We were one night out of Saint-Louis aboard Bou el Mogdad. Everything seemed to be proceeding normally as the old boat plodded her way upriver from the coast. As her 40-odd passengers finished coffee and dessert in the dining saloon, few had any sense of the gravity of the situation in the galley. There, half the crew had gathered in a huddle, their faces frozen in expressions of near terror, transfixed on the screen of a single smartphone perched on a metal countertop.
2,000 miles away, in Cameroon, Senegal’s national football team had reached the brink of victory or defeat in the final match of the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. At last, Senegal scored the decisive penalty against Egypt, securing the nation’s first ever victory in the tournament’s 65-year history. In an instant, the boat exploded in roars of celebration as the crew burst out of the galley and into the saloon, including the passengers in the spectacle.
It was an auspicious start to what. Even in the rarefied world of one-off river cruise vessels, there really is nothing quite like ‘the ,’ a 51m former mail boat which has plied the Senegal River, on Senegal’s border with Mauritania, for most of the last 72 years.
