Alphabet Travel

The plunge into Central Africa brought us to a string of exotic-sounding places I’d never heard of in my life; places like Oyem, Ndjole, Lambarene, N’dende, Mila-mila, M’banza Kongo,Benguela and Lubango. The few that I had heard of – Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Luanda – did not fill my heart with delight, though there was a little buzz, a small flush of excitement, connected with each, because they seemed like cities of the imagination, places that had seen hard times, were or had been hard to live in, and were visited only by intrepid explorers, coffee swilling journalists and wary expats. The sense of adventure was with us as we headed south, though for me it came with some sleepless nights.

Gabon was easy to travel through until we hit the equator, and the paved jungle road descended into red dust. As a country, it seemed less scruffy and more ‘together’ than Cameroon, with heavier price tags to match. Friendly locals in the border town had helped us get our orientation.

‘This is Gabon!’ exclaimed a young man selling biscuits.

‘This is a sandwich!’ grinned another man close by, waving it at us.

President Bongo had just passed away and Gabon was in an official mourning period that was just winding to a close, after which talk of succession could take place. Big posters on billboards showing Bongo’s image were everywhere. In the countryside and along the edge of the forests, one story wooden slat houses saw the usual rural activity played out around them. Goats grazed and sprung about, chickens pecked in ditches, clothes hung on lines and people headed out with baskets and machetes to harvest fruit while others worked around the home. New to us was the bush meat trade. Roadside trade extended beyond the usual piles of plantain here – over barrels, the occasional dead monkey was laid out for sale, and pangolins hung from wooden frames by their tails. In Oyem, our alphabet ‘O’, we found pangolin on a restaurant menu (‘You know!’ smiled the waiter, ‘the one that curls up into a ball!’) it was not tempting. Seth got a haircut in this town, in a tiny dark barbers full of mirrors and dusty football posters. It looked to me that the barber had accidentally given him a big round bald patch, and for twenty minutes I was genuinely worried. In daylight, however, the bald patch was gone, and what Seth was left with was a classic Kevin-Costner-in-The-Bodyguard cut. Preferable, I think, to a monk-from-The-Name-of-the-Rose cut.

The women in our minibus south to Ndjole spent much of the journey picking on a couple from Equatorial Guinea, because their incomplete paperwork kept slowing us down at police checks. The bad vibe seemed to rub off on the bus itself because the strap attaching all the luggage to the roof snapped and everything fell into the road. For an hour, the women directed their shouting at the bus boys as they attempted to reload, and we sat by the road enjoying the view of Gabon’s thick forests as large hornbills flew over it. A little boy joined us and we threw stones at targets. The cliché about travelling in Africa teaching you patience is absolutely true. I learned lots about patience last summer when walking such a long pilgrimage day by day, too. Hopefully, by September, I will be a patience wizard. The afternoon ticked on, the light began to change. I walked two hundred metres down the road, retrieved a fallen plantain, and brought it back, adding it to the pile for reloading. Finally we got back on
the road, and the scene became stunningly exotic, with the wide brown Ogooue River to our left and whole tunnels of lime green bamboo to pass under. In Ndjole, I bought popcorn from a man in the street with a very old fashioned popping machine, and we ate grilled chicken from a street stall, and drank cheap Regab beer. Everything and everyone in the town was bleached with red dust, and logging trucks roared through the dusty heart of the place. It was a strange town and our being there was strange, too, for the people living there: a double whammy of weirdness.
The same logging lorries that roared through Ndjole also nearly killed us numerous times on the road south to Lambarene. They swung round corners on the wrong side of the road and almost sent us flying into ditches several times. Our share-taxi driver mumbled his disapproval but generally lost himself to the reedy tones of Phil Collins, singing about paradise again, as he always has since we came to Africa. Lambarene, on the Oogue River, would have been a great place to stay, if both of us hadn’t gotten intense food poisoning. (You know it’s a bad place to eat lunch when you see a member of the kitchen staff sticking his finger up his nose to prod a spot, but by then our plates were clean…) Both of us lay hot then cold, green in the cheeks, exhausted from vomiting, in what was a nice hotel with a pleasant balcony we never really got to enjoy. We had chosen it because the guidebook said the owners demonstrated ‘some eccentric behaviour’, and we wanted to know exactly what that meant, but sadly we were too ill to find out and it will remain a mystery. Whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was road and jungle coming at me, and somewhere echoing in my brain were remnants of the usual minibus songs, about Jehovah, and being covered in the blood of Jesus, and being in-ter-nash-eeo-nal.

