Visit to Bandia Game Reserve & Acrobaobab

For lots more photos of Bandia & Acrobaobab, see BOT at http://www.becauseoftime.org/ISD/ScenesDakar.html (Gallery 27)

Bandia Game Reserve is a 1500 hectare park located about an hour or so (absent of traffic congestion which, apparently, is virtually never, we were lucky) SE of Dakar.  The vast majority of animals are imports.  The park is certainly not anything of the scale of the great game reserves of east and southern Africa, but it offers a pleasant getaway from the city life of Dakar. 

We traveled with two of my students, Adam and Damir, and Damir's pop, Colin, who was born and raised in Malawi, and so offered an interesting perspective and a keen eye for details, from identifying snake and ant trackways, to understanding how to conduct ourselves around game.  (When I got a little too close to a rhino, note the top photo above, Colin cautioned me to back away  s l o w l y .)

The drive out of Dakar was congested, as traffic winds along the narrow tombolo (a geologic term referring to a sand spit) that links the peninsula to the mainland.  It is a gauntlet of tight, breath-gasping traffic courses (I hesitate to refer to them as lanes), where driving is more like canoeing along a river snagged with debris in the form of other vehicles, with hawkers approaching the car selling every imaginable thing, from bras to bags of juice.  The road south along the coast, adjacent to the location of the new airport, was much improved, relatively fast and smooth.  The landscape is generally flat, with some rolling hills, dotted along the way with baobabs.  It was still quite green from a relatively wet rainy season.

We picked up an English-speaking guide at the park headquarters, who accompanied us throughout the morning, picking out a route, left here, right there, along narrow dirt paths, on his cell phone to other guides, exchanging information about the location of animals.

We were quite lucky in the variety of the animals we were able to see, and in several locations were we able to get out of the car and walk around the game, as was the case with the park's two white rhinos and the giraffes.  

Our guide confided that there are lots of dangerous snakes in the park:  python, cobra, black mamba.  (You know, I'm just not a snake kinda guy)

A highlight of the day was lunch at the park restaurant, and the green vervet monkeys who nonchalantly hung out with us tableside.  We were also fortunate to see the crocodiles in an adjacent lake fed with fish scraps from the kitchen.  Very dramatic.  Cuddly they are not.

After Bandia, we drove over to Acrobaobab, essentially a ropes course suspended from baobab trees.  The boys spent a couple hours learning the procedures, clipping-in and out, traversing various routes, concluding with with a zip line run.  The park also has the equivalent of a rock wall, with handholds hammered up the side of a baobab tree.  Much fun, lots of smiles, and a few whines (ahem, Adam).