This is the glory of abroad; the way that foreign places, with layers upon layers of history quite outside your own, can leave you feeling gloriously ignorant and eager to learn.

Not that I was starting from scratch. I was visiting my daughter Hannah, who has spent prolonged spells in West Africa studying migration, which also includes the endlessly-fascinating subject of how people get by. Plus I had my Lonely Planet guide.

Lonely Planet guides are great things but probably work better in small, tidy places like Luxembourg than in the great urban sprawl that is Senegal's capital, Dakar.

You might think from the Lonely Planet guide, accurate and helpful as it is, that getting round Dakar would be pretty much like getting round, say, Coventry. But that fails to take into account the Africaness of it; the smells both worrying and intriguing, the crowds gathering in random, good-natured clusters for no reason an outsider can understand, hustlers who drive you to distraction until you learn to ignore them, the Babel sounds of a multi-lingual, very vocal capital overlaid by the hooting of cars by drivers apparently intent on tearing to shreds the city ordinance banning the honking of horns.

Anyway, here is my alternative guide to Dakar.


Shopping

I have no idea what the locals call a pretentious fashion outlet in Senegal, but 'boutique' isn't it and I think the absurd term 'boutique hotel' would leave them as thoroughly puzzled and depressed as it leaves me.

Here, boutique means, quite rightly, a small shop – actually, in most cases a hut or a shack. Boutiques all sell hearty, fresh French-style bread plus a quite adequate range of wrapped foods – Maggi stock cubes and Laughing Cow cheese triangles, sold singly, being particular favourites.

Fresh fruit and veg are differently sourced; they are sold on tables on the pavements. Fish and meat comes from the markets and it's no great disaster that there is a very inadequate, virtually invisible, system of waste disposal, because there is very little waste to dispose of.


Food...

The annoying thing about Senegalese people is that they eat huge amounts and seldom get fat, unless they are middle-aged ladies who have to be large-framed in order to show off their big, bright, brilliantly-engineered frocks to the best advantage.

The top dish is rice and fish with vegetables including, rather oddly I think, carrots and turnips. Chicken – proper chicken with skin and bones and taste – is also popular in a spicy sauce, again with rice.

The street stalls sell hot sandwiches of barbecued meat or fish which also include, within a French roll, salad, sauces and (this is unbeatable) integral chips; but fast food is rare – there are no McDonald's or KFCs.

I did, feeling hungry, order what I thought might be a fast dish at a beachside cafe – fried octopus and spaghetti, which should have taken 10 minutes tops. About 90 minutes later it turned up; the spaghetti was perfect and the octopus, slow-cooked and deeply-spiced with vegetables, went straight to the top of my 'The condemned man orders his last meal' list. Like much else in Senegal, it was an object lesson in making the best of not very much.


Transport...

Taxis are everywhere, private cars being in short supply, and in no case would a British MoT inspector begin to know where to start. Dials and knobs on the dashboard are represented by taped-over holes, tyres are generally bare, windscreens often broken.

One driver, deciding to let some air into his sweltering cab, passed round his only window winder, keeping a very close eye on it, window winders evidently being like gold in the Senegal taxi trade.

Still, the taxi system works safely and efficiently, the only problem, often a tedious one, being negotiating the price.

This can be avoided by using the set-fare cars rapide, a near-miraculous form of mini-bus transport which, in my experience, takes you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go for virtually nothing and with no queues or hanging about.

The cars, brightly-painted and as ancient as the hills, carry 30 or more passengers, with rows of three seats on each side and folding seats along the central aisle.

Since the cars, being of a miraculous nature, are usually packed, a lot of manoeuvring is required to get on or off and the system depends for its success on an elaborate etiquette, with people for ever having to adjust themselves to let others through, always with a smile and a friendly 'Ca va' or whatever the Wolof equivalent is.

The whole bus becomes a model of creative co-operation when it comes to collecting fares. Since the conductor, manning back doors generally held together by string, can't possibly pass along the bus, the fares and change get to their destination via many pairs of strange hands, with a smile at every hand-over.

Possibly more remarkable than all this was that the passengers, crammed in a rattling, rusty, over-heated bus with a floor you could watch the road through, looked, in both senses, so very cool – the young working women in particular emerged from all that shaking-about with their immaculate hair and make-up and business suits intact, as if they had been delivered by air-conditioned limousine.

One form of transport the Senegalese don't go in for is baby buggies, the pavements being rough or non-existent and the kerbs unfriendly. The result, in child development terms, is that Senegalese toddlers, constantly hitched up within inches of their mother's heartbeat, are extremely well-adjusted.

They are also, probably because they are encouraged to get on their feet as soon as they become too heavy to carry, remarkably sturdy. If an African football team wins this World Cup or the one afterwards, I wouldn't be all surprised.