The next day, weak and grumpy, we attempted to catch a bus south to the Congolese border. Unfortunately, the white Toyota pick-up truck heading that way already had a full cabin, and the back was half loaded with boxes and luggage. The remaining space – about one by two metres if I’m generous – was occupied by a crush of six people. There was room for two more, insisted the driver. It was not wise for two people who were sick and who had not eaten for 24 hours to ride for many hours on the edge of an overcrowded pickup truck but we climbed apprehensively on board. It was the filthiest journey to date. The woman across from me kept holding her head in her hands and muttering ‘never again’ in French. The bumps meant you had to hold on for dear life, and the rising dust from the red roads coated all of us until, at police checks, we were no longer recognisable against our passport pictures. How the cop kept a straight face while scrutinising so many bright orange faces is beyond me. If you closed your eyes, your eyelids grew so heavy with dust that it was actually hard to open them again. It was impossible not to swallow the stuff, too, when you spoke to someone or coughed. We arrived in N’dende looking like complete freaks, and checked into a motel at a petrol station. After washing away an ocean of orange dirt, it was beer time, and our empty stomachs, having shifted the bug, cried out for food. Crashed out in chairs in the motel bar, we laughed about the day, and a black dog strolled up to us to be petted. When I looked down, it was actually a chimpanzee. ‘Toto, no,’ called the waitress, and it scuttled off. Strange incidents like this are beginning to feel normal.

When it comes to police bribes and corruption, we had always expected central Africa to be the worst. In Nigeria, we didn’t pay a single bribe. Cameroon was bad for it, Gabon comparatively angelic, but northern Congo proved to be something else. Our first experience took the biscuit – or noodles, even. Barely had we stepped into little Ngongo, our very first Congolese town/village when the police had us opening up our bags, laying everything out, and talking them through each item in detail as their eyes shone covetously. It was like a television shopping channel, listening to Seth explaining his GPS while eyeballs goggled. One man was particularly taken by my small collection of Nigerian movies. In his head, they had his name blazoned across them in big letters.

‘These’, he wagged a finger at me, ‘are illegal. It’s illegal to bring them here!’ He was using the fake-stern manner, pulling the fake-stern face, that we have seen so many times on greedy officials out here. I used to do a lot of acting, and I see it as an art form, so when someone is ‘acting’ with me in real life, for the sake of manipulation, I see straight through it and it urks me. I get customers like this occasionally in the bookshop, who pretend to be angry about something to wangle a discount – the faux-huffing and puffing, like little dragons – you can spot it a mile off. It’s hammy. So this official was furrowing his brow at me, jabbing an accusing finger at my petite nollywood selection, and he was about as intimidating as a tuskless walrus in a sunhat, honking along to yellow submarine, but annoyingly these people do have the power to make things difficult for you. I brushed off his talk about the DVDs and continued to unpack when he ordered me to do so, being sure to wave my packs of sanitary towels and tampons in his face.

‘Keep calm,’ whispered Seth, recognising the classic Taurean temper beginning to reveal itself, ‘don’t get impatient with them!’

Meanwhile, the other policeman was very interested in our packs of noodles. ‘You just add hot water’, explained Seth. This will make me sound ridiculous, but the pack in question was my favourite flavour and I had spent some of the morning planning devouring them – cracking a raw egg on top, stirring it in, down the hatch – so when Seth made the (actually wise) decision to give them to the cop, I stood mortified for a moment,, long enough to make my official bark at me to start packing away the big mess they’d forced us to make in their office. It was necessary, too, to hand over a token note in a handshake before we were allowed to progress to the next office. (In Congo, you run the gauntlet of different divisions and at every layer you want to bury your wallet deep in your pocket.) In the second office, we ducked out of the bribe. In the third, we bought our visas, and the officer had no interest in lining his pocket. Ngongo was tiny, dusty and inhabited by more hens than people. We asked when the next vehicle would head south, expecting an answer like ‘3pm.’

‘It’ll be tomorrow morning, 5am’ was the response. This meant a whole afternoon and night in police-ville. The local hotel was a brick block of tiny rooms under one long corrugated iron roof. Cockerels strolled in and out of our room as we made a makeshift lunch, and when we ventured out into the town… village… we found it was only a hundred metres long. Beyond it lay deserted grasslands and dirt road. Walking a little way in the late afternoon light, it was hard to understand we had reached the Congo.

