Congé part II

Since I don't have an actual VISA for Guinea (thanks entirely to Mauritanian boldfaced ineptness) the border police the next day gave me a little trouble. The barely literate policeman tried to make me go back to Bissau, while fondling a stack of 5,000 CFA bills, fanning them through his gold-ringed fingers (hint, hint) Still, I can't really blame them. Then suddenly, after the quota of harrassment had been reached, its entertainment value diminished, he called in a colleage and they both made a great show of discussing the merits of my case, as if there were absolutely anything at stake, as if the whole disorganized, corrupt mass of Guinea was in danger from one emaciated little toubab in a backpack. 'But he's Peace Corps!' says the second in French to the other, with what I'm sure was sarcasm intended for my benefit, 'Man, he's a blanc, you're just asking for trouble.' Give me a break. Peace Corps is about as dangerous as a goat snout.

The driver of my taxi tried to ditch me at the first sign of trouble, handing me back my grimy backpack, and the suddenly-on-my-side policemen bitched him out for it. Here's to fairweather friends. :)


In the leafy Guinean border town of Sareboido, I changed my remaing CFA for a giant bundle of inflated Guinean Francs (704,000 of them to be exact) and tried to stuff them all into the hidden, fanny-pack-like money pouch that I had made from an old pants pocket and a piece of a sheet. Then I settled in to wait at the head of the shady street for a car to fill.

I instantly liked Guinea, feeling that there was something different about it, for no better reason perhaps, than that I had finally acheived it, and continued to do so through the yummy bowl of hot-peppered riz-gras, casually eaten in a chair with a spoon, served from a bucket by a woman with tiny dreadlocks like pins, right up until the point when they overcharged me horrendously. Well, of course they did. I didn't argue, because I feel that bartering with people with whom you have been nicely chatting is degrading for everyone involved. Plus, negociating for prepared food (which I never have to do) feels especially tacky. My only defense at this point, because I'm arrogant and bitter, is to ask them patronizingly, 'Is this the correct price?', and shoot them an accusing stare so that I've forced them to lie explicitly when they answer 'yes', and so that my position on my little moral encampment is fortified.

That night we traveled miles and miles through the forested roads of red mud. 'Roads' is generous. Traveling conditions for the average person are so appaling thats its almost surreal in a nightmarish way. Before and afterwards you think it impossible that you could consent to , or survive being smushed for hours into an airless, stifling car in the rain, fighting to maintain your pathetic 1/2 seat from the hot, fabric swathed bodies next to you, radiating heat like small stars, being endlessly jostled and jumbled over treacherous vehicle-destroying potholes, as your head nods from exhaustion.

Still, there you are, time and time again, like a mouse who doesn't learn, and it just is. It's not that its not as bad as you think it will be. It is. Its just that the body forgets discomfort 5 minutes after it ends, and the mind turns it into a virtue.

Boy, Guinean standards sure are different! Get this: in Mauritania it's (Islamically) forbidden for me to sit in the seat next to a woman who is not my sister, despite the fact that we are both sheathed in fabric like Pharoahs, - a reality which results in endless amounts of reshuffling during transports full of strangers. Sometimes, when it is unavoidable, we simply jam a divider of whatever is available, a notebook, a waterbottle, between men and women, or obey wordless rules about the hierarchy of badness, or who is least related to whom. I, being what I am, - the epitome of the 'alien', usually top the list, but occasionally, and revealingly, I am considered as incomprehensible, and as neutrally non-human as the notebook.

In Guinea, however, at one point during the voyage I was sitting between a miniature little man in a hat, and the young mini-skirted woman beside the driver (Did you do the math? That's four people in the front of a car the size of a Civic) me, smushed up against the bare thighs and arms of the woman as she straddled the gear shift, our bulldog-faced driver reaching between her legs to shift from 2nd to 3rd. And no one batted an eye, as the rain continued and Salif Keita played on the stereo. Well, maybe one eye. My time in the RIM has made me a bit of a prude, for the moment.

