Senegal (ebola or liquor)
I had the interesting pleasure of having to work in Senegal during the heat of the ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The threat of getting ebola is a lot more exciting from a computer screen in Canada. When you get off a plane in a West African country the thrill vanishes and you are left with a guilty anxiety. “Guilty” because despite your common sense, as a North American, our subconscious is preprogrammed to absorb fear mongering. Thus, when I got off a plane in Dakar Senegal, I was calm but a little apprehensive. Especially when the customers agents started shinning lights in my ears. I came to learn that in Senegal the only real threat to your health is malaria and cockroaches. The traffic can be a real arshole and the airport is tiny, cluster-fucked and hot. Africa wouldn’t be nearly as daunting to visit if the airports weren’t fucked and hot as hell. The security in Africa is a breeze, but there is a million people all trying to get out of Africa at the same time.
As nice as Senegal seems from the water, it is a far more interesting place to be in a the city, late at night skulking around the local disco's. On my last tour there, a colleague and I took an opportunity to get off the boat and spent the night buying cheap beer and dusting off prostitutes. Dakar appears to be incredibly safe for a West African city.
While sailing in and out of Dakar you had sail by this wreck, every-fucking-time like some omenous warning to fuck-off. And while massive transport ships come and go like fuck-faces the fishermen boot around in their shitty little wooden skiffs. The fucking things are so long and narrow, that after you have three people in them they are basically kataramans with an outboard engine on them. They usually pile 5 or 6 guys in these fucking wooden missles and go dozen's of KM out to sea. While monitoring the UHF the boys on the boat said they would occasionally hear distress calls, only later to find out that some fisherman had gone overboard from one of the skiffs. You go over the side of one of them shit missles in the middle of the ocean at night, you are FUCKED. The boys aren't wearing lifepreservers out there ya know. Most of em have no idea how to swim. At that point you're basically hoping to land on a murmaid or get swallowed by a giant whale.
