Sunday, June 13, 2010

Dakar, Senegal




May 31, 2010

The flight from Paris to Dakar. Again on the window, sandwiched between that and a fat lady and her fat husband. As my fatigue increases my tether decreases. In fact, they were very nice, even though she coughed relentlessly throughout the flight. They were on their way to vacation in Senegal. But the real interest this flight was the view out the window. It was clear almost all the way so I could watch the landscape below and track the plane's progress on the GPS. France looked so green and bucolic. Small towns surrounded by green patchworks of fields, rivers meandering through. Each town appeared so circumscribed as though the French have not discovered (or discovered and rejected?) the idea of urban sprawl. I wanted to descend and stay in one of those villages.

Spain, of course, appeared much dryer and emptier. Then we crossed the Atlantic west of Gibralter. There the water was spotted with thousands of white dots. At first I thought they must be white caps (which didn't really make sense from our height), but then I could make out some larger vessels and realized that I was seeing a multitude of small boats in those blue waters off Spain and near the Strait of Gibralter. As the plane flew closer to Africa, the sea emptied except for one large ship, perhaps a container freighter.

But the most fascinating part to me was crossing the empty desert reaches of Morocco and then Western Sahara. It became empty desert with the most amazing formations of rock, mountain, and rivers of sand. Some of these formations looked like trees with a central trunk, large branches, with ever smaller and more ornate branchings. One becomes multiple. I can hardly think of anything more fundamentally archetypal--as though these images summed up the entire meaning of the universe. I took picture after picture out the plane window.

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