A few hours after the sun had gone down on our journey over the forested paths, we came to a small lake at the bottom of a hill, where we got out to wait for the return of the small, hand-cranked barge which was to take us to the other side. Passengers from one the other cars sat off to the side of the path, and listened to Shakira as she belted out from the tiny speakers of one of their cellphones. "Hello, hello Monsieur?" said the man with the phone as I squatted nearby on the wet ground. My god, I thought, I am conspicuous even in complete darkness. There was no moon and I hadn't said a word. Jesus.

This was Magu, who will figure more in to my story later, but for the moment we just sait on a little conveniently placed wooden stool, and passed the time. He was returning from Germany (he's a mechanic there) and wore a black suede-esque jacket and jeans, had a shaved head with a long nose and biggish teeth that were a little crooked in the front, and we spoke in English because he could, well enough to be not too irritating. When he smiles it looks strained as though insincere, though in fact he's almost childishly guileless.

He was pleasant, though a little boring honestly, and when he suggested meeting up in Conakry, as we glided on the ferry over dark, muddy water, catching on branches, I couldn't help wishing, though I accepted, that I had landed an invitation from someone more intriguing. That's true, though not admirable. I've become blasé about fortuitous meetings and spontaneous offers of hospitality here, and have come to receive them with a critical eye.

To be continued......

Congé part I

I went away for a while.


I left my adopted desert home, with its bland dust, and caramel colored flat plains, its sense of reluctance, and went to Guinea, which is the wet, green wonderland of Mauritania's opposite.

The overland journey (there and there and back) was constant and cruel. It was not my intention, I had dreams of a plane, and a boat, of relative comfort and speed, none of which took place, because suffering is the medium of travel in Africa (when you are young, foreign and poor, when you are in love with your idea of the 'authentic') and that you will fall into its stuffy grip is inevitable.

My first night began with luck - I spent it with a St. Louisian who invited me to his house after we had shared the same taxi from Nouakchott. With impeccable taste, because I am impeccably tasteful, I refused his offer of lodging several times before accepting. He was transporting a giant karaoke radio system for reasons known only to himself. His family was kind and their house was relatively lovely (they had pink couches and art, hand-painted on the wall) and when I randomly burst into their compound at 10 o clock at night, they didn't openly stare, suspicious and rude, and mumble a reply to my greeting as Mauritanians would have done, but actually seemed charmed and alive, and asked me immediately 'what is your name?'

In Dakar, I realized how important it is for one to have a place to ditch one's cumbersome travel bag (I didn't) upon arrival, because I was attempted-mugged (my first!) by two rather inept villains, something that I feel certain wouldn't have happened had I not been weighed down by that awkward signal of foreignism. I know better than that. As luck would have it though, I was slightly less not-on-the-ball than the pick-pockets, and was able to wrest them away emptyhanded, and shout that intimidating zinger 'leave me alone!', which in my excited anger, I mispronounced. (wtf?)

On the way to Ziguinchor, the steamy capital of the Cassamance, we pass through The Gambia (which, if you don't know, is the most absurd little colonial relic of all, carved out of Sénégal's belly) where suddenly everything magically changes, and the gendarmes speak English - 'Okay, you have to come down (get out) now. Okay, you pay 5,000, eh?' - and where the signs say things like 'Faranah Town' and 'Moussa's Grocery'. Of course, nothing else actually changes between this 50 Kilometer long strip and the surrounding country, - the sickeningly thick foliage, the people, the horrible roads, the children, - nothing but the thinnest glaze of life which is the officialness of borders.

But speaking of such, more than once during my trip I had the surreal sense of being in a sort of play, in which everything changes on the deliberate schedule of the playbill, except the actors and their mysterious thoughts, which remain constant behind their costumes and shifting dialects. Once, sitting behind a group of chatty wolof women in a cab, with their uncovered heads of styled, fried and highlighted hair, their plunging necklines, I kept thinking simultaneously how scandalous they would seem to their arrogant and repressed Mauritanian counterparts in their stilted veils, and also how the line that separates them is no thicker than a sheet of fabric and a good stylist. And...scene!

