the St Louis jazz festival take 2

I went to the St Louis jazz festival back in May 2010, and whilst this year's was smaller - due to the lack of tourists allowed into the country at present, I guess - I thought it worthwhile taking the four-hour trip up there to catch some of the action.  Saturday night was the highlight, with Vieux Farka Toure followed by Baaba Maal on the official stage, and Cheikh Lo playing later as one of the 'off festival' acts.  As with my previous visit, I didn't get to bed until 4am.

It's a great festival - with different acts playing all through the night in at least a dozen different locations - but frustrating as there is no centralised information as to who is playing where, and even when you spot the posters on walls, the advertised times of the performances bear no relation to reality.  So if you try to plan a schedule, you can end up seeing just the first ten minutes (or even just the warming up) of each artist before you rush away to catch the advertised start time of the next.  Much better really to just wander about with little-to-no specific plan.  I would love to be able to re-live the festival weekend so as to catch a different set of acts!

There is also a festival parade, although again, with no useful information available.  There was no advertised route, and people I asked didn't even know if the parade was going to happen - but finally, two hours later than advertised, a couple of floats came along the street, accompanied by a few of the advertised 'false lions' that I had been keen to see.  This picture was taken by a friend of mine, whilst I struggled as ever with a camera which insists on cycling through its settings menu whenever I want to take a picture with it:

Of course there were also the beautiful old streets, with their decaying old buildings, to wander around in the mornings (how I envy people whose body clocks don't wake them at around the same time every day, regardless of what time they got to sleep).  Plus the city is considerably cheaper than the capital (taxis around a quarter of the Dakar price, and some ridiculously cheap restaurants), and whilst the festival was held a month later than usual, the rainy season hadn't yet started, and so I walked the streets, soaking up the atmosphere and admiring the old buildings.

What was sad was seeing the signs of severe coastal erosion on the outer island of Guet Ndar.

Apparently the sea now comes 200-300m further inshore than it did some 20-30 years ago, and you can clearly see the effect, with the back walls of what were once rooms now exposed to the elements, the foundations also exposed.  & this community already, apparently, the most densely populated area in the whole of West Africa. Thankfully, work is now underway to build up the sand into a long 'sea wall', which will give some protection although I can't see that it will last all that long.

The weekend ended far too quickly, and I did at one stage ask myself why I am living in Dakar rather than in St Louis!