Not far northeast of Dakar on the Cap Vert peninsula is Lac Rose, a shallow
freshwater lake that decades of evaporation have converted into a salt pan
whose color is somewhat pinkish in the right conditions of sunlight. We went
to go have a look.
We went as much to enjoy a day outing as to debunk this picture posted in
Reddit; it's obviously been photoshopped six ways to Sunday. But hey, the
Internet is a huge bag of lies, right?
The lake gets its color from a high concentration of Dunaliella salina algae,
its shallow depth, and the high salt concentration. But it gets its fame from
the famous Paris-Dakar rally.[1] This is where the rally would end, and sure
enough, the restaurant where we stopped for some <i>yassa poulet</i> was
scrawled on all sides with the slogans, team member lists, and some creative
black-marker drawings of the teams that had celebrated their successful desert
traverses. At the water's edge, some hopeful boatmen approached to offer us a
tour of the lake, but with small kids the noonday sun seemed like too much, so
we opted for an expresso instead, in a restaurant whose shade came from a
banana grove. The sun was really strong, a combination of "day at the beach"
and "day in desert sands", as the colors washed out around us.
I always feel in places like this that I learn more about the French than I do
about the Senegalese. Senegal benefits richly from tourism, but it's a unique
sort of traveler that spends concentrated time here, and having worked with the
Senegalese for several years now, I see how they bend themselves a bit into a
form the French traveler expects. Everyone gets a bit more "Bob Marley" for
one, and spouts "traditional wisdom" in a way that sounds like it might just be
made up on the spot. There's a sudden emphasis of aspects of regional culture
(camels, Tuaregs) that seem more natural just a bit north, and so on. But why
gripe about it? The kids had fun banging on the drums though, and enjoyed
themselves running up and down the sand dunes until they got cranky.
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[1] The Paris-Dakar rally now takes place in Peru, after the Senegalese
decided they'd had enough of rowdy 4x4 drivers crashing through their fields
and after rowdy Mauritanian insurgents made the Western Sahara route untenable.
There's still a number of cross-desert rallies though, as about twice a year
the streets of Dakar are choked with Mad Max-esque road warrior vehicles and
sunburned, middle-aged Frenchmen. And over in Peru, I gather the locals aren't
too fond of the rally, either.