‘Don’t walk as far as the roundabout,’ warned the local kids, ‘there are ghosts.’ Congo’s civil war officially ended in 2003, but security in the country was still a bit patchy. Elections had just been held and the results were widely believed to have been rigged. Ahead of us down that dirt road lay a country with a difficult past, an edgy present and an unpredictable future. I was fairly sure that the only ghosts on the road were metaphorical, but perhaps that made them no less important to consider.

At half four in the morning a horn began to blast on the road outside our room. We both sat bolt upright as someone pounded on the door. For those who have seen the movie ‘Jeepers Creepers’ (scary, but ultimately let down by the hysterically unfrightening use of the namesake song as a recurring theme); remember the first scene, in which the two teenagers are chased by a crazy truck being driven wildly down the road by an insane demon, leaning on the horn, waaaaaap-waaaap? That truck was waiting for us on this particular morning. There was no time to wake up or even to think – we ran to the lorry, were ushered away from its crowded back and into the cabin, where we sat between mike, the angry yet likeable driver, and Joseph, the bespectacled maths teacher. The hours passed and night fused into day. Only after several police checks (and one bribe) did I realise I was wearing my adidas trousers around my neck. There hadn’t been time to pack them. At one stop, loading boys heaved crates of empty beer bottles onto the roof. As though the sight of so many empties offended him, mike cracked open a full bottle and slugged down the full 600ml. Somehow, it didn’t really matter. He and Joseph warmed to us, and enjoyed pointing out oddities along the way – Joseph in the precise detail suited to his profession, and Mike in his loud Jeepers Creepers style. He helped Seth get photos of some men selling a big hunk of gazelle, and then bought it. Later he pulled over and bought a dead monkey. I watched him inspecting the quality of its sad hands in the wing mirror. Close to the town of mila-mila the scene suddenly became one of grassy mounds, very spectacular. We waved goodbye to Mike and Joseph, and looked for onward transport to Pointe-noire – our planned ‘P’ – in this tiny junction town. It lay 181 kilometres away. The policeman who checked our passports told us it would be a ride of two hours, maybe three. It sounded easy, but the town was full of people huddled in bars looking slightly dusty – not a good sign. Their luggage – typically dotted with great branches of plantains – lay by the road with half-arsed plastic covers draped across it. It had obviously been there for some time.

‘How long have you been here?’ Seth asked a tired looking workman nursing a beer.

‘Since yesterday’ was the reply. It seemed like nobody in these bars was that set on actually reaching Pointe-Noire. They’d given up. There was no public transport – the only chance you had was hitching a lift in or on a lorry, and these guys had too much luggage to squeeze into a cabin. Someone knew someone who might be leaving for P-N that afternoon. The lorry depot was a kilometre away, they could give us a lift. We agreed. Mila-mila was too depressing to hang out in, and we told ourselves we weren’t queue jumping because nobody had seemed remotely animated to get up and go. It was a logging company, and our ride would be a huge lorry loaded down with huge tree trunks. A price was debated over and the driver readied the vehicle. We waited. And waited. A kitten fell asleep on Seth’s bag and we talked with a local nurse. Kids with mad hairdos ran around while women prepared pastry puff-puffs. Finally Seth said to me: ‘Why are you wearing your trousers around your neck?’

‘It’s been that kind of day,’ I said.

It was an hour and a half before we climbed up into the cabin and hit the jungle road. The excitement of leaving in the lorry wore thin when it became clear that it could travel no faster than a trotting warthog. It had severe problems with hills and even the smoothest parts of the rough jungle roads threw the driver into overly-cautious concentration. Bafflingly, other lorries with identical loads roared by and sped into the distance, leaving us in clouds of red dust. Moussa, the driver, was a good guy, but we worried – with all the scenic twists and turns in the road, we seemed to be covering no distance at all, and we were moving as fast as a drunken slug. Pushed to explain our situation, Moussa told us that while most other lorries had ten cylinders, we had eight. While they could race downhill in third gear, we had to do so in first. Hours past. Each time we hit a pothole, we flew out of our seats. Sunset approached. P-N was virtually no closer than it had been when we set out many hours before. Moussa pulled up beside a truckers stop next to the Mayoume Forest. It was a lovely area, where patches of dark green forest filled the clefts in the valley, but the idea of sleeping over in an all-male truck stop in the middle of the Congo worried me. Nobody had said anything about overnighting in the middle of nowhere. It felt like a curveball I wasn’t quite ready to catch. Moussa reassured me that there were women here, and as we walked into the fire lit compound, I was relieved to see one or two of them, their faces lit up orange. A simple wooden hut was available for us. It had a sand floor and we had goats for neighbours. You locked the door from the inside using two big sticks and the bed was a bamboo frame with a thin mattress. From the small supply shop we bought a drink for Moussa, and pilchards, beer and luncheon meat for ourselves, which we ate by the light of a kerosene lamp. (The pilchards were mine. Too many crunchy spines…)

