The final posting: Dakar-Goree Challenge

It's very early on Tuesday morning and I am about to set off for the airport, and London. I have been out at a concert and for some reason have enough energy to stay up and write, instead of getting a couple of hours' sleep.

I've been full of energy, infact, since Sunday, when you will know that I did the Dakar-Goree challenge, and completed it. The adrenaline, perhaps, or the thrill of going back to London and seeing my family, have sped me through the last hours and I am happy to report that my body doesn't even ache.

It was a sunny day, even though I prayed for cloud, and Now and I set off with a bag full of peanut butter sandwiches, arriving at the starting beach at 11. I had already got myself greased up with sun cream, and then friends started arriving and someone started taking photos.



There were really a lot of people there, and lots of kids. Not just strapping 17 year old kids, of which there were many, but tiny 8 year old kids who, many of them in their knickers, appeared to be getting ready for the race too.



They milled about on the beach, occasionally glancing out to Goree Island, shimmering somewhere in the distance, while I lathered myself in more sun cream and tried to gulp down as much water as possible before the start.

But start we did, not before Peter (Monsieur Ambassador), had ralied the British (and Danish) Team and staggered us in colour co-ordinated positions, much to the amusement of the Senegalese.



As we all moved along the beach to some unknown destination, suddenly someone was shouting and we were all off, hundreds of people splashing into the warm ocean and launching themselves horizontal in the hope of finding a few cubic centimetres within which to move the arms and legs.



Much as the Senegalese have no sense of spatial awareness when it comes to moving vehicles along a road, so, it seems, it is in swimming too. At one point, with a foot in my face and another coming in from the side, a little boy swam from behind and when he was right on top of me- and I mean he was actually weighing down my legs and much of my lower back- he carried on going until I shouted, heh, attention! He didn't even look up and so I put down my feet and waited for the little minnows to zoom by. It was only after a kilometre or so that I could even start putting my head down in the water, for fear that I was going to get a foot in the face.

Well, one kilometre followed another, and then it started to get a little boring. Luckily the support team of Cecilia and Zal, Now and others were on the boat and gave some good cheer which spurred me along, but it was only really when I hit the raw sewage slick that I really got inspired to finish the damn race.

There was one bizarre moment when a French man in a canoe paddled by. I was hanging on to the 5th buoy, and looking at the island and thinking how tiny it was and how damn thirsty I was, when he called out "do you want some raisins?".

"Yes!" I gurgled.

"Then come over here," at which point I thought, maybe this is a trick. I'm going to go over there and he's going to kick me back into the water, or worse, under the water, and make away with my goggles. And to answer an earlier question, yes, ingesting too much sea water does play with your sanity.

But raisins I got, and some cold coca-cola, and no, he didn't throw them to me and expect me to catch them in my mouth. I ate them in the normal fashion- mixed with sea water.

He also told me that it was only 1km to go, but that was a lie. It was at least 2.5km but then another French man came along, a swimmer this time, and said, it would be such a shame to give up now. And that was all it took, and I was away, across the channel of strong current that divides the first half of the course from the island. After two and a half hours, I arrived, 142nd out of a few hundred, and half an hour under my predicted time.

The first thing that happened was that someone had to pull me out of the water. I couldn't actually get up the beach, I was so dehydrated and hot, but someone thrust a bottle of water and a sandwich into my hand and I went off in search of shade. About half a second later a little boy appeared and said, "toubab, give me your sandwich". Is there no respite?

The boat carrying Cecilia and Now and Zal arrived an hour or so later, alongside the British-Danish team, and then we all climbed aboard and had champagne. I have no idea if I'll do it next year; someone is talking about Goree to the Madeleine Islands, which is 7km, but I think they're mad.

Next report from London. Where I hope it's freezing cold.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 28

It's the night before the big day. All I have managed this week in the way of swimming is a piddly half hour at the Ngor hotel. My cover's blown there- I lied about staying there and now they know I'm an imposter. Anyway, it's not swimming which is going to get me across there now, it's pure adrenaline and stubborness.

