Exploring Senegal's Vibrant Countryside by River Cruise

They say you can never go back, but that’s only true in part, and doesn’t apply to travel at all. Visit a place a second time, and you go with a seasoned pair of eyes, and all the buoyancy and confidence of familiarity. My second time in Saint-Louis, Senegal, I was better at fending off the touts, better at finding the best grub, better at dealing with the heat. I picked a better hotel—the La Résidence, with its antique whiff of cigar smoke, its old-world comforts, and its rooftop views of the city. And this time, I would go further—I’d be spending a week gliding up the Senegal River, 125 miles from Saint-Louis to the trading town of Podor, on a river cruiser, the Bou el Mogdad.

Saint-Louis is famous for its French Colonial style architecture—with its symmetry, high ceilings, and balconies—but the pastel hues of those buildings are as faded as their grandeur. Against it all, the Bou, freshly painted white as a sun-bleached bone, looks positively brand new. Yet the story of the Bou is also one of return; she is the prodigal daughter of Saint-Louis.

Built in a Dutch shipyard in 1950, the ship spent twenty years on the Senegal River, carrying people, mail, and goods back and forth from Saint-Louis to the port-city of Kayes in Mali. When the expanding road network put an end to that in the 1970s, the Bou left for greener waters, hauling goods and passengers first on Senegal’s Sine Saloum delta, then on the Casamance River, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone. Local entrepreneurship brought her back in 2005, refurbished her with 25 comfortable cabins, a plunge pool, a restaurant, a rooftop bar, and a library—turning it into the country’s unrivaled luxury vessel, maintaining a vintage glow.

After a preliminary night onboard—cocktails, dinner, and a welcome concert by a local band, we set out in the early morning, pushing against the drift of the caramel-brown river. Senegal was to starboard, Mauritania to port. The land was so flat that after four hours, the twin spires of the Grand Mosque of Saint-Louis were still visible.

We weren’t traveling fast—at three knots, we were going at little more than a brisk walking pace, a speed conditioned for simplicity. And it was that simplicity that made this return to Senegal so sweet. Gone was the bustle of Dakar, the crowds, noise, and smells of the city. There was only the soft thumping of the engine, and nowhere to be. I could spend hours reading my book and looking out over the countryside in quiet serenity.

To guide us along our passage, we had Ansoumana Badji, who’d been with the Bou since its return to the river. Over those hundreds of trips, he’d become a kind of a local celebrity, greeted as an emissary in every village and town we visited. He was the encyclopedic master key of the voyage, opening doors to school visits, village chiefs, local artisans, and wildlife. Add to that his natural capacity for languages; besides his mother tongue Jola, he could rattle off his lectures in fluent Wolof, French, English, and Spanish. By the end of our journey, his Portuguese and German were coming along, too.

The entire 125-mile journey, from Saint-Louis to Podor, crosses territory that was once part of the Waalo Kingdom, which covered an area the size of Hawai‘i’s Big Island. What looked in early November like dry, barren land of baobab and thorny acacia was regenerated by annual summertime overflows over the floodplain, the eponymous waalo, and filled the sluices cut into the earth to deliver water to the fields. Beyond the floodplain was the jeeri, the dry, sandy border of the Ferlo desert.

November through June, when the Bou operates, is the time of low water and bustling agricultural preparation. The banks were lined with garden plots—quadrants of onion, pepper, and tomatoes, drooping banana orchards, and thickets of sugar cane. Women hacked at the ground with mattocks. Herds of lanky zebu cattle the color of chocolate—white, dark, and milky brown—stood brisket-deep in the river while their minders watched us drift past. Occasionally there was a village, a collection of huts from which children would appear, running to the riverside to wave at the ship. Tall minarets of mosques marked the towns like spears stuck into the earth; occasionally the muezzin crackled to life to issue the adhān, the prayer-call to the faithful.

This blend of the pastoral and the religious made the Senegal River feel like an archaic vision of paradise, a strip of vivid life in an otherwise unforgiving environment. That’s what the first Portuguese visitors felt; on their maps, they marked it as a branch of the Biblical Gihon River, which flowed out of Eden.

That first afternoon we tendered into Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary, where we saw cream-feathered pelicans in the hundreds. Afterwards, following hot showers, we assembled on the top deck for pre-dinner drinks (beer, gin and tonic, and ‘mojitos’ made from the local variations of mint and lime), and dancing. The staff were the barometer of fun: cruise director Maimouma Guisse, masseuse Absa Mar, and barman Petit Bâ all got us on our feet and kept us fed and watered.

The following days on board kept a similar routine—a light breakfast followed by a morning excursion. One day we visited a school in Dagana; on another we visited the cows and their herdsman in a Puleh village, then took horse drawn chariots along the riverside. After lunch, the heat of the day usually meant a small siesta before we set out again for an outing, returning around 7 p.m. for cocktails and dinner. The cuisine was Senegalese with a flourish—the roasted fish and chicken yassa and grilled lobster were like what one would find in the best restaurants of Dakar. One night, we ate tomato salad, beef knuckle on a bed of rice and chickpeas, and warm chocolate cake with ice cream, all of it accompanied by French wines; another was a grilled king fish, so large it was carried in by four men.

Over the next five days, I followed our progress on a good paper map I had bought in a Saint-Louis bookstore. Past the Diama dam, past the sugarcane fields of Richard Toll, past the tiny Guidakar forest, past clumps of houses that didn’t appear on the map at all, to our penultimate night near Doué. That last night we dined on shore by the light of oil lamps, at long tables with white linen tablecloths. The Bou’s chef, Djiby Thiam, had gone on ahead, to slow-roast two couscous-stuffed muttons over a low fire. The meat slipped off the bone, and our silhouettes danced against a backdrop of darkened greenery. Afterward, children from the village gave a dance performance, accompanied by a local griot, West Africa’s oral storytellers who carry history in their songs.

Later that night, back on board, full of food and drink, I sat listening to “Vltava” from Smetana’s Má vlast symphonic poem, as I watched the river drift by. That music, about Europe’s Moldau River, fits here too. It wasn’t the Czech countryside I was hearing, but the sounds of Senegalese river life. In the dueling flutes I heard the flight of the birds through the reeds; in the rising strings was the heat and the wind that bore down from the Sahara; in the woodwinds was the knitting together of toil and celebration, a reality of life here along the Senegal River, but common to countrysides around the world. Work and play, song and dance, day and night, all of it a lovely return to simplicity. As a relic of an older era of travel, the Bou el Mogdad had been a part-luxurious, part-sentimental journey along this river. They say you can never go back—but you can go far enough.

If You Go

The Bou el Mogdad operates from November through April, when the weather is hot and dry. Trips between Saint-Louis and Podor take seven days, beginning in each town on a Saturday, and ending the following Friday. Excursions and activities for each are the same.

What It Costs

$900 USD for a standard cabin and $1300 USD for an en-suite “comfort” cabin, all-inclusive of food, drinks, transfers, and excursions. The Bou is equipped with free Wi-Fi. Spa-treatments, laundry, and gifts are available for purchase onboard.