Touba Day 2

My friends and i spent the day wandering around the hot sandy streets of Touba barefoot. We started the day with a late breakfast with our host followed by a tour of the Grande Mosque. The building is very impressive and i have never been inside anything else so elaborate or ornate.

The Grande Mosque took decades to be built and is continually being added onto and expanded. Across the street we visited the library and saw many of the books written by Cheikh Amadou Bamba and learned more of his story.  Our guide said that he wrote over 7.5 tons of books and all of it could not be read in a lifetime.

As soon as we left the mosque we were mobbed by people begging for money, both young and old. So many kids surrounded our vehicles and were tapping our windows that some started to climb onto the roof rack to try to get our attention. We had to cut our visit short so no one would get hurt.

We drove north through a couple hundred potholed kilometers of the Senegalese countryside to reach Saint Louis at the North Western corner of the country. We passed millions of goats and cows and a couple camel herds in the peanut fields in the middle of nowhere.

Peanut field on the left

Saint Louis was a nice change of pace and we wandered out to the fishing village and ate dinner overlooking the river as the sun set.

the Senegal River