What I am doing right though is not going out tonight, which is tough because I have a brand new beautiful pair of hand-made shoes, designed by me, for me, which I am gagging to wear. But it's Saturday night, almost 11pm, and I am listening to Angolan ballads and about to go to bed.

On Friday afternoon, Ceclia and I were on our way to the swimming pool when a lady called tp say her son had been playing in an abandoned building near my house and had found my bag with my keys and press card, and phone number, inside and would I come and meet her to get it.

I went along there with my friend and neighbour, Julie, who has a car. When we arrived, the girl sent her son off to the house, where he had found the bag, to bring it to me. But when he came back empty handed and said that a man who was there said I have to come and get it myself, both Julie and I had a bad feeling. but we had no choice so we went along, into a lonely-looking area of half-built houses beside the airport fence, and were led to a shell of a house where a few people were sitting around inside. The boy brought me my bag, damp, the handle snapped, but showed me all the H and M receipts, keys, soggy business cards, which he had carefully folded up and put inside. We said our thankyou's and went on our way.

But as we were leaving, a crazy-looking man who was standing on the roof and had been watching us, shouted that we should wait and he came down to where we were standing. He was short, with eyes bulging out of his head, a pot belly falling over his low-slung trousers. He looked angry, drunk, or mad, I wasn't sure which. He came storming over to where I stood holding my bag and ripped it out of my hands, reeling around and shouting at the others who were standing around watching this spectacle. When he grabbed my bag, it was like it was all happening again. Out of the houses and streets came 20 or 30 people, all thorougly interested in what was unfolding, which was a total mystery to Julie and I. For the next twenty minutes people shouted at eachother, shouted at me, stormed around, all the while this little black patent leather bag sitting in the hands of a young girl, the daughter of this aggressive man who was apparently trying to get his cut of the money I had supposedly paid the girl who had called me about the bag in the first place.

Eventually, I got my bag back and Julie gave me the keys of the car- by this time I was so shaken up, breathing uncontrolably and having to do everything in my power not to cry- and I just ran and locked myself in the car. And we drove, very fast, away.

Neither Julie nor I could understand it. It wasn't a misunderstanding; it was clear cut. The bag belonged to me, I had behaved in the proper way, thanking everyone who helped me, yet this enormous and unneccesarily aggressive drama bubbled up out of nowhere and left me feeling absolutely wasted, a shivering shaking mess.

I always thought that if someone attacked me, I would fight them with all my strength. But this has effected me more than I could have imagined. Today I screamed when someone came near me on a busy street in broad daylight, and then when Now came with me to the shop, 50 metres from where I live, to buy eggs, I jumped into the verge when a young guy looked at me for more than a second. Now assures me this will pass, and I hope so, because life's a bit tricky when you're afraid to go out of your house.

One of the interesting things about this incident is seeing who comes to the rescue. The people who have been most sympathetic or helpful are people who I might have overlooked as friends. And some of the people who I trust most, have let me down. I have seen that people here have seemingly unending quantities of generosity, that people who you know just in passing, will go to the ends of the earth to help you if they can.

But I have also seen that people can be full of distrust, they can hold grudges and never confront you about them but just let them go on and on, torturing them and your friendship. I have seen that people just wnt to be your friend for what they can get from you and that when you need a little tenderness, they are nowhere to be seen. That you can put your confidence and trust in people over a long period of time and when it comes to the crunch, they, for some reason I just can't fathom, turn their back.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 25

Only 4 days to go. Last swim: Saturday. Today: Wednesday. Mental state: borderline

Still suffering from the closure of the Piscine Olympique, I have taken my way to smiling my way into hotel swimming pools. My lastest was the Ngor Hotel, which has a beachside rectangular pool of 17 metres. I went on a saturday at midday and joked with Johnny the life-guard that I was going to do 2.5km, that's 150 lengths. Ha ha ha, we all laughed.