At dawn, the three of us returned to the lorry. Surveying the huge load as the sun rose over it, it looked almost appealing. We drove ALL DAY. I thought several times about the policeman’s claim that it would take just two or three hours. There were times when the GPS thought we were actually getting further away from Pointe-Noire. For some reason it didn’t matter and we even laughed about it. Sometimes potholes almost sent the three of us through the roof. It was sunset when we reached the coastal city. The two hours had in fact been 26. There was a sense of awesome release on hopping into a taxi, but it was short lived. Seth and the driver conducted an animated conversation in French that did not sound at all promising. I kept hearing the words ‘train’, ‘ninjas’ and ‘probleme.’ The ninjas, I knew, were a militant group. We had already discovered the crazily bad roads in Southern Congo (deliberate neglect, we were told, a political statement from a government that looked north) and had been counting on riding the train east to the capital, Brazzaville, from where to cross into the DRC. If we couldn’t take the train, we were in trouble. I looked out of the window. Our guidebook called the city Congo’s answer to a beach resort, but we never saw the sea, and the streets were covered in grey sand. Alleyways were piled high with rubbish, and pubs had great paintings outside – gorillas, crocodiles, mirrors in the shape of the Eiffel tower. Trucks carrying soldiers with huge guns rumbled past. Our hotel was bustling with wealthy Africans, and the occasional Chinese visitor, here to see family working on the national highway or near the oil plants. The Simpsons was on TV in French. We took a room and Seth translated the conversation from the cab: the train is unsafe to travel on, as it passes through the dangerous Pool region before reaching Brazzavillle. In Pool, the police have to get off the train and the Ninjas get on to hassle the travellers a little. As foreigners with valuable gear, we’d almost certainly be robbed of everything we owned, should the militia feel that way inclined. As for our physical safety, it could not be guaranteed or guessed at.

‘Perhaps the driver was exaggerating’, said Seth, ‘a lady in the lobby said she might be able to arrange an armed guard for us…’

I was not feeling inspired by any of this. The next day we went to the train station and asked the situation. They confirmed that the ninjas did indeed take over the train at Pool, and that we would be likely targets. Sassou had only been re-elected a week ago and tensions were high in the country.

‘Maybe we could hire a 4 by 4,’ I suggested, though totally unconvinced, ‘there’s still the road.’

We asked our hotel manager about it. He said that to avoid the Pool region we would have to drive all the way up to north Congo then all the way down again; days…probably weeks… He held our shoulders.

‘You are young people, with long lives ahead. These people don’t value human life. They are bad, bad people – like animals.’ We knew we had to fly. Seth cursed our map, and then our chosen route through Gabon to Ngongo, but if fate puts a bunch of crazed rebels in your path, what can you do? The next day, when we flew to Brazzaville, President Sassou was flying to Pointe-Noire. Both airports were braced for him, the armed soldiers more serious looking than ever. Politics seemed to lace life in central Africa, even in the eyes of the fly-by traveller. The flight instilled in both of us a sense of numbness. We had travelled on public transport from Morocco to Congo, and now had to break our aeroplane virginity, against our wishes. It was only a domestic flight. This distance was just 350km. We didn’t have a choice but it felt like a failure at the time. In likeable Brazzaville, even after beer and Chinese food, I felt a bit broken. Part of me thought we may as well be done with it and fly to Johannesburg, and explore southern Africa from there. Why risk travel in the DRC and the uncertainty of trying for an Angolan visa, when we could just fly? In honesty, what I was experiencing was pure nerves. We planned to cross the Congo River to Kinshasa, DRC, the next morning. I’m not a brave person. It’s a common misconception that those who travel to unlikely places are. Like most people, I get a little high from risk taking when it works out, sure, but I don’t much trust that part of myself – it’s a bit tacky, like the cheap, brief thrill you get on a rollercoaster. I don’t travel to take risks or to boast of it; I travel because the world is amazing and I like to be as much in it as possible. In many ways I am still a total softy, and so that night, I didn’t sleep. I was awake all night – seriously – worrying about Kinshasa. We never wanted to have to fly at any point between Morocco and South Africa, but the unpredictable stability of certain African countries meant that we would probably have to at some point. We were lucky it was just a domestic flight, and it in no way tarnished the efforts we had made with public transport all the way down. The coward in me now wanted to fly to Joburg, to skip the DRC and the potential Angola hassle, and to find myself instantly in sunny South Africa. But at sunrise Seth woke up, and he’s braver than me. The wheels began to set in motion, towards the Congo River, where from the banks we could see, on the far side, the city skyline I had dreaded all night.

