Back to St. Louis and Lampoul

Two weekends ago the environment class went on a field trip to St. Louis and Lampoul, but a lot of people not in the class, like me, tagged along. In St. Louis we visited a damn and learned about all of its environmental benefits and downsides.

The story of this plant is pretty cool. I forget most of the details, but I think the plant is causing a lot of problems for the environment, so this Senegalese women found out how to the use the plant to make fuel and is making a huge difference for the entire city while also making quite a profit.

We crossed the boarder and entered Mauritania! We were only there for about 5 minutes, but I'm still going to tell everyone I've been to Mauritania.

The we re-took the lovely off road adventure to the desert.

The other truck got stuck in the sand.

And they had this cute little dinner tent set up where they made us a really really good Yassa Poulet, which is one of my favorite dinners here. It is chicken with rice and this really good sauteed onion sauce.

And of course I rode a camel again :)

And then at night we made a camp fire and told riddles and jokes which was really fun.

The next day we woke up early for the sunset, but it was so foggy that we could barely even see the sun, let alone the sun set sky it usually lights up. We also went on a surprise 5 km hike through the desert to the beach. He told us it would be about 2 kilometers there and back, but that was not at all the case. It wouldn't have been too bad but my flip flop broke. It was fine for the deserty parts because you don't need shoes for sand anyway, but then the terrain turned to spiky plants and cactuses, like shown below, which was not fun. We came up with an inventive way to fix my shoe with a hair tie, but it was still hard to walk fast. When we reached a village, the professor literally bought the shoes off of a random woman in the village. I felt really bad at first, but the woman was very happy to sell her shoes and I realized we were probably paying way more for them than she bought them for anyways.

Given that the hike was so much longer than we thought, the beach was a perfect break to relax and cool down.