Bord du lac

The shore of Lake Retba is a narrow strip between salt water and dunes, and everything happens along three hundred metres of it. On one side, the salt hills: white heaps two or three metres high, lined up along the water, carried up basin by basin from the pirogues by the women. On the other, a row of camps and restaurants, a few craft stalls, and the quad hire men waiting for the day visitors.

The work starts early. The harvesters wade in around eight, their skin coated in shea butter against the salt burn, break the crust on the bottom with an iron bar and lift the salt by hand into flat-bottomed pirogues. A day's harvest is a tonne for one man, and a ruined back by forty; the salt then leaves for Casamance and Mali.

Around eleven the coaches and 4x4s from Dakar arrive; around four they leave again. That is the real reason to sleep here: between five in the evening and nine in the morning there is nothing left but the salt, the birds, the camp dogs and a low light that makes the water pinker than any midday photograph.

On the far side of the dune belt, two kilometres away, lies the ocean and a huge empty beach, reached on foot through the sand in half an hour, or by quad in ten minutes.

The camps along the shore are much alike: low buildings, a sandy courtyard, a mango tree, six to fifteen rooms, a generator for the power cuts and a borehole for fresh water — which you use sparingly, because it is counted here. You eat what the house has cooked, at an agreed hour, as you would in a family home. And you buy salt in bags straight from the women who carried it, for a few hundred francs. At night there is no lighting between the camps: a phone torch does the job, but you have to remember it.