Bravery is relative, as is adventure. In Indonesia, I climbed volcanic Mount Batur before dawn, and reached the summit feeling triumphant only to find a Balinese 10 year old had done the same, wearing flip-flops and carrying a case of soda on his head to sell to us. There's always a team braver than you and it's inspiring to meet those who coax you into discovery and adventure. In Senegal, that team was OAR Northwest. Here's a picture of them as they set out on a cross-Atlantic voyage, rowing from Dakar to Miami. I was there as they left terra firma in January 2013 and I've thought of them every day since.

Lac Rose was only a couple of kilometers away from Dakar, but given urban traffic/chaos, dusty back roads, one main thoroughfare blocked by a day market, and another closed for construction, it took us over an hour to reach. Surely there was an easier way home? There was, once you put on your lucky adventure hat.

Not far northeast of Dakar on the Cap Vert peninsula is Lac Rose, a shallow freshwater lake that decades of evaporation have converted into a salt pan whose color is somewhat pinkish in the right conditions of sunlight. We went to go have a look. The lake gets its color from a high concentration of Dunaliella salina algae, its shallow depth, and the high salt concentration. But it gets its fame from the famous Paris-Dakar off-road rally, which used to end here.

The brightly dressed men on horseback caught my attention first, but then I saw the man leading a camel to the front of the stage.

I was in dusty Ndioum, in northern Senegal, for work-related matters. The sun was high overhead the Sahel, and there was dust in the air. I've spent a lot of time here, and I find it fascinating, because it's so different from anything I've ever experienced, and I wonder how people make their living here. We were getting ready to break ground on a new bridge.