Saly

My week of slightly surreal Senegal experiences is continuing. I’m spending a couple of days at a place called Saly, which is on the coast. It’s the country’s main tourist centre, known here as Senegal’s Riviera. We’re here for a proposal development workshop – it’s easier to bring everyone together from different offices around the country to work intensively from early in the morning till after midnight for a few days to get the project designed and written up.

The place we’re staying in is beautiful. Bougainvillea, frangipani and coconut trees surround the lush gardens of the mini villas. It’s so green compared to outside the resort; it feels more like the Caribbean than the Sahel. There is a peacock wandering round the outdoor restaurant and there are the most incredible birds everywhere, with black heads, red eyes and metallic turquoise bodies that glimmer in the sun. I normally freak if I’m anywhere near a bird but these are so far-removed from their minging pigeon relatives, even I can’t fail to be impressed!

It’s off-season so it’s pretty quiet. Apart from us, there’s a delegation of civil servants here for a workshop on good governance, and then there’s a big group of retired French people. Older French men in swimming trunks with their pot bellies wobbling as they play petanque on the lawn, and women (long past an acceptable topless bikini age), wandering around the pool, their skin the deepest of leathery tans. It’s quite a comedy sight! Still, I’m not complaining. There’s not many times in my life I’ve been checking budgets with sand between my toes, watching the sunset (and listening to Phil Collins pumping from the poolside bar!).

I went for a little walk along the beach today after lunch, while everyone else was praying. The sea is calm and an inviting turquoise blue, busy with a bizarre mix of traditional fishing pirogues, jet skis, swimming tourists, and a group of local boys washing a sheep. I was disappointed at the debris though. Where the sea should be lapping the golden sand, bits of dead fish, tree roots, beer cans and plastic bags line the edge. In such a fancy tourist resort I was surprised that the coast wasn’t spotless.

Chatting to one of the staff at the hotel and things became clearer, although even more worrying. With the sea rapidly eroding the land further up the coast (which people blame on climate change), one of the hotels was finding their part of the beach was starting to disappear into the sea, each year becoming smaller and smaller, which was discouraging tourists from coming to their resort. To combat the phenomenon the hotel paid for a sea wall to be dug deep into the sea-bed to change the direction of the tide so as to stop it taking the beach away. Fine as a concept in itself and had the desired effect for the hotel, but the effects of this meant that the beach at the resort next door was doubly affected by the erosion power of the sea and their beach started rapidly disappearing. They therefore paid for a similar wall to be dug on their patch.

Gradually, resort by resort followed the same pattern so that now all the resorts along this stretch of coast, have these walls. The hotel I’m in is the last one before the village.

6 months ago the beach at my hotel was 45m wide, with palm trees and space for 4 rows of sunloungers.

Now it’s about 4m wide.

The beach has simply disappeared into the sea, taking the coconut trees with it. It’s a pretty frightening concept. The change in the natural direction of the currents is also apparently what’s causing rubbish from elsewhere to be dragged in and washed up on the previously spotless beach.

The hotel I’m in has a tough choice. If they don’t build their own wall, the clientele will stop coming to their resort as there really is no beach anymore, and their livelihood will be lost. If they do build a wall, this will have a devastating effect on the village further along the coast, whose inhabitants don’t have the funds to build their own protective wall to save the small stretch of beach left, used for launching the village fishing boats.

It just highlighted to me how it's all very well talking about protecting the environment and effects of climate change, but when it comes down to decisions that affect your life in a major way (in this case, the hotel's decision to build a sea wall that will damage the environment - and the local village - but save their business), it's pretty hard to ask people to put the environment before themselves, even if there are negative consequences.