CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 412 km round trip from Lamin - roughly 7 h 33 in the saddle. On the way it passes Saloum Delta, Wanar and back through Saloum Delta. It crosses from Gambia into Senegal - carry ID and check the toll rules. The line favours views over speed.
The Maurel Frères building at Albreda is a plain, solid trading house of the kind that once lined the West African coast, and it tells the commercial side of the Gambia story. Albreda was a French trading post from the late seventeenth century, wedged into a river that the British otherwise controlled, and for roughly a hundred and fifty years the French and British argued about it. France finally gave up its claim to the little enclave in 1857, but the French firms stayed. Maurel Frères, a trading house from Bordeaux, had a presence along this coast, and its warehouse here, built of brick and stone with a pitched roof, handled the trade that replaced the slave trade: groundnuts, beeswax, hides and rubber.
Read the complete Maurel Frères Building write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Maurel Frères Building is where the day begins. Next is Saloum Delta.
The Saloum Delta is where the river Saloum and its arms dissolve into a maze of mangrove channels, sandbanks and low islands before meeting the Atlantic, about halfway between Dakar and the Gambian border. It is a flat, watery, shimmering place, where the horizon is a line of mangroves and the only things standing taller than a man are baobabs and the occasional village water tower. Locals call the narrow creeks bolongs, and they wind through the delta like veins.
Read the complete Saloum Delta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saloum Delta comes up about 60 km into the recorded legs. Next is Wanar.
The strangest stones in Africa may be the lyre-shaped ones at Wanar. The site, in the Sine-Saloum region of central Senegal, is among the largest groups of megaliths on the continent, with dozens of circles made of tall, rounded laterite pillars, and among them stand a few unusual forked stones, shaped like a lyre or a letter Y, with a notch cut in the top. Archaeologists think they were made by deliberately splitting the stone, and the form seems to echo the shape of a branched tree. Nobody can say for sure what the shape meant, which is part of the appeal. The stones at Wanar form part of the Senegambian stone circles, listed as World Heritage in 2006.
Read the complete Wanar write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 207 km into the recorded legs you reach Wanar. Next is back through Saloum Delta.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saloum Delta write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Saloum Delta, late in the day. Next is Maurel Frères Building.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Maurel Frères Building write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Maurel Frères Building. That is the ride.
Maurel Frères Building → Saloum Delta is 60 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Saloum Delta → Wanar is 147 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Wanar → back through Saloum Delta is 145 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Saloum Delta → Maurel Frères Building is 60 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.