May 8th & 9th – Seville’s Fantastic Feria

As the ship finished its docking manoeuvres on the Guadalquivir at 11pm, our sensible thoughts of going to bed after dinner were swiftly changed by the mass of bright lights and the muffled sounds of music and jollity we could see and hear floating across the river. They were calling us not to miss the chance to visit the sensory overload that is Seville’s Feria de Abril – the time when Seville’s already party-mad population, lose themselves in a joyful riot of music, dancing, eating and drinking.

We were lucky enough to know someone who had a caseta (one of the private tents), so we were able to experience the Feria as the Sevillanos do, and join in with the eating, drinking, and (on Tracy’s part) – the dancing. All the women were dressed up in their traditional Flamenco dresses, and the whole place was buzzing. 3 fun-filled hours passed in a blur, and with the party still buzzing it was time to stagger back to the ship at 2.30am.

Understandably it was a slow start to the following morning, but it was nice to reacquaint ourselves with our favourite city, and experience Seville’s laid-back charms. Then, it was time to return to the fair to see the action at day time.

It was no less colourful, and with all the people parading around on beautifully-groomed horses or in shiny horse-drawn carriages, there was a really exotic air to the fairground. I did wonder if the ship’s first-time visitors to Seville were thinking that the city always behaved like this, but even the party-loving Sevillanos can’t keep up this level of sleeplessness and hedonism for more than a week.   

We had a great time at the fair, and then we headed into town for a bit of shopping and tapas. But, it appeared that most of the shop owners and workers were too busy partying to open, so we had to settle for tapas instead. Unfortunately, there was a bull fight on, so pretty much every bar was showing it on TV, which wasn’t great for a pair of animal lovers like ourselves. However, as we’d just bumped into a couple of the bullfighters leaving their hotel on the way to the bull ring, there was a grim fascination to watching the bloody action through our fingers, and wishing that it was a more equal fight.

Anyway, as ever, we had a wonderful time in Seville – it’s impossible not to in this fantastic city. I can’t wait to come back here for a few weeks in October.

May 7th – Breaking-the-Fast in Casablanca

When you visit Casablanca coming from Europe, you can be hit by its sense of chaos. But, when you’ve just come from West Africa, it feels like an oasis of calm, and a lesson in organisation. Because, the city is like a stepping stone between Africa and Europe, a halfway house between the First and the Third World.

Actually, visiting on the first day of the holy month of Ramadam, was not perfect timing. People are understandably a little subdued – not surprising considering that they have to fast during daylight hours (which are about 14 hours at this time of year) – and most of the restaurants and cafés, plus some of the shops are shut.

However, we had a nice time exploring the Nouvelle Ville that had been laid out by the colonial French to look like a European town – an atmosphere that it retains to this day. We concentrated on visiting Place Mohammed V, the town’s main square which was being renovated last time we were here – it was now looking pretty good, and the ground-breaking new Grand Theatre (CasArts) building was nearing completion.

Then we took the new tram system to the beach, where we were meeting some friends for lunch. It was cheap, clean and highly efficient, while our fellow passengers were all very friendly. On the way, we passed through a massive new development outside of the city centre – a new “Finance City” where large numbers of skyscrapers and upmarket apartment blocks are being built on what was once scrubland. If they can find enough businesses to fill the offices, and enough well off people to occupy all those apartments, then Casablanca will be doing pretty well.

When we got off the tram, I had never realised that Casablanca had such a beautiful beach, but I was very impressed by what I saw. I couldn’t work out if the beach was pretty much empty because - a) it was Ramadan; b) the locals aren’t into beaches or exposing too much flesh; or c) it was just that it was during the day and mid-week – probably a combination of all three.

After a promenade down the beach, our lovely friends Herve and Colette had somehow found a restaurant that would open to create a feast for about 40 of us from the ship – it felt a little wrong to be eating so well while the rest of the city was fasting, but what can you do?

In fact, that evening, just as we were resting our stomachs, another friend Sidney, had managed to find a restaurant that was open at night time; so, we pretended like we’d been observing Ramadam all day and joined a delicious break-fast buffet.