But then the idea was in my head, and suddenly I was at 50 lengths, then 100, and then I just had to finish it up. So after 2 hours of midday sun and 150 lengths, I was dizzy from all the turning around, tired, and incredibly sunburnt. I cycled home in a near-coma, at which point Badji, my neighbour's guardian, remarked: "You're all red!" and I knew it was going to be bad.

That evening I was invited out by my friends Mr Ambassador and his wife to dinner and a concert at a garden restaurant (which actually has a pool, but too many steps, which I might knock my teeth on). I had already chosen my black linen dress with the low cut, cross-strapped back. Which had been to the cleaners and come back again, my only ironed piece of clothing. But when I put it on, all you could see was a red and white Speedo stripes effect going on, along with a swimming bonnet mark across my forehead. But there was nothing I could do, so with my body temparature somewhere around boiling point, I went off to dinner, drank a lot of wine, then went dancing until 4am to Orchestra Baobab (live), taking a few turns with an old salsero in a straw hat.

The next day, and the next, and the next, I was incapable of anything, swimming or otherwise.

Which brings me to why it is now Wednesday, four days to go, and I haven't been swimming yet this week.

Last night I went out to a new bar, called Chic et Fast, which when said by a Senegalese sounds like 'Chicken Fast'. There was a band playing and I was taking photos for my seminar in Sweden. Cecilia, who you may remember is my swimming partner, got out of her sick bed to accompany me (she has been sick since the goat hair incident), and we passed a pleasant evening talking about other people's boyfriends. She and another friend gave me a lift home, and dropped me at the end of my road so I could walk the short walk home to my house.

Just as I got out of the car and it had driven off, I rounded the corner of a little restaurant and there was this young man who made a bee-line straight for me, at which point I knew I was in trouble and started to run, or run backwards, i can't remember which. But he caught me and grabbed me by the back of the neck, then held his fist in the air and started jabbing it towards me with his imaginary knife. But of course, there was a power cut and I couldn't see whether he had a knife or not so in the confusion, I thought the worst. It must have been ten seconds for him to get my bag off me, maybe less, but in that time I had the following thoughts:

1) He's going to stab me in the throat
2) They say that if you're being attacked, you should do one of two things: scream, or not scream
3) I know that one of these things will make the mugger run away and that one will get me killed. But I can't remember which.
4) I'm screaming. What if it's screaming that gets you killed?
5) So, if I'm doing the wrong thing and he stabs me, is a Senegalese hospital going to be able to save me?
6) No: therefore, I'm going to die
7) That will break my mum
8) And there's lots of people who love me: they'll be really sad too
9) Damn, he's got my phone, camera, £60, press card, driving license, bike, house and post box keys, and my first ever handbag, which I love dearly.

That's almost one thought per second. Impressive. I really thought I was going to die, I thought he was stabbing me because all I could see was this hand going up and down towards my throat. but what was suprising was that the sound that came out of my mouth wasn't a sound I had heard my body make before. it was like this deep primeval gurgling which retched ad bubbled from the core of my body. It was the cry of someone who really thought they were going to bleed to death with a slit throat on the sandy road at Mamelles.

When I realised what had happened, that he had got away and that I was OK, I started calling out for someone to help me, and a sleepy guardian appeared from behind the wall of a house, and let me into the compound. Then his boss, an Italian man in boxer shorts (who was wearing the same ones when I went round this afternoon to thank him for looking after me) appeared and brought me a chair. By that time I was hyperventilating and terrified. Then all these men appeared, and I thought one of them was him, which sent me into a further panic, but they were just guardians from the surrounding houses. They walked me home, giving me a good dose of sympathy, the Senegalese way:

"You're so stupid to walk alone at night"
"What were you doing, carrying all that stuff in your bag?"
"Why didn't your friend drive you to the door?" etc.

