Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things. - Tahir Shah

25 January 2020, Keur Ayip Guѐye
Auberge Lamba Oundiga Malila 12,000XOF (R293)

By 09:00 this morning, we were in the taxi we had arranged yesterday evening and on our way to Sine Ngayѐne, one of the four Unesco World Heritage sites encompassing the Senegambia stone circles*. Sine holds 53 of the 93 circles incorporated by Unesco, a drop in the ocean of over 1,000 stone circles in this area. Essentially, Sine is a cemetery, where the stone circles originally enclosed tumuli (graves), now flattened by erosion. The stones at Sine are shorter on average than those we saw at Wassu a couple of days ago, but the overall impact at Sine is more impressive. Enclosed by a low wall, the circles lie close to each other on the dusty plain, yellow grass rustling in the wind, the sound of donkeys braying mournful in the distance.
It took us about an 30 minutes from Keur Ayip to the village of Ngayѐne where we stopped for a breakfast of a sort of potato stew served in a long bread, and milky coffee. Then the road deteriorated into a narrow dirt track, uneven and dusty, travelled almost exclusively by horse-drawn carts and the odd autocycle, and jumping with locusts. Another 30 minutes or so brought us to the dusty village closest to the site. Here our driver had to track down the keeper of the key, who came on his autocycle to take our money and let us in and point out the one double circle at the site, saying a king was buried in the centre and his queen between the inner and outer circle. Speculation only?
On our way “home”, we paused again in Ngayѐne to buy soft drinks, and our driver obligingly stopped on a couple of occasions to allow me out of the car to photograph the unusual baobabs growing in profusion here (and in The Gambia). A woman with two little ones waved at our driver as he passed her by, clearly wanting a lift. He continued driving as we had booked the car for ourselves, but we said he should pick her up. The older child was afraid of me, sadly, and would not sit close to me, but when our driver then stopped to pick up a man on his way to the mosque, the child had to sit on my lap, his mother’s being occupied by a sleeping sibling. I could feel the tension throughout his body … horrible. Just before setting off on our journey this morning, a small boy came over to shake Charl’s hand, took one look at me, and burst into tears. Unsettling, though amusing too.
Back in town I had my hair cut by a barber in a tin shack at the back of the bus station. A young man, cutting a white woman’s hair for the very first time, whose father died when he was just six months and who loves and supports his mother. “Life is difficult in Senegal. Senegal is poor”, he said.
In the evening we dined at a restaurant near our auberge on fried (dried) chicken with a lettuce salad and French fries.
*Stonehenge they are not, but the Senegambia stone circles are worth a visit (or two) nonetheless. Erected for 1500 years beginning the third century BC, the circles cover an area north of the River Gambia that is 350km long and 100km wide. There are 1,053 circles comprising 28,931 stones, the biggest concentration of stone circles anywhere in the world. 93 circles are incorporated in four Unesco World Heritage Sites, two in The Gambia, two in Senegal. The stones were excavated from laterite quarries and average two metres in height; some weigh up to 7 tons. Though the circles are associated with burial sites and rituals, little seems to be known about exactly why they were constructed or by whom.