It was ironic that it turned out that I have rarely eaten so much food, on this day of all days, but if we ignore that, I have to say that I’m really impressed by the direction that Casablanca is going. Our driver in the evening told us that he thought that Morocco was a giant that was finally waking up, and given the amount of construction we saw around the city, it’s waking up pretty quickly.

May 3rd – Dakar – A Colourful City of Contrasts

Just driving out of Dakar from the port brought home the best and the worst of this crazily busy city. What we saw from the coach window was a jarring mixture of the modern and the medieval, an unsettling juxtaposition of the shiny First World and the scruffy Third World. As we drove along smart toll highways that wouldn’t look out of place in France, we passed by dusty unpaved streets that can’t have been improved in the last 100 years.

The roads were packed with cars – from clapped out old Renaults, to modern SUVs. We saw crazily overcrowded minibuses with people grimly hanging off the sides, sharing the roads with ancient horse and carts. It reminded me of Egypt – a country that is similarly struggling to adjust to the modern world, and where society appears to be just as polarised.

We were heading to the Pink Lake – a lake that didn’t appear to have got the memo, and so looked more dirty brown than pink. But, we had a tremendous adventure along the way. At the lake, we transferred into a battered 4x4 truck that must have been at least 50 years old. It took our driver 5 minutes to hotwire the truck, as its battery laboured to even turn over. When I suggested that maybe we should get a truck that actually worked, I was told that this one was fine.

But, what we were greeted with was an amazing sight. The salt pans were being worked by a team of incredibly hard-working people filling huge buckets with salt from the lake and then carrying them on their heads to dump them onto great piles of salt. It was an almost medieval spectacle of the hardest of hard labour – the buckets weighed about 10 kilos (22 pounds) and they were doing a bucket load every couple of minutes. When I heard that they were earning maybe a couple of dollars a day, it made me feel very humbled. Suddenly our lives in the West seem very easy.

Then, when it was time to go, rather predictably, our ancient truck wouldn’t start. Then, the replacement truck (obviously their second best model) they sent over arrived with a flat tyre. This was just about able to give us a jump start, and we set off into the bleak sand dunes worrying that if we ever stopped, we would be marooned there forever.

We had a fascinating visit to a dusty sand-filled village where it seemed like there were twice as many children under 10 than there were adults, before we had a hair-raisingly bumpy ride across a beautiful beach and through some vertiginous dunes. Once we were back on the road, it became obvious that the bumpiness of our ride wasn’t just because of the rough conditions – our tyre wasn’t just flat, it had pretty much sheared off the wheel.

The state of our truck seemed to encapsulate my impressions of Senegal – exciting, colourful and wonderfully adventurous if you wanted to take it on, but woefully under-invested in, and malfunctioning to the point of total breakdown.

On our journey home, we were treated to a fabulously wild “Lion Dance” by some intimidatingly huge men – the audience of us 14 and about 500 enthusiastic villagers were treated to a wonderful if slightly bewildering spectacle.


Finally, the day was rounded off by a fantastic evening “Silversea Experience” on Goree Island, the old slave island off Dakar – as ever it was a sensory overload in a really magical location.

May 2nd – A More Friendly Welcome in Banjul

Visiting Banjul in The Gambia normally comes as a more welcoming environment after some of our other more uptight West African ports.

It’s hard to say why the welcome is friendlier here – the place is poorer than Ghana, and the infrastructure is in a worse state, but people are more willing to smile and interact with foreigners. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a bitter independence struggle here in the Gambia – the British almost had to force independence on the locals. Maybe they’re more used to foreigners because of the long established beach holiday industry here. Or, maybe they’re just a bit happier, especially since the shadow of autocracy was lifted when the dictator President Jammeh was ousted in 2017.

Certainly, Jammeh didn’t leave this tiny country with very much – he managed to spirit away something in the region of $1 billion from a woefully poor country, but people seem to be working hard to improve their lot.