Enough enough.

Badji, my friend and guardian in our street, was happily on guard at Ann's house and came out to hug me and take me to my flat, where I struggled with matches, trying to get candles lit whilst unable to breath properly. Then my neighbour, Doudou, came to sit with me while I shivered and put on jumpers (and he sat sweating in a vest).

Every time I tried to sleep, I would close my eyes and see this young man coming out from behind the building and running towards me. Consequently, there was not much swimming, or work, done today. I did go to the office, where I had to borrow money because of course I have nothing and no way of getting money, and bought myself an amazing tarte au chocolat for lunch. That cheered me up.

Well, it's a sad day for me and Dakar. I always felt so safe here, and I let my guard down. Now it's taxis to and from the door, until I can buy a car. And a sad day for swimming, because right now, it's the last thing on earth I want to be thinking about.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 20

I wonder if something happens when people are confronted with a terrifying challenge, and they go into a kind of denial and start doing things that will jeapordise their prospects of succeeding? Because I haven't swum all week and even worse, I stayed out all night last night, creeping sheepishly home at 9 this morning in the midst of a blissful rain storm. So now I have no pool to go to, and no energy to go to one even if there was one.



I have a new project on the go. This here is my friend Now that I talk about all the time. If I was 11 I would say he was my best friend. He owns the boutique in my street, the little blue shed he's sitting beside. We've decided he needs to make some changes to it, and he's applying for a loan to expand it plus pick it up and turn it 90 degrees so that he has more room for people to sit there. Because a corner shop (which is the British equivalent) is much more than somewhere to buy a baguette. It's the community centre, neighbourhood watch, club house, place to leave the keys, and much more. It's where I go when I want to eat my meal with friends, it's where I go when I need someone to translate a song for me for an article (because at Now's boutique I think there are about 7 language groups represented), it's where I go when I need a plumber, carpenter or painter.

But the one major flaw in the design of Now's shop is that it's metal and there's no shade near it. So at the moment, in the 35 degree heat, we all hide in the shade of the wall of the house opposite and talk about how lovely it would be if there was a tree to sit under.

At the moment, my garden is blooming. On my two metre squared balcony I have all sorts of succulents and creepers and bloomers going on, plus my basil and bonsai baobab tree, but soon I'm going to be in London and there'll be no one to look after them. One of the things that bonded Now and I was the way he looked after my basil plants when they were tiny and I had gone away to Guinea. He talked to them every day, gave them water, and when I came back they had grown almost out of control. Now I know that he understands what I mean when I say "look after them"- it's not just giving them a pint of water the day before I come back so the soil feels wet when I touch it.

One of my newest aquisitions is a frangipani tree. When I lived in Australia I developed a fascination with this flowering tree and one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me was to send me a birthday present, a huge box full of gifts, the bottom of which was lined with frangipani flowers. Ever since then I've dreamed of growing one myself. Well, you can't move to the tropics and then not grow strange tropical plants so on my balcony is a gorgeous green frangipani tree, small for the moment, but growing fast. It seems happy somehow- perhaps because the leaves grow so fast that they are always a glowing green- but I get good vibes from it. When the discussion of planting the tree at the boutique came up I thought, what better than to plant my happy frangipani in my street where it will give shade to my friends and have the space to grow big and wide and bloom with flowers? And so the preparation has begun for planting my first ever tree.

Now dug the hole and together he and I went off the the man who sells plants by the side of the road, at the bottom of the lighthouse hill. He sold us a cement sack of rich soil for 50 pence but when we tried to carry what must have been 50 kilos home, the sack split and Now and I spent a very funny half an hour trying to carry the bag whilst keeping the rips face-up. Now eneded up carrying it on his back. Now we will wait one week for the soil to do whatever it has to do and then we will plant the tree.

