Week 8 – N’Djamena, Chad – Vincent Sonneville

Week 8 – N’Djamena, Chad – Vincent Sonneville

 

Chad is located right beneath Lybia so you’d think that the travel distance won’t be that much. The thing is however that Chad is divided in 3 distinct areas. The Savannah in the south, the Sahelian belt in the center and the Sahara desert in the north. This means that there’s a lot of desert to cross before you can reach the more populated areas. So after our flight we came to land on the N’Djamena (the capital of Chad) airport. We arrived in the evening and were pretty exhausted by now. So the first thing we did was find a cheap place to spend the night.

 

The next day we made plans to first travel to a city north of N’Djamena, Bol, which is located directly next to Lake Chad. My father actually told me that this was worth paying a visit since this is a historical shallow lake in Africa. The intriguing thing is that this lake has shrunk for 95% from about 1963 to 1998, and that recent pictures (2007) show that it’s growing in size again. It also provides 30 million people with water so of course we had to see this.

When we got there, it was kind of weird to see such a vast amount of water in Africa. We saw some nice views and visited the city Bol for the rest of the day.

 

When we returned back to N’Djamena we found out that there wasn’t very much to do around here so we planned a trip with a travel agency to the city Sarh. This was a bus ride of about 460 kilometers through a lot of Savannah, at an average temperature of 30 degrees it’s needless to say that this was a bus ride we wouldn’t forget so quickly. Once arrived though, we headed straight to the reason why we went to Sarh; The Zakouma National Park. This park is home to 44 different kinds of great mammals and numerous types of exotic birds. We were lucky to be there in March, since this is the time the animals congregate around watering holes.