the people are, there is no harrassing and aggressive begging for cadeau here.

The national park we are in tonight is Senegal’s biggest with more than 900,000 hectares and lots of gazelles, monkeys, hippos, and crocodiles. Our guide Musa told us there are even lions and elephants, but “so few, you would have to stay for 2 years to spot them”. I tend to belive even two years would not be enough since the number of lions and elephants is zero, but this is my personal view only. We will see tomorrow, we are going on an animal watching trip at 7am.

We left at 5am today to get to the border and to Dakar as early as possible. Everything went well until we passed the Moroccan exit checkpoints and Senegalese border control. But then at Senegalese customs we were facing Africa at its best again: there was one single guy preparing the car documents, taking approx. 15 minutes per car. Extrapolate yourself how long that takes for 177 cars… We were lucky to have been one of the first cars, but some of the teams are probably still there waiting for the guy to manually copy all the data of driving licenses, car registrations, and passports into a checkered notebook.

The landscape in Southern Mauritania is changing very quickly from desert to savannah, and there is a huge fertile area at both sides of the Senegal river. The Senegalese seem to be much more open and accessible than the  Mauritanians, but also much more persistent in begging and requesting petit cadeau. We also had two harsh encounters with the police, once for not flashing the warning lights when stopped by the police (which would be OK, but the reaction of the cop when he saw that I successfully warned the other teams via CB radio clearly showed that he was only after short term money), the second time for overtaking in the city (which we were told is forbidden in Senegal, hehe). At the end we did not pay anything, but it took some time to discuss with the sly and arrogant guys.

Due to the brutal traffic around Dakar we only arrived in the evening there, just in time to have dinner with our colleague Xavier who has recently moved to Dakar. We are skipping the official camp today and spend the night at Xavier’s place, with private shower, coffee, etc.