Saturday, October 15, 2011 Bus to Mali

Talk about when taking a 2-hour flight would have been slightly better than 24 hours in a fucking African bus.  I was told to be at the Saint Louis transport station at 5am.  Of course the 7-seater Peugeot didn't leave until 8:30.  In the process, I was hot, tired, and probably contracted malaria from the relentless mosquitoes.  I asked when the car left, and the constant repornse was "Whenever it fills up", which apparently means 3.5 hours, during which vendors and begging children with pinkeye were everywhere.  I felt like it was almost worth it to just pay for all the rest of the seats in the car so it would just leave.  I got in the car to a shitty town called Ouro Sogui, deep in the east of Senegal in the middle of the Sahel.  It wasn't a bad ride since I was in the second row.  When I asked someone how long the ride was they said "Well, it depends if the car breaks down".  Awesome.  The owner of the car charged us $10 for a seat.  I feel that since cars are so rickety, roads are so potholed, and the terrain is so inhospitable to humans, that there is a real possibility that the car won't make it back.  So I felt like this owner was King Ferdinand financing a trip for our driver, Christopher Columbus to go sail to the end of the world and back.  The outskirts of Saint Louis were pretty shitty; basically nothing but flodded muddy streets and endless piles of trash.  Literally the prettiest part about it was the fact that the trash was multicolored.  I really hope my photo albums of West Africa consist of something besides people and goats wading through piles of trash.  Almost all waste is plastic wrappers, a reason why I hate using single-use plastic products when I can avoid it.  But here, there really is no choice.  Especially water; diarrhea or use a plastic bottle.  The former.  The road to Ouro Sogui flanked Senegal's northern border along the Senegal River, which gave life to the otherwise inhospitable Sahel-Sahara.  The landscape was arid savanna, with round mud-hut villages, colorfully-dressed women caring for children, men in long colorful tunics lying in the shade watching the colorfully-dressed women care for children.  Life here is very simple, people are desperately poor, and the oppressive sun makes doing any work that much harder.  It ended up taking 6 hours to go 180 miles because of the potholes; they were so bad that 50% of the time, the car was driving on the dirt shoulder.  The layover at Ouro Sogui lasted 15 minutes, which I used to buy and eat a delicious succulent watermelon.  That may be my favorite food in the desert in the draining 95-degree heat.  The car rides are pretty brutal.  This one was to the village of Bakel, seated in the back next to a girl who kept trying to flirt with me, and who had a full set of armpit hair.  I can only imagine what her... never mind.  It was dark when I reached Bakel, and I caused a scene ditching my unpromising taxi for one that was actually leaving.  I finally got to Kidira, on the Mali border, at 10pm, and decided to cross into Mali, so I took a cab to the Senegalese exit station, and just like that I was officially out of Senegal.  But then, when I tried to cross into Mali, the policeman strongly discouraged it, saying it's better to wait and spend the night in Senegal and then cross the border tomorrow.  This was probably good advice, because it was so poorly lit that I couldn't see anything.  I had no idea if I was even crossing a river, fields, a village, or anything; pitch black in the middle of Africa.  So I checked out a hotel, and they tried to fuck me over by charging $40 a night for this dump that smelled like urine.  So I went back to the police station and the officer so graciously let me stay in his nephew's house, which I was all about, yet he kept reassuring me that it was safe, as if I was hesitant and sketched out.  I'm way past being sketched out.  I'm generally a very trusting person, especially traveling because in my experience people in foreign countries (especially poor religious countries like Senegal) are very honest, hospitable, and generous.  In the US, do you think a policeman would offer his nephew's house to a Senegalese tourist crossing the border at Tijuana?  So this guy gave me his bedroom for the night; I literally paid $20 to sleep in his bedroom, with a fan and squat toilet (better than my room in SF).  It was kind of funny because the TV was in there, so people kept coming in to watch during the night, which I really didn't mind.  I had to turn the lights out and it was so annoying because even though the fan kept away the mosquitoes, these mini beetles kept biting me so I had to use a winter blanket and so I was sweating like a pig.  I can't believe how necessary a fan and mosquito net are here.  I was seriously so gross and sweaty from all the dust and 20 continuous hours of uncomfortable overland travel.