In Zig(uinchor) I was accosted at the station by an overgrown urchin in a giant pageboy hat and white wife-beater, who convinced me in a moment's weakness to come stay with his family (or rather to 'just come and see') who rented out rooms in their home. Me, who prides himself in thinking he's strong-stomached and unique, who's terrified of missing a possible 'experience' and disdainful of his position as tourist, follows this strange little ragamuffin, knowing full well he was probably lying, or worse, but being unable to resist making everything difficult.

Fast forward to me spending an unbearable awkward 20 mintues on the urchin's floor, being stared at or ignored by his completely indifferent family, glued to the TV, barechested young mothers making rice, as he 'prepared' the room. It was immediately obvious that these people were not ready for prime-time, and that the mistake was mine. When I finally insisted on seeing the room, my heart fell from embarrassment. It was a horrid little hole (though I've stayed in worse) which he was attempting to make decent with a reed broom, lit by sinister candlelight, none but a dirty piece of plain foam on the floor and no mosquito net. What did I expect?

He frantically tried to persuade me with photos of his 'white' (as if that alone was enough) friends, whom he claimed had stayed there before, and in the photos they looked happy, and he, calm and tranquil in white, his eyes downcast, in stark contrast to his red-eyed anxious and sweaty appearance now. The photos were very obviously taken somewhere else, and in what must have surely been better times. I felt awful of course, and sad, and I'm ashamed to admit that I actually thought about staying for half a minute, as I contemplate my standards. I would oddly rather embarrass myself than someone else, but honestly that emotion is less about concern for others than it is about my own weak will, and when I realized that, I flatly refused before I could change my mind.

Not to make too much of this, but I was furious with myself then, because it became obvious to me that I was not some free-swinging traveler, moving on the authentic African path of classical suffering, but more like a careless dope who had allowed a misguided sense of adventure and a warped addiction to 'things happening' to lead him to a useless and awkward place where he had no business being, and which benefited no one.

-Ziguinchor was wet and saucy with impenetrable Sénégalese indifference, the kind that lives in the eyes and blank faces, which says 'we don't need you' when it is humiliatingly clear that you need them.

-The speechless ghost of the colonialists is everywhere in the stonework and the window grating.

-I ate a good but overpriced fish from the river, with rice molded into cakes, and lemon with piment. I was starving. I ate everything but the plate. I ate every piece like the savage I've become. I fed the tail to a loitering white cat.

Zig was just one junction in what was to become (though I didn't know at the the time) an endless series of junctions on the way to nowhere in particular.

As such, the next stop was Guinea-Bissau, whose Ziguinchor consulate was in one of those omnipresent colonial era relics, steady and heavy with the damp, dark wood of decay. The consul -a giant, quiet, efficient man, who finished my VISA in 5 minutes, his massive shoulders squeezed into a tiny shirt and tie, and behind a tiny desk, with beads of sweat on his wide nose at 9:00 in the morning.

I don't speak Portuguese.

That's what I have to say about Guinea-Bissau. The change happens just as suddenly as before, on the bank of a river waiting for a ferry, the red mud everywhere, men peeing into the shallow waters, hot humidity, grilled crawdads and little river-fish, gingerbread gateaus and beignets.

I don't know the religious statistics of the area, but there's got to be at least enough Christians to throw in a lion's den, because on top of an idling minibus, as we waited on the shore, was strapped a writhing, shrieking mass of pink pigs in a net. It was pretty awful, I mean aside from the sickening way animals are treated here (which is pretty bad, but I'm over it) I think I might have felt for a moment some of the revulsion my villagers (as Muslims) might feel for such an obscene little animal, which a Margaret Atwood poem once called something like a 'bloated pink tuber of flesh', smushed end over end together, squealing in their own awful stink. But then I remembered bacon and ham omelets, and the moment passed.

