Today's taxi driver was as cheerful and as pleasant as they have all been, despite the oppressive heat and dismal greyness of the day.

"I started work at 7 this morning," he chirped, "and I have already done 85 km. When you have a family to feed you have no choice."

We careered along the highway and across the bridge in the morning traffic, and I told him that in Senegal, taxis have meters but do not use them, so that either I overpay, and am pissed off before I even start the journey, or that I pay the right price, and he is pissed off that I am not paying more. Either way, the journey is usually unpleasant because of the Dakar taxi man's insistence on bargaining for a price.

"There are a gang of Senegalese taxi men at the airport in Abidjan," said my man. "They stay there all day, and wait for a client who isn't from here. Then he makes up for the fact that he hasn't had a fare all day and stings her for it all at once. Once," he said, getting into the swing of it, "I was outside a hotel when a taxi appeared with a Chinese girl inside. He had told her it would cost 15,000cfa to the hotel from the airport, when really it should have cost 5,000 at the most, but that at the bridge she would have to have her bags searched by the police, and she had agreed to pay the cost of the bribe. Well, when they were stopped at a checkpoint, as he knew they would be, the Senegalese had paid the man off but when he got to the hotel, he said he had paid him 10,000 francs. When the girl refused to pay, the man took her bag. So I told the man I would take him to the police station."

My taxi driver went on with other stories about the Senegalese taxi mafia, concluding that it was all "pas bon".