This 25 year old car is carrying 14 people. It was designed for 8. There are three on the front seat, four in the middle, three in the back and three on the roof. I just survived 48 hours in one of these. That's two days and two nights. If we slept, it was beside the road for an hour or so. At one point, in the middle of the night on the 250km mountain bush road between Labe and Koundara with the headlights already failed and ten breakdowns behind us, the driver got out of the car, laid his jacket on the bonnet and lay down to sleep.
"Naomi, he's not fixing the car anymore, what's wrong?" I screamed at my friend who was mad enough to think with me that a trip to the mountains of northern Guinea was a good idea.
Naomi asked our driver what was going on. "Il arrive" he said and sure enough, another over-filled car came chugging along and the driver, someone who had become my only hope in this whole sorry exercise, climbed on its roof and went off, into the moonlit distance. The great American PR machine (Naomi) said, "it's a lovely full moon".
The whole 250 km took us 17 hours. But there is a silver lining to all of this. During break-down number 2, conveniently executed outside a 'restaurant' in a village whose sole income is generated by avocados, I bought 5 of the shiny green fruits for 20 pence. When the car was fixed (temporarily, apparently), I went to put my avocados in the boot of the car. The other passengers had bought sacks of 20 or 30, as well as kilos of mangoes.
"That's nothing" said the driver, a young man with rotten front teeth but a nice smile (amazingly). "Go and buy some more" and he peeled off 2,000 francs and gave them to me.
"He's joking, right?" said Naomi, and I gave the money back to him. He looked confused and went off to buy them for me himself. It was up there in the top 5 romantic gestures ever, and from a man whose name I never found out.
Oh Avacado Man, where were you when we broke down on our next journey, 7 hours from Dakar, when the driver didn't even know that to get an African car started it has to be pushed? And that, by the way, is one of the good things about overloading a car. When it does need to get started again, there is ample supply of young men to get it going.
**********
When people say to you in Senegal something about mountains, they mean something of about 200 metres high. So the hill by my house which I can walk up in ten minutes is a mountain, because it's the highest point in the whole country.
Or so we all thought.
Naomi and I were hanging out one night in her flat in Dakar, and she said she needed to leave the country to get a new visa for Senegal. I just needed to get a bag on my back and start moving. War to the south, desert to the north, and mali to the east. So we decided on Guinea, to the south east.
Kedougou is a dusty little town near the border with Guinea. Not a whole lot going on, but my god is it hot. On the way there (only one breakdown, by the way) the heat scorched my eye-lids as the wind blew in through the car window. But this is Senegal which I am starting to udnerstand is one of Africa's better developed countries, and there was cold water and restaurants at the other end. We had the best steak and salad I have ever eaten, with avocados in the salad without even having to ask. We slept that night in an oven, but there was electricity so we had a fan.
The next day we asked for the bus to Dindefello. They showed us the bus, it was going to leave at some point, but maybe not until the next day. We sat on it for a while then decided there was a better way of getting to this village, and we set out on the road with our thumbs out.
Like a miracle, a man in a pick-up truck arrived and I pleaded with him for a lift. And so this journey, only frequented by cars once a week on market day, was done from the bed of a pick-up, through the forest, across dry river beds, through small villages where children threw mangoes at us (to eat, not to injure us). At Segu, the last village on the Senegal side, a blind police man put our details into a ledger. It took half an hour, long enough for it to pass through both mine and naomi's heads that this was the last record of our existence here and that should anything happen to us, only this man would know we had been this way. When it came to my turn to be written down in the book, I took the pen and did it myself. He stamped our passports, we went on our way.
At Dindefello it was equally as hot. But there is a waterfall there and we grabbed a kid who took us through the forest to the pool and we swam there and tried not to think about river worms. That night, Ricard, a young (but bald) man invited us to his house where we lay on his bed (!), a wicker platform in the compound, which meant it was cool and it was the first time in a couple of days when I didn't feel I was suffocating. He invited us to stay and the next day we checked out of the campement where we were being ripped off by a grisly man who wanted £1.50 for an omlette and moved into Ricard's garden. When i asked the kids where the toilet was, they looked very confused and offered me a bar of soap. Funny, because tht was to happen to me three times. In Guinea when I asked for a pharmacy, all the men standing around in the shop looked confused and then handed me a bar of soap. Go figure.
At 4am, after a couple of hours's sleep, Muktar arrived, the man who had been issued with the job of carrying our bags and 15 litres of water up 5 mountains and across 40 km of rough terrain. He used to be in the Senegalese army and galantly took our load and set off up the mountain, with naomi and I following behind, wishing there was a damn vehicle, or road, which led to Guinea so that we didn't have to walk.
At 6.30 am we got to the border with Guinea, a tree. Soon after that we met the famous Guinean police, a band of stoned, creepy, corrupt men sitting around on their arses waiting for foreigners to wander along so they could see in what ways they could screw things up for them. "We stamp passports at 8am and not before" said the policeman.
