The Sixty Cent Shave

What is this, I come back from a week long trip traveling through places that most people only see in those exoctic magazines. Places that remind you bitterly of that friend, you know the one whose parents are doctors, businesmen, anything that lets them travel, that went to some exoctic far away location, some place that's more of a story than a place. So then why do I choose to write about something as typical, boring, unattractive and, if I may, personal (people don't usually talk opening about their shaving habits, and if they do it is never in a wanted conversation) topic.

The sixty cent shave, it took just enough time for the short, white bearded Senegalese man less than one minute to use his electric clippers to cut off my beard, my mustache. What does the sixty cent shave mean? Is it a social commentary? I mean those booths were old men sit you down and give you a haircut and a shave still exist, think about all of those movies with old men sitting around barber shops, with the straight razor and the strop were they wet the razor before they shave you. These things exist here, in fact many people set up little informal shops on the street, things like a chair, a mirror and a small sign showing the same typical haircuts. On top of all of this the fact that it costs only sixty cents, (300 F CFA). Or is it just a rhetorical devise, a literary form, kind of like Proust's cookie (how is that for a literary reference), that allows me to talk about other things, a way to look through a situation without really touching it, using it like a window, like a ledge to dive into other areas, areas much more exotic, dark and as of yet unexplored.

Palmeran, even the name of this place gives you this thought about it. I mean "palm" is in the name, it seems almost gawdy it works out so well. Palmeran, where in fact there are lots of palm trees, sand, small African children wrestling ("la lutte" in French, "beri" in wolof, a typical type of wrestling that involves usually more dancing than actual wrestling), fish, fishing boats and the enourmous sun that just seems to tan these memories with brightness. This place is the palm wine capital of Senegal, although we never actually saw any palm wine here, it makes sense. Its exotic, typically exotic, with the large beaches, wavy ocean, the sun, oh god the sun is always out, always hot. This was the first stop on our trip, the first step in a large stride across islands, much of the middle part of the country, until we ended up sitting on a beach with the wind clifss and a hotel that seemed much to expensive to cost only 8 dollars a night (but we will come back to this later).

Palmeran, getting there was an adventure in itself. Sitting in the minicar, basically a smaller version of a Jegan-Jay. The minicar to Samba Dia, a garage town, like so many of the slightly larger towns in this area, built up around a garage, around an area where cars stop and let people off, people get on, but its rare to see people stay, and the people you see sitting, the residence seem more like characters than people, they are the typical mother selling peanuts and home made baked goods, the small girl asking for money, the old men sitting with their aviator sunglasses and large boubous, sitting staring at the world thinking whatever old thoughts happend to compel them to stare at the world from behind those dark frames. Samba Dia to Palmeran in the same Minibus and then we get off as a random Palmeran. There are four! Four cities with the same name, and they aren't necessarily within walking distance of each other. The only difference is the nicknames that are attached to each of them. Palmeran geej, Palmeran ngaleen.

We don't know these things, we get off at the first one, squinting into the sun that seems so much brighter than Joal. Is this exotic, there is a road, the typical red dust that characterizes all of the roads in Senegal, this rust color that stains your clothes, covers your face, and clogs your nose so that every time you sneeze this red blood color covers your kleenex. We can hear the beach though, and we feel the wind from the ocean. Its shooting through narrow alleys of the city, seeming to whisper to us from behind this wall of a city that is hiding something much bigger than itself, hiding this ocean that is so impossibly big, something that can't stay hidden. So we need a room, a place, some sort of base camp.

The campement has been shut down. The government shut it down due to its old age, the lack of running water (at least not in the majority of the buildings). It does look old, the painted animals on the side of the little huts are faded, polkadotted with decay. We bribed some local children (using the cookies I bought in Joal) to show us here. "The next campement is a half hour walk down the road". Luckily one of the men there shows us to a Frenchman's house that operates as an auberge when his family isn't vacationing there. "Robert Toubab", the eccentric French man, grandpa age, who mumbles but laughs, talks constantly, mostly about nothing. I feel like I am staying at a grandparents house. He rents us all rooms, the same price as would be the cost of the campement. Seperate rooms with sinks in the rooms, and RUNNING WATER. I forget the comfort of things like this, the creature comforts of getting your water from a faucet instead of taking a cup full our of a basin or bucket. We sink right into these things, we are thirsty with change, thirsty with acting as toubab as possible. This trip is a new one, a trip to forget, to act ridiculously American, be selfish, intentionally not talk to Senegalese people, not have to tell someone to come eat with us if they pass. We are tired, I am tired, but right now we are sitting and relaxing letting the salt air push all of these worries out of our air, letting the breeze help us laugh this fatigue out burst by burst.

