January 23rd: Abidjan to Monrovia to Conakry to Dakar
Following the coastline, we make tech stops in Liberia and Guinea on route to Dakar, covering nearly fourteen-hundred nautical miles and mired in the Harmattan until we close in on the Sahara and see its sand spread flat under the sun from azure sea to shimmering horizon. There is silence in the cockpit as we contemplate this expanse. Here is the muse of aviation’s poet laureate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Here is where, in 1935, he crashed at night in the sand after nearly twenty hours in the air, racing from Paris to Saigon. Somewhere far across these dunes heaped and drifted serpentine by the wind, he and his mechanic survived heat and dehydration for four days before being discovered by a Bedouin and saved. Out there two men in a flying machine met salvation on the back of a camel. Beyond our line of sight from twelve thousand feet the dunes undulate endlessly in the wind, expelling the Harmattan into the sky like smoke, hallucinatory. This is a landscape of delirium and death.
We arrive in Dakar for a short overnight stay. The runways are paved across the shifting desert sand. The sky is bleached pale as the sun sets to the west behind the Atlantic. Outside the terminal, beyond the borders of the parking lot, baobabs writhe from the sand like beautiful gnarled trolls with their knuckles buried in the ground and their humped backs exposed to the heavens.
For the entire forty-five-minute drive into town the highway cuts through swaths of homes all strung together - concrete, brick, and mortar - and low, with blunt medieval towers and unfinished walls, gaping roofs open to the pallid sky. They crowd the highway like the barren banks of a river. Glimpses into the unpaved streets from the van as it flies by. Kids run barefoot playing football in the dirt between the buildings, the dirt drifted high against the walls and everything cast in shades of brown and grey and crisscrossed with long twilight shadows.
The hotel is in an oasis of affluence at the heart of Dakar. More metal detectors and security to get in. Everywhere the people are tall with elegant features and they tower over us like giants.
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