An Outing to Lac Rose & Yoff Village

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Photo 1: boats along Lac Rose (note the hue of the lake);  photo 2:  a man poles out onto the lake to harvest salt;  photo 3:  W.'s mum poses with a sweetie-pie young lady selling tourist items (the girl introduced herself, and politely shook each of our hands;  later, after it was clear she'd not make a sale, she asked if I'd pay her for the photos I took, which I did, being a softy for cute kids);  photo 4:  a pirogue returns to sea after off-loading;  photo 5:  a horse and wagon wait to transport fish from a beached pirogue to the nearby market;  photo 6:  the Kumar family (pop is our IT Coordinator, mum teaches high school physics and chemistry); photo 7:  pirogues on Yoff Beach.  

  

A group of ISD staffers and visiting family drove out to Lac Rose, a popular tourist attraction 35 km northeast of Dakar.  Lac Rose is very salty, ten times saltier than the sea.   The name stems from the red color produced by salt-resistant cyanobacteria present in the lake, in concentration during the dry season.  Salt has been mined from the lake since the 1970s, and is used both for the canning of fish and export.  Men can be seen in the shallow water, shoveling salt into square-hulled boats, designed to carry up to a ton of weight.  Women are responsible for piling the salt on the shore to dry and bleach.  D. explained that women do not enter the salty water for its impact on their ovaries and thus their fertility.

We drove around the margin of the lake, pursued at every stop by vendors hawking their wares, then enjoyed a pleasant lunch poolside at a local hotel.

On the way back to Dakar, we stopped by the Lebu fishing village of Yoff, where we wandered through the fish market and down to the beach to watch the returning fishermen land their pirogues and unload the day's catch.