We head into village for provisions: cookies, wine, soda. We horde these things, speak quietly to everyone we see, we don't want them to catch on, don't want them to know too much, then they'll be interested. They'll invite us over for dinner, we'll stay for hours, have to spend the night, wake up shower with a bucket, drink tea, eat lunch, watch T.V. Instead we go back eat our cookies, drink the soda, save the wine for later and head to the beach. The sun shoots into us, it shoots through our skin and warms our blood. We mostly sit on the beach, venture into the water occassionally, but sit and stare at the ocean. We have no obligations, we have nothing to do but breathe in a scene, to wait for nothing elese to happen.

Palmeran. Two days with "Robert Toubab" and his house, where wasps build nests on the bathrooms, where the Senegalese people pass just to ask us if we want to buy ANYTHING, they will go and search for it for us. The first two days of speaking English, speaking Serer, which although it is Senegalese it is better than Wolof, it is new, exciting. We stumble over these things, they bring back memories of Marlodge, the small Serer village I visited a long time ago, of Simal, another small serer village. For the others they think of Mbamb, a small village where we will end up watching some festival appear out of nowhere, but for now we are in Palmeran, where we do nothing particularly extraordinary, we do typical things, lay on the beach, don't necessarily act like tourists or like Senegalese. We are lying on this beach between two bodies, between the ocean that brought us here (well not actually the ocean, more of an airplane, but hell it sounds so poetic), and the land that we've come to know. Like usual we are lying right in the middle of these two extremes.

It is out of this that shoots us to Marlodge, well first to Samba Dia again and then to Dangan, and then a three hour wait for the boat leaving to Marlodge. We wait, like usual, sitting on a bench in front of a store, on a bench with some Senegalese women selling cashews and cashew fruits (I never knew there were fruits that came from the same tree as cashews), these Doctor Seuss like creations, these bizarres pepper like monstrousities that cost less than 10 cents each (although I never got the courage to try one). We have to deter the local canoe men, they try to get us to take their boats which are easily three times as expensive, because "time is money". They assume we are impatient tourists, that we will wait but eventually come around, after the first hour huff and walk back and forth scanning the horizon for the next boat. Instead we sit and wait, talking amongst ourselves and letting the delta breeze blow on.

Marlodge is an island, there is no way there except for boat. There is no bridge. There is no spot where one can walk because of a sand bar. We have to wait, we have to wait to take a boat through the delta, which seems more like a string of rivers than a delta, than the ocean pushing into the continent. These long windind arms that are lined with mangroves. The birds. The small men (small because they are so distant) paddling around their hand carved canoes, pulling their fishing nets from the water. This is just getting to Marlodge. This is just crossing the delta. Once we are in Marlodge, things stay surprisingly the same, you see all the pirogues literring the shores, the horse carts (because there are no cars on Marlodge). Marlodge is cut off, no cars, no roads (at least not in the normal sense, more liek paths), no noise after dark. All the electricity comes from solar panels, and at night you can see all the stars.

Here we stay with a friend of the family, a Senegalese man that was dating a 60 year old French women, a women easily twice his age. He brings us to "his" house, which is the house that the French women constructed here, so that when she was done working she could retire to Senegal. The friend, Ferdinand, tells us that he broke off his relationship with the French women, the "Française" as I call her, because of problems, namely that he couldn't have a real family with her. He still watches over her house though, still lives like he used to, as if he had half a share in this house.

We do pretty much the same things here, just sit around and try not to do much. We go swimming, this time not in the ocean with its giant waves and hot sand, but on a small river, where we pluck mussels from the river bottom to cook later (which we do!). The current pushes us down the river, its surprisingly strong. We swim and then wait, wait through the night, stare at the stars and get ready to continue, to take the next step in our journey towards Mbamb, a trip that will take more time than it should have.

Mbamb and Toubab Diallo, the next step in our week long journey, but not now, a little later, I have run out of time at the cyber.

Let's hope that it is sooner than later.