I should say though that Now has doubts that it will give us enough shade. A mango would be better, but, says Now, mango's are very lazy trees and in the ten years of having a mango tree at his house in Casamance, he has never once seen a mango on it. An acacia would be better, but we're not sure where to find one and they produce such horrible spikes that we would surely be being pricked left right and centre from its thorns. So the frangipani it is.



Last night we got our electricity back at about 8pm so that was when I started my afternoon's work. I worked until midnight and then went to see an excellent band, Moussa Diouf, a Senegalese jazz bass gitar player who's on tour here from France. He and his guitarist sidekick, Herve Samb, have got everybody talking- it's Richard Bona meets Santana, via Senegal, and it's excellent. I'm taking photos at the moment for the seminar I'm giving on west African music and my work in Senegal at the most excellent Selam Music Festival in Stockholm in early November because I want to be able to show people what the scene's like here. This is the stage at Just 4 You, which I grant you sounds like something you might find on the front of a Korean notebook, but it's one of the best places to see live music in Dakar, with gigs every night of the week, mostly featuring from big names like Omar Pene and Cheikh Lo.

Scooting around the corner to Pen Art Jazz, another excellent live music venue, I bumped into my friend, the manager, who insisted that we go to Dakar's newest nightclub, a place called Nirvana where I was, of course, totaly under-dressed and felt like someone's Aunt. After paying about what I spend on my month's rent on a bottle of wine and dancing to 'Holiday' (remember that?), I thought we were going home (it was 4.30 am) but I was mistaken, we were actually going to Ngalam, a really old school disco where I felt much more at home in my jeans and t-shirt and danced wildly to Ivorian music. After that it was dibi, the Senegalese equivalent of a kebab shop- a hole in the wall place with guys standing around in butcher's overalls stoking an enormous wood fire and raking meat by the kilo on a grill above it. The owner, a big mama in a purple flowery dress, dealt with the drunks galantly in the only the way a mama can, and we ate wonderful grilled meat until it started raining and the sun came up and it was time to go home.

And so there's been no swimming today either and there's only 9 days to go before I have to face my demons.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 18

Not much time to go now until the big swim. But the news on that front is that the Piscine is "broken" and only the kids' pool is working. Yesterday that was an adequate excuse not to go at all, but I have since discovered that the pool will be closed all of next week for the swimming championships, which culminates in the big Dakar-Goree swim, so today I had to go.

The pool is 25 metres, and full of bobbing infants. Three weeks ago, the prospect of a 25 metre pool would have been enough of a challenge, but now only a 50 metre stretch will do it, and it has to be relatively clear of bodies. So I put in twenty minutes or so but it got so complicated and it's so damn sunny that I had to retreat to the office, and to air conditioning.

My new Voice of America boss, Nico, thinks the solution is for me to swim at the office pool, but we're not sure how long it's been since it was cleaned. It's also a small pool, tiny in fact, but no chidren in it, in fact, no one in it at all. But I'll give it a try because right now, my options aren't all that great.

The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 15

I’ve rearranged my bedroom so that my bed is up against the window and as I write, I can see the sea.



It has the potential to make a big difference to my life, except I don’t appear to spend much time in my bed because every day this week I’ve been out until 3 and then had to get up for something early the next morning, usually something with a nautical theme.

Yesterday was Saturday, and the day for mine and Cecilia’s open sea swim. I know I got you all excited about this last week, posting photos of our triumphant swim to N’gor island. Well people, the swim to N’Gor was much like piffling around in the bath- clear warm waters, no waves, no current. The only real obstacle was the goat hair (and we’ve both been sick since then because of it).

This week we decided to swim from Oceanium, a water sports shack half way around the enormous bay which faces Goree Island (our eventual goal), to the Savannah Hotel, on the furthest point of this bay. The problem is that I swam 2.5km in the piscine this week, (yes, that’s 50 lengths of the Olympic swimming pool) and I had grown, shall we say, a little bit cocky. I thought, if I can do 2.5km then I can do 5 right? But let me tell you, 2.5km in the pool is not 2.5km in the sea. It is not even 1.5km in the sea. It’s nothing, there is no comparison.

