I crossed another border! Traveling in West Africa is pretty crazy, but first let me explain what I did before my spontaneous decision to visit Guinea.
On Thursday, 7 of us rented out a car and made the 12 hour trek to Kedougou. Our gift upon arrival: RAIN! It felt amazing after such a long car ride. The next morning, we hiked about 7k to visit five hippos in a river. Don’t worry Dad, we didn’t get too close! Truthfully, they were pretty lazy in the late morning and stood up once or twice but didn’t put on much of a show. Saturday we went to Salemata, to spend the night on the ground since the campement couldn’t exactly provide us beds. And the next morning was the Bassari Rights Festival.
Kedougou is in the far south-east corner of Senegal and it looks and feels nothing like the rest of the country with its mountains, waterfalls and animists! There is an ethnic group called Bassari that live outside of the Salemata, south of Kedougou. Every year, a group of boys come of age and go through an initiation rights ceremony. The night prior to the circumcision, there is dancing done by the already-initiated men of the village. The next day, hundreds of men dress up with traditional masks and beading with red paint from head to two. They blow whistles and cry out, and when all of them do it, it gets pretty noisy! There is a fight between the already-initiated and the boys in their late teens, but this fight can’t be filmed, nor watched by women. I guess I would lose my fertility if I watched such an event! It was still pretty incredible that such a tradition has lasted through all the years of influence by the west. I mean, people were selling t-shirts of Barack Obama at the event!
The next morning, Erin and I biked to the garage to scope it out. A few of our friends have gone to Guinea and all of them have said it takes about 3 days to fill up a car, since transport won’t leave until it has enough people to pay for the gas. Well, we showed up and as they were putting baggage on top of the pick-up, they said “Yes, we have 2 spots available!” Erin and I weren’t really expecting that. So we biked back to the house and went back and forth. Should we go? Should we wait to go with Pulaar speakers? Should we wait and bike in July (since transport is even slower in the rainy season)? ….
So we are going then?! We packed up quickly, called our Safety Security Coordinator and got vacation days approved and were on our way to a city called Labe, 300k, or 200mi south of Kedougou. It took 27 hours. No joke. We stopped a few times since the pick-up truck had 32 people and baggage and couldn’t make it up the mountain with all of us. Yes: 32. There were 3 people in the front, 3 on top of the baggage on the roof, 5 nursing babies, 2 toddlers and 19 adults crammed in the back of a pick-up. We stopped other times to pray and cool down the engine and other times since we needed to get out when we nearly tipped over. The road was AWEFUL and all uphill. Kedougou is at sea-level and Guinea has mountains at over 1500 meters. We stopped for dinner at 10:30pm (yes, we left just after breakfast and only had a few cookies and a mango) and slept for almost 8 hours in some village. No one told us this would happen. We thought we were just stopping to eat and then they told us to lie down. Erin and I figured they wouldn’t leave without their 2 toubabs so we took up the chance to sleep on some cots made out of bamboo and palms. Better than the ground but not all that great of a night’s sleep. We woke up at sunrise and were back on the “road”. We made it to Labe and made the biggest, best tasting spaghetti either of us had ever tasted. Then we wandered around town to stretch our legs. We found numbers of other PCVs in Guinea who gave us advice on what to do. Obviously, we didn’t have much planned!
The next morning, although it was raining like crazy, we rented a car out and had a driver take us to the Chutes de Saala – a very impressive waterfall! So cool: we got to walk all around it since the water level was so low. That evening we hung out with some PCVs and woke up early the next day to get back in the car to go to Mali (a city in Guinea). In Senegal, a 7-place is a station wagon that has 7 seats, for 7 people. Makes since right? Well, this one had 16. Guinea is crazy! We got to Mali and met their SED volunteer after finding out that the car that goes to Kedougou “just left” and that “this one will leave on Sunday, Inchallah”. I think the “God willing” part was the fact that the sad looking truck only had 3 tires. It was Thursday. We needed to get back to site, so we got a list of villages, food, water and tape on our feet and within a few hours, we started hiking to the top of the last mountain that was uphill on the way to Senegal, the Grande Dame de Mali. It’s a rock formation that looks like the face and body of a woman. We decided to get a few kilometers head start and stay at a campement that the volunteer works at and get the advice of people who supposedly do this hike all the time.
These experts said it would take 7 hours and that there was no way we would get lost. Well, Erin and I have been here long enough to know that was BS. We hired a guide and didn’t regret a single cent! We left the campement at 6:15. The toughest part was getting down the mountain. Our guide knew all the shortcuts and Erin and I just kept looking back at the Dame de Mali, completely impressed with ourselves; she just kept getting smaller and further away! We ate hard boiled eggs, bread, tomatoes, sardines and mangoes and oranges. We stopped in every village to get more water and probably drank about 5 liters each. We rested from 1-2:30 and were really starting to question ourselves. I took off my tennis shoes at 3ish and switched to less invasive flip flops. I had one blister the size of a quarter on my big toe and 6 others. Ouch. But then, before 5, Alseny, our guide, turned around and said, “We’re in Senegal”. Wait a minute – no border crossing?! The next people we met said Dindefelo is just at the bottom of this mountain. That’s where a fellow PVC lives and works with a campement! YES! The last mountain was the toughest. Have I ever been this sore?! Erin twisted her ankle but was so determined to get down that it didn’t slow her much. We made it at 5:45pm. So this is what we figured: about 12 hours, about 3 miles an hour, if we figure terrain, breaks, heat and exhaustion: anywhere from 30 to 40 miles!
The people at the camepment took such great care of us. It was wonderful to speak Wolof again instead of Pulaar greetings and French. We ate dinner and slept so well. Everyone laughed at how slowly we were moving but were utterly impressed. As were Erin and I:
“Erin, remember when we walked from Guinea”
“Kira, we didn’t walk! We hiked! We’re awesome!”
This will go down as unforgettable forever. The roads are bad! So we walked back! No, we hiked back!
And you would think that was it right? Nope, Dindefelo has one of the most beautiful waterfalls in Senegal that is spring fed, so thus unaffected by the amount of rainfall. It was the most relaxing morning swimming and recounting our story of the day before. And although we were at first annoyed with the other tourists commenting on how slowly we were moving, they ended up giving us a free, air conditioned ride back, with seat belts!
There would have been no way to actually plan this trip – being spontaneous pays off! It was so much fun! Best 10 days I have had in a long time!
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