Somewhere Between Here and There

WORDS : WIZARD CYCLING CREW

There is always a moment during a trip when you realise that the place you are in is very different from the one you imagined before leaving. For us, that happened pretty quickly in Senegal.

We had been talking about the country for years, mostly through our friendship with Modou and the Sunugal Association at C.I.Q. in Corvetto, Milan. We would meet there for events, eat Senegalese food, listen to music and spend hours talking.

Eventually, we felt like talking about Senegal wasn't enough anymore. We wanted to see it for ourselves. So we packed our bikes and went.

THE JOURNEY

10 DAYS / 10 VILLAGES / 1,000 KM

Eight of us travelled across Senegal by bike, moving from Dakar towards Thiès and then through villages, laterite tracks, salt flats and the Saloum Delta. We had already taken our bikes to some pretty remote corners of Europe, but this felt different from the beginning.

The road could change completely within a few kilometres. Tarmac became laterite, laterite became sand, and everything was covered in a fine layer of red dust. There were long empty stretches and then, suddenly, a village full of people, animals, shops and kids running alongside the bikes. We never really knew what the next few kilometres were going to look like.

BEYOND THE RIDE

The bike was the way we travelled, but it wasn't really the reason we went.

We wanted to meet the people we had heard about in Milan, see the places Sunugal works with and understand a little more about the relationship between the community in Senegal and the one they have built here.

Before leaving, we also started a fundraising campaign with our community and partners to support Sunugal. The trip was part of that relationship, rather than something separate from it.

HOOP

One of the things that took us a while to get used to was the traffic. In the cities there are very few traffic lights, and the roads seemed to work through a completely different kind of logic. Main roads flowed into smaller ones with merchants, mechanics, carts carrying vegetables, goats, horses, cows and children all moving around the same space.

There were speed bumps everywhere, partly because of the number of children around the roads and villages. After a few days, they became our entertainment. The roads could be long and monotonous, so whenever someone spotted one, they would shout “HOOOP!”

Then someone else would repeat it. Then another. Soon all eight of us were shouting “HOOOP” down the road.

The funny part was that people on the side of the road started joining in. We would hear a “HOOOP!” coming back from somewhere ahead, and suddenly the whole road was doing it.

We never planned it. It just became a thing.

THE LANDSCAPE

We had the old Paris–Dakar somewhere in the back of our minds before leaving: the dust, the dunes, the old motorbikes, the feeling of being completely exposed to the landscape.

Senegal obviously isn't the Paris–Dakar, and travelling by bicycle changes everything. You don't cross the landscape at speed. You spend hours inside it.

Red laterite, salt flats, enormous baobabs, Atlantic wind and faded buildings. You notice the details because you are moving slowly enough to stop whenever you want.

WHAT DO WE BRING HOME?

It's difficult to say what you bring home from a trip like this. We left with a route to follow, a distance to cover and a fairly vague idea of what we were going to find. We came back with a collection of much smaller things: conversations we didn't expect to have, faces we still remember, places where we stopped for no particular reason, and plenty of moments that made us realise how little we actually knew before coming.

Ten days gave us enough time to ride through a part of Senegal, but obviously nowhere near enough time to understand it. Maybe that is why the trip still feels unfinished. We went there because a relationship that started in Milan made us curious about what was on the other side of it, and the bikes gave us a way to move through that world slowly enough to actually meet it.

We came back with more questions than answers, which is probably a good reason to go somewhere in the first place.