I joined a tour that did a serene boat trip down the wetlands outside the capital Banjul (where we saw plenty of huge pelicans), and paid a visit to the Abuko National Park. On a fun walk around the rough trails of the park, we we saw plentiful birdlife and some huge crocodiles sitting still as statues by the side of a lake.

Gambia doesn’t have much – beyond groundnuts and tourism, there aren’t many revenue streams here, but it appears to be doing its best. For me, the biggest problem seems to be the huge number of people in a society that hasn’t got enough work to go around. Without some population control, this little country’s biggest export may continue to be people – people willing to uproot their lives and take the dangerous journey to Europe.

April 30th – Accra’s Haves and Have Nots

Accra (Ghana’s capital city) is another place where you get to see the progress that Africa has made over the last decade, but also where you see the many challenges that it is struggling to overcome.

From the port, you pass by such a variety of dwellings, shops and streets of all qualities – from walled communities of upmarket villas and western style shopping malls, to run down shacks, informal market stalls and dirt roads that make you question whether you’re really in a capital city.

It was the contrasts between the haves and the have-nots that struck me most here – driving through Jamestown (one of Accra’s oldest district) showed us probably the poorest living standards we’ve seen on this World Cruise. The guides wouldn’t let the ship’s tours off at the scheduled stop at the Jamestown Lighthouse, because according to him, “the people aren’t friendly here”. Whether he was being over-cautious or not, it was difficult to say from looking out of a coach window, but there it did seem to be a fairly deprived area.

Elsewhere, we got a very warm welcome – particularly at the rather bizarre coffin maker’s workshop, where we saw how the Ghanaians like to be buried in colourful coffins carved into shapes that reflected their lives and interests. So, you could be buried in anything from a bic biro, an aeroplane, a cocoa bean or a beer bottle (my own personal choice).

We visited the impressive Kwame Nkrumah Memorial, where I pondered on what Nkrumah would have made on the progress made since independence in 1957. His country has enormous potential – oil and mineral wealth, a decent infrastructure, and a well-educated people – it just needs a chance to turn potential into reality.

April 29th – Touring Takoradi

It’s difficult to know whether some time spent in Takoradi makes you feel optimistic or pessimistic about this part of Ghana. As you explore, you see plenty of poverty and ramshackle homes, but you don’t seem to see any hunger or hopelessness – in fact, many of the people appear to be eating rather too well.

The people are generally friendly, but there’s a reserve to them, which coupled to a complete aversion to anyone taking phots of them (even if you’re just taking a general shot), can come across as a little unwelcoming.

We visited the chaotic fish market in Sekundi, which was a riot of colour and fishy smells – the non-stop action would have been very photogenic if you weren’t made to feel uncomfortable taking photos.

Next, we went to meet a village chief which was a very interesting experience. He was an eloquent man who tried to explain how the social structures and community loyalties that he represents, just don’t fit very well into this post-colonial world of national governments. Even calling him a “chief” or a “king” didn’t really translate his position – he said that technically, he was a god, and that even we were his subjects. I think I came out of it more confused about his role than when I went in, but hearing his perspective on the world was fascinating.

Next, we drove through the sensory overload that was Takoradi’s street market. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a busier market, as our coach crawled through the scrum of colourfully-dressed people, our ears were bombarded by music, by preachers and by promoters, while people either waved at us or scowled at us if they thought we had a camera in our hands. One bus had an onion lobbed at it because a stall holder thought someone was taking a photo, while I was merely shouted at for daring to have my window open.

Our final stop was at a local hotel where we were given a much-needed cold drink (it was absolutely roasting today) before we watched an energetic show of dancing and pulsating drum music – how they kept their efforts going in the energy-sapping heat was a marvel.

So, I can confirm that Takoradi is an incredibly lively but slightly crumbling place, that alternates between welcoming and intimidating, and where the sights are never less than fascinating (if only they didn’t mind us photographing them!). But, that’s the great thing about travel – being taken out of our comfort zones, and visiting parts of the world that we wouldn’t normally get to see.