Like a pond of blood

This is Lake Retba, also known as Lac Rose, situated in a desert to the northeast of the Senegalese capital Dakar. The water here does not appear blue as most water bodies do. Indeed the colour changes with the season and with the time of the day. It changes from light purple to deep scarlet […]

This is Lake Retba, also known as Lac Rose, situated in a desert to the northeast of the Senegalese capital Dakar. The water here does not appear blue as most water bodies do. Indeed the colour changes with the season and with the time of the day. It changes from light purple to deep scarlet pink, thus the ‘rose’ in the name of this lake.
At the time I visited, around noon on a sunny day in February, the water looked strangely reddish and thick. Somebody described it as looking like a “giant strawberry milkshake.”
This unusual colouring is said to be caused by the salinity of the lake. Even a quick dip here could be damaging to the skin because of the very high salt content in the water.
Many local people come here to excavate salt. But before walking into the lake, they have to rub some kind of shea butter on their skin to prevent tissue damage.
It’s not all salty business here, though. This is a tourist attraction as well.
I was in Senegal for a conference organised by Turkish faith-based organisations. First on our programme schedule was an evening reception, which would feature speeches in French—and there would be no interpreters for people like me who do not understand the language. Next would be a long day of paper presentations by 25 scholars from around Africa, the United States and Europe, mostly in French but this time there would be interpreters.
The conference was aimed at exploring dialogue and cohesion in a globalised world, and was convened by the Turkish Ebru Magazine and the Atlantic Turkish-Senegalese Association in conjunction with the Senegalese Ministry of Education.
Visit to Lac Rose was not listed among our activities. So it came as a surprise gift. And it was also an auspicious way of kick-starting what would inevitably be marathon sessions of academic discussions.
Thus, on our first day in Senegal we set out to Lac Rose for what turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the three-day trip.
We arrived at Lac Rose by bus from Dakar, driving through kilometres of un-tarred, cattle-route looking roads. It was a drive of about an hour and a half from our hotel, the King Fahad Palace Hotel.
Quad biking
As we drove along, we passed through a city whose filling stations had no queues like the ones that have become common in Abuja. Yet, Senegal is a net importer of crude oil.
Most of the residential homes here have no fences at all, not to talk of electric fences. No private security guards and no Alsatian dogs keeping sentry. Around the dusty city, you see only a few policemen in the streets. Obviously this is a city with low level of violent crime.
Towards the outskirts of Dakar, I noticed that horse-driven carts are the common vehicles of conveying goods. They carry virtually every load—from sacks of oranges to bags of grains.
There are almajirai here as well. When we stopped over at a village, some young street beggars holding bowls approached us, mumbling something in a language I did not understand, most likely Wolof.
By the time we arrived at Lac Rose resort, most of us in the bus appeared groggy after the bumpy journey. There were few interesting things to see along the way.
Luckily, some fun was awaiting us ahead.
On arrival, some young men were waiting for us at a resort a short distance from the lake itself. They fuelled and prepared quad bikes that we were to use for a ride into the desert.
Minutes later, all was set. We rode in a convoy of quad bikes, each of us driving one, towards the shores of Lac Rose. We then moved round the lake, stopping at intervals to appreciate the scenic beauty.
Dotted along the shores of the lake were canoes of salt excavators, and hills of salt. Imagine the captivating contrast between the hills of white salt popping up just by the pink water! In the water, half naked men “fished” out the salt to be transported ashore.
The lake covers an area of about 3 square kilometres. We rode round it in the windy, dry condition. As the large tires of our bikes pummelled into the piles of fine coastal sand, salty dust rose into the sky and a lot of it settled on our bodies and dresses. I did not realise it at the time that everything I was wearing, as well as uncovered parts of my body, had gathered the salt dust.
Two hours after, we were on our way back to Dakar for the start of the conference that brought us here in the first place. But for the adventurous among us, the visit to Lac Rose was the main event.
The trip to Senegal was sponsored by the Ufuk Dialogue Foundation.