Ngor

Ngor is a Lébou village the city caught up with and never swallowed. The lanes are two metres wide, you walk between painted walls and basins of fish, carts cannot get through, and the village beach is a closed bay where the pirogues are hauled up on the sand next to the swimming children.

Opposite, three hundred metres out, is Ngor island. The crossing is by outboard pirogue: five minutes, a thousand francs return, leaving as soon as there are enough passengers. On the island there are no cars, white houses, two beaches — the village one and the wilder one "round the back" — and restaurants where you wait an hour for your fish because someone has gone to catch it.

It is also a long-standing surf spot. The Ngor right appears in "The Endless Summer", the 1966 film that introduced it to Americans, and the winter swell from November to March still draws surfers from everywhere; a board rents on the beach for five thousand francs a day. Village boys learn to stand on offcuts of plywood before they are ten.

The neighbourhood lives off fishing and, for the last twenty years, off renting: the Almadies begin on the other side of the road with their restaurants and offices, and land prices followed. What has not changed is the rhythm — the pirogues go out at five, the fish is sold by eleven, and in the evening everyone sits outside in front of the village mosque.

One warning and two landmarks. Swimming is easy in the village bay, enclosed and shallow, but the sea turns serious as soon as you round the point towards the island, and nothing is supervised. For shopping, the small Ngor market in the morning and the shops on the route des Almadies are enough. And at weekends the village beach fills with Dakar families from eleven until sunset: it is cheerful and very loud, and it bears no resemblance to the quiet of a Tuesday morning.