Well, after asking some divers if there were any jellyfish in the water, we plunged into the rather turbulent sea and set off for the relatively short 700 meter swim to the Savannah. After a few seconds we realised that this was not going to be the short little hop we had imagined, because every time we brought our heads up to breath, a wave hit us in the face. And every time I did a stroke, the current would push me back the way I’d come.

And the water was murky. We’ve had glorious rainstorms but nice as that is when you’re lying in bed looking at the ocean, it also means that the water and everything on the bottom has been stirred up and you can’t see a thing. And here’s my biggest challenge. I am terrified of what I can’t see. After a few minutes I started imagining that if I did front crawl and kept my head down as much as possible to avoid the crashing waves, sooner or later a sea monster would glide into my goggled vision. Or a big fish. At one point I even imagined a dead body would float towards me. I was, shall we say, in a state of hyper-tension.

So imagine my terror, people, when into my vision did float something dark and terrible-looking, its body rank and bulbous, it’s poison-filled tendrils reaching out to do me harm. As it brushed my arm I cried out – glggg glllgg ggggglllllllg- and tried to swim away, sweeping the water and the evil monster it carried away from me. But it was in vain, I had been touched by a black plastic bag and swimming would never be the same for me again.

The journey carried on much the same way, and Ceclia made an apt observation about half way through the first leg.

“This is the closest I’ve ever got to being ship-wrecked,” she said, and I thought about The Perfect Storm and the one where Tom Hanks grows a lot of facial hair.

Eventually, a jetty came into sight and we waited for a wave to launch us up its barnacally steps. A man was there, in goggles too, collecting mussels.

“Have you ever seen a mussel before?” he asked, in much the same way that someone on Friday night asked us after we’d been at a Cheikh Lo concert for two hours if we’d ever heard of Cheikh Lo.

“Il faut essayer, huh?” and I imagined my hands around his neck.

Well, it was a sorry sight, Cecilia and I sitting with our knees hunched up on the steps of the jetty looking at the distance we’d come and would soon have to repeat.

“I really didn’t enjoy that at all,” I said.

“I hope there aren’t any sharks here because my knee’s bleeding,” said Cecilia who had scraped herself climbing up the steps.

Neither of us had anything positive to say.

Getting back in was a laugh. The sea was crashing on the steps of the jetty and kind of sucking all the water out and then thrusting it back even harder, so we had to leap in, clearing the steps, and then swim really hard so as not to become barnacle fodder.

I got into a better rhythm on the way back, my goggles didn’t steam up so much (I have a theory about this- I think my head is particularly hot and creates more steam in the goggles than is normal) and I began to harden my mind against the plastic bag fear. We eventually dragged ourselves up to the beach of Oceanium and quickly went to get food.

“No, this is good,” said the ever-optimistic Cecilia.

“I think this has helped us to become a lot more realistic about the swim.”

And she was right. It can’t get much more realistic than this. I am afraid of the sea and everything that floats in it, my eyes produce steam, and I am no match for the Senegalese current. We had done less than a third of what we will be doing in two weeks’ time and we were broken. Not even 12 falafels could lighten my spirits.

We met later on that night and discovered that we had both had emotional and tearful outbursts after we had left eachother. I cried when the man who I paid to unblock my mobile phone accidentally blocked my SIM card, and Cecilia had a row with her boyfriend after he touched her record player.

On my way home I went to visit Pape with something of a heavy heart. I told him the good news, that my friends and family have been kind enough to sponsor me for this swim so his school can make some improvements. But what I didn’t tell him was that I don’t think I can do this swim. Pape went into an emotional silence when I told him about the money, and then he got up and flung his arms around me and promised he would come along to Goree and wait on the finishing line with peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t tell him about the plastic bags.