It is easy to pinpoint the exact moment when I realized West Africa was ready to shed its backpacker haven image and embrace a new kind of traveler. I was sitting on a beach at the mouth of the Saloum River, a smoky grilled oyster in one hand, glistening in its charred shell, a glass of muscadet in the other.
I was in the Sine Saloum Delta, a glorious melding of river, earth and sea just north of Senegal's border with the Gambia, where a handful of hotels have sprung up in the last five years, drawing a new set of travelers.
West Africa has for decades been the province of backpackers — the place to go for life-altering journeys filled with US$2-a-night hotels, interminable, jouncing journeys in the back of bush taxis on rutted back roads and gorp for lunch and mystery meat stew for dinner. I made many such journeys myself as a high school student living in Ghana in the early 1990s. But the big-money tourists went east or south for the big game safaris and the luxury resorts on the Indian Ocean and the Cape.
But in West Africa today, in places like Ghana, Benin, Mali and especially Senegal, travelers are searching for the other Africa — more Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor than Isak Dinesen and Ernest Hemingway — are finding new and surprisingly sumptuous options.
The Sine Saloum Delta region of Senegal is perhaps the best embodiment of the trend, mostly around the town of Palmarin, a collection of villages on a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Saloum River. On a recent trip to the delta, my partner, Candace Feit, and I spent a few days comparing two very different but quite luxurious lodges that have sprouted between the river and the sea and plying the mangrove-lined tributaries in massive wooden boats, spotting birds and eating oysters plucked straight from the brackish water.
Our first stop, the Royal Lodge, was a spare-no-expense collection of sprawling suites in thatch-roof bungalows beside a broad beach. The cavernous suites were divided into three spaces of equal gigantitude: a sitting room, bedroom and a showstopper bathroom, complete with a whirlpool tub that looked big enough for a family of four.
With its infinity pool, swim-up bar and oceanfront location, the Royal Lodge is a state-of-the-art beach resort, but few people come here for the beaches, which are nice enough, but nothing compared with the breathtaking scenery. The delta is a place of ethereal beauty: the still, snaking branches of mangrove-lined tributaries, thick with herons, ibises and pelicans; the eerie stands of baobab trees, those mighty symbols of Africa with their gnarled, finger-like branches; the spongy expanses of marshy earth crisscrossed by the pitchfork feet of a million birds.
With that in mind, we hired a horse-drawn cart and a guide named Simon Mbissane Ndiaye through the hotel to take us on a ride through the countryside to a pirogue, a type of wide, colorful fishing boat used all over Senegal, for a cruise. Our cart quickly veered off the main road and into the Palmarin nature preserve, a vast and rich tapestry of plants and animals.
We weaved our way through an otherworldly landscape of salt pits, huge craters dug by local villagers — mostly women — who harvest the crystalline hunks that cling to the earth as water evaporates. Each pool has a different hue. Some are the color of melted butter, others deep ocher, still others in shades of pistachio and peach, a bizarre and mesmerizing palette created by soil, minerals and microscopic plants.
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