The most exciting thing to have happened to Dakar since the birth of Youssou N'Dour some fifty years ago is the building of a tunnel, THE tunnel, which goes all the way underground and up the other side of a road which was never really that busy. The tunnel bypasses some ugly bits of the city so that visitors can get from the airport to the town without having to see any poor people. It emerges onto a junction which is now incredibly busy and extremely dangerous.

This morning I went on my moped to the travel agency, which sits right on the slip road beside the tunnel, near the exit. I took the tunnel, thinking I would be able to turn off the road but found that I was on a super-highway all the way to the roundabout, 1 kilometer away from the exit. So around I went, and back to the tunnel. I stopped and asked a policeman, guarding the entrance to the sliproad, how I was meant to get to the agency, there, 20 metres away.

"Go through the tunnel."
"But I've just come through the tunnel," I protested.
"Go back through the tunnel," he said, clutching an automatic rifle to his shoulder.

Deciding not to argue, I went off through the tunnel again, where a huge line of traffic had backed up because a taxi had broken down at the exit, and eventually emerged out the other side. But I could not get off that road either and ended up back in town, where I had started.

Deja-vu. The same thing happened to Julia and I in a taxi on Saturday night.

I eventually arrived at the travel agency, third-time-through-the-tunnel lucky.

"They are telling me I am having to shut the office," complained V, my ever-efficient and helpful Indian travel agent.
"It does not make any sense. The people are coming to the airport," he was talking about the delegates to the Islamic summit, "not to the office. But they are telling me to close."

On the way home I got caught in a sandstorm- the construction in the city has left vast expanses of land treeless and covered in sand- and arrived home feeling like a piece of sandpaper.