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.
From Lamin it runs 412 km to Lamin; allow about 7 h 33 of riding. The stops in between: 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.
Before the French and the British came to this stretch of the Gambia, the Portuguese were here, and the ruins of San Domingo are what is left of their presence. Portuguese traders and settlers moved up the river in the sixteenth century, married into local families and built a small community with a chapel, a handful of houses and storehouses on the north bank near Juffureh. They traded cloth, iron and beads for wax, hides, ivory and slaves, and their descendants, often of mixed ancestry, became middlemen for later European traders. What survives is a fragment of wall, the outline of a chapel or church and some brick foundations in a patch of ground under baobab and mango trees.
Read the complete Ruins of San Domingo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ruins of San Domingo 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 Ruins of San Domingo.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Ruins of San Domingo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Ruins of San Domingo. That is the ride.
Ruins of San Domingo → 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 → Ruins of San Domingo is 60 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.