North and south in West Africa
North: the spirit of Saint-Louis Once we leave Dakar the country gets arid in a hurry. The landscape is dominated by stands of huge baobab trees, clusters of gnarled limbs reaching skywards from their absurdly thick trunks as if pleading for some kind of arboreal salvation. Some few are selected by a mysterious avian algorithm for group accommodations; I counted twenty separate nests on one particularly large baobab, while others all around it lay empty. There are also thorn trees not quite like East Africa's acacias, a thick-barked species from which foliage grows in sporadic dense clumps, etcetera; but this is unquestionably the land of the baobab. The road is excellent the whole way north, two smooth broad lanes with gravel shoulders. A wide swathe to either side is generally dusted with trash, mostly plastic bags, proportional to the density of the local population. We pass a children's hospital, a giant mosque towering above a bizarrely large roundabout, pale long-ho