"But you're here and we have to do some kilometres before it gets too hot," we protested.
"8 o'clock" he repeated before going off into a tirade to poor Muktar who was trying to find some boiling water so he coud have his morning coffee.
At 8, another policeman arrived, stoned, and took us into a thatch hut to stamp our passports.
"Vaccination card" he demanded, and then didn't look at them. "And you?" he pointed at Muktar.
"I don't have one, I live in a village a million miles from anywhere, least of all a hospital" was what he didn't say.
"Looks like your guide's going to have to leave you, girls" said Creepy Policeman with a grin on his face. I wondered if Naomi was capable of carrying 15 litres of water. He was looking for a bribe of course, so we called his bluff and said that the guide could go and we would carry on alone. Eventually they let us go and Muktar went on anyway.
We walked 30 kilometres before lunch. We passed a village with some heavily-laden mango trees and asked a man if we could buy some. We had a 200 franc coin, 20 pence. He got a stick and pulled down 20 mangoes. They were added to Muktar's already outlandish load. Up ahead, throughout this walk, loomed an enormous jagged mountain. I was in denial that we would ever have to climb it. Ricard, back in Dindefello, never said anything about the mountain being that big so I figured there was some way around it.
But it was that big. And there were four of them. And another 10 km the other side before we reached the first town in Guinea. We started to climb at 4pm and I just had no energy. I guess the tin of sardines we had for lunch just weren't giving me the nutrients I needed, huh? I really thought I wasn't going to be able to go on. So Naomi started one of her many stories that were to get me through the toughest travel week of my life. the idea of the story was to start in one of the United states and tell me every thing she knew about it. "I knew a guy whose cousin came from Ohio..." and up the mountain we went.
After every hike there was a flat-ish plateau where a village had sprung up. From these plateaus we watched the sun setting, ate mangoes, were greeted by people living in round thatch huts, picking manioc leaves, crushing maize, looking after their cows. Along the route we met another man who climbed with us, giving Muktar some moral support with the two girls who were obviously having a hard time of it. We didn't need the PR machine to say encouraging things about the view. I never knew west Africa had such incredible mountains, green stretching all around, and it was the thing that kept me going. Imagine what the town of Mali-ville would be life if it was set in these gorgeous mountains...
**********
After 18 hours of walking we arrived in Mali-ville. It was dark, and Naomi and I were very near tears. There's one hotel in town. it's up a hill, of course. The whole f-ing town is either up or down a hill. We got to the hotel and there was no one there. We shouted for someone to open up, Moktar sat with his head in his hands, I wondered how this day could get worse.
The boy who had been showing us the way started to ask for money. "It's getting better all the time" sang Naomi.
We went back to town and wandered along deserted roads. We climbed another hill and a young guy appeared on a motorbike.
"I'm going to ask him for a room to sleep in" I said, and approached, determined to have him invite us to sleep in his house, wherever that was. But it turned out his father had a 'hotel', a house that was almost finished which he could rent one of the rooms of. He took us there and I told them they could now leave us. Four men stood in the room asking us if we would like to go sight-seeing the next day. I told them to get out of the room because I was going to collapse.
"OK, but would you like us to come tomorrow morning at 7 so you can go sight-seeing. there's a wonderful...".
I went into the bathroom, sat down on the edge of the bath and cried. So I was the first to break. Naomi handled them galantly, got them out, and we collapsed on the bed.
But the bed was not all it seemed.
The matress, a lovely European matress with springs, was still in its plastic cover. The following day, after a noisy night of rustling plastic every time one of us moved, we asked Daoda, the owner's son, if we could take off the plastic cover.
"No, it's to protect against the dust" he said.
"But there is no dust here, it's bare rock everywhere".
There was no budging him. He said if we found the pastic wrapping too hot we could cover it with the thick nylon blanket they had supplied us with.
Next we tried to find food. This is a town of a few thousand people, but not a restaurant in sight. We went out each night with our sights set on something, not too high, just something a bit clean, maybe some salad, maybe a table to sit at, maybe a candle or two.
Each night we were sorely disappointed. We would wak and walk and then end up eating with the ladies who sell grilled meat cooked over a fire on the corner of the street. Sometime we bought an avocado and put it in the sandwich too. Each night I went home wondering which one of us would get sick. But neither of us did. Infact, it was about the only thing that didn't go wrong.
One night we did find a cafe that sold coffee and hot chocolate. We descended upon it as if we had discovered the Ritz on our own street. I ordered cafe au lait and sat down at the rickety wooden bench that looked out on the main street (which a bull promptly sauntered down). the drink came with Naomi's hot chocolate, but it was in fact hot chocolate too. I pointed out this fact, desperate to have some coffee, and the guy looked confused, took it away, and brought back the same cup with some Nescafe sprinkled on top.
"You got mocha!" said the PR machine.