The women on the ferry sold, out of the coolers perched on their heads, unbelievably delicious, sherbert-thick Tejmakht (Baobob) ice, making Mauritania's weak stuff seem like another species, and said 'cinquinta franc' when I looked at them expectently for the price.

Bissau I left immediately and so saw nothing of - a coffee stall, a greasy fried egg, a carrefour - I traveled inland towards Gabu) because its impossible to drive south along the saw-toothed shoreline) in a taxi with a big fat Gambian woman from Serekundo, trussed up in brilliant hot-pink like a frosted cookie. It was raining and we listened to something groovy yet mournful in Portuguese as we rolled by the fertile, wet fields, and houses with roofs like four-sided pyramids.

In Gabu, after a minimal amount of drama, considering, I found a hotel run by a shirtless, 40-something Portuguese man, wearing a plastic retainer and running shorts, rubbing his protruding belly, who spoke a tiny amount of both French and English, and referred to his Bissauian groundskeeper as 'my boy'.

The place virtually reeked of kitchy tastelessness- architecturally lovely, but decorated with what one felt was this man's 'personal touch' -the room draped with heavy, mustard-yellow curtains smelling like grandmothers, garish posters of puppies and kittens, doilies, a Maggi calendar from 3 years ago showing a smiling Wolof woman.

The man, in an attempt to communicate, says 'night', points to the ceiling and says 'light', which I take to mean there will be a generator to run the lights later. He pantomimes spraying while making sound-effects - 'kshhh, kshhh', as if they will spray for mosquitoes in the netless room? I'm guessing, because neither of these actually took place.

In the bathroom were giant trash cans filled with clean water to bathe and do everything else with. The fixtures were all gone, either from theft, or the fear of it.

I wandered the streets and found people pleasant; smiling, curious but not staring with malice. When I walked by two girls selling grilled, blackened sweet-corn, one tells her friend to look up and see the whitey - at first she looks everyway but at me, until I wave because its almost too late, and she laughs, covering her mouth.

Presently, after getting rather lost, I round a bar-ish restaurant cafe, and throught pantomime and pointing got a tall red can of beer and half of a grilled chicken with cucumbers and sliced onions on the side. It was the best thing I ever ate. It was everything I had ever wanted.

I spend a lot of time on my trip (too much, really) thinking about whether or not I was okay with being alone, and what I was getting out of this endless traveling, and what exactly I was supposed to be doing to make it into something which transcended that. Still, I don't think at that moment I could have done any better, -there I was, one lonely little pony, plopped down like a puppet into this Bissauian hole in the wall, getting sauced on domestic brew, reading Hunter S. Thomson's 'Rum Diaries' and tearing apart this overcooked chicken like a hyena.

I tried to follow a distant, loud, parading wedding party through the darkening streets, but got lost again. Then it rained.

To be continued.

what's the word....

Hi weirdos,

I realize that my once steady stream of posts has more recently become a lifeless trickle, but deal with it. I no longer have internet whatsoever outside of the capital, Nouakchott, so that makes blogging a challenge. Nevertheless, here I am! I'm going to try to post a few things, which may be incomplete, but maybe worthwhile for all that. Also, I have a few pictures (which are conspicuously absent at the present) to post, but maybe not until December.

--Also, I'm glad no one writes me ever, or sends me letters, so thanks for that.

OK Kiddos, stay tuned.

PS Alice and Tony, I'm calling you soon to check on the progress you've make towards coming here, and I'm using check minuses and gold stars. Which will you be?

PSS Oh, wait, I found some pictures of various things such as myself and food. I didn't take any of them, Fred did, but that doesn't matter. More to come....

A plate of tajiin (a snack we eat before meals on special occasions)

Cous-cous, which we eat every night, though normally the meat is in microscopic bits

Me and my friend Rachel in (perhaps) St. Louis? last Christmas.