Fifty kilometres; it was an inoffensive distance to travel between the villages of Bintang and Tendaba. On the map, it was a mere wiggle, a jubilant jump eastwards then westwards, passing a handful of small villages. In my head, I had us relaxing beside the Gambia River by lunchtime, eating chicken and chips with our feet propped on garden chairs. We had been camping, badly, for two days and nights now, and were orange with road dust, ready for some R&R. Here’s how the fifty kms treated us:

Phase one – A lift from Bintang village to Sibanor village, where we hope to flag a giri-giri minibus. The lift goes well; we ride alongside a huge basket of ripe red tomatoes and we only break down once.

Phase two – A whole hour by the roadside, in the company of fruit sellers and bored little boys. Every giri-giri going our way is full. We all gather dust in the shade of a tree filled with bats. Finally one that goes only as far as the next village arrives and we jump on board.

Phase three – For two and a half hours we share a bench with some tired looking women who have been waiting all morning to travel to the next town. When a giri-giri that miraculously has space finally pulls over, we discover, after loading our bags onto the roof, that there is not enough room for everyone. The conductor tries to kick off two of the women to make space for us but we protest, and watch miserably as the bus squeals away coating us in sand. For forty five minutes we try to flag down every moving vehicle, from lorries to pickups. At last a bus collects us, taking us just twenty km onwards to tiny Kalagi. Sigh.

Phase four – In Kalagi we quickly board the hottest giri-giri on earth and slowly bake all the way to Kwinella village where…

Phase five – … we are surrounded by children grabbing us as we try, and fail, to locate a cold bottle of Coke for the unavoidable five km walk we will have to make to reach Tendaba Camp.

Phase six – The walk is not so unavoidable; a teenage boy wants to drive us there on his donkey cart for a hundred dalasi. While he fetches the cart, we sit outside his school and chat to his teachers. The cart is slow – slower than walking – but with the weight off our shoulders we can watch hornbills flying from tree to tree, and fend off requests from the driver’s younger brother to relieve us of everything we own. ‘Can I have your hat? Can I have that book? Can I have a football? Give me your watch. A pen? Some sweets?’ We ride on.

Phase seven – Arrival. Down two bottles of Fanta on the spot to the surprise of the bar staff. Shower off a world of grime and stand amazed in equal measure by the great wide Gambia River and the number of hours of the day that have magically vanished. Feel as though I have been submerged in quicksand almost until death then pulled out at the last moment.

Our time in The Gambia was great, but there was certainly a point at which we began to dread moving between places on account of the gaping time and energy vortex that would kick in, inevitably, every time we tried to progress further east into the tiny country’s slender belly. It was a situation best explained by Paul Simon; ‘sometimes the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.’ In Tendaba we walked, talked and relaxed. Seth edited photos, I wrote. The river sunsets were beautiful, cold Julbrew beer in hand, while pied kingfishers fished in the shallow water all around us. We stayed for one day, two days, three… until we knew we were staying because we couldn’t bother leaving. To reach our ‘F’ though, a town called Farafenni, we needed to hit the road. It was forty kilometres away – who knew what the Gambia could hit us with for such a modest sounding distance? Actually, it wasn’t so bad; just a ferry, two buses, one taxi and a lift with some kind birdwatchers.

Farafenni inspired a touch of depression in me. It was another small and dusty town with no distinguishing features. There were the usual kids calling ‘toubab! toubab!’, the usual quiet market stocked with the usual vegetables, meat slabs and dusty fish scales blowing about underfoot. Shops sold the same shampoo, same hair extensions, same soap, same flip flops as ever. As usual none of the buildings were tall. As usual everyone rested until the sun had calmed down. I had known not to expect monuments on every corner in West Africa, yet was missing them, yearning for features beyond the colourful dress of local women shopping in the street, for inspiration outside of everyday life. I suspected that such feelings were pretty lame on my part and grumpily played Nintendo in our cheap hotel room, hoping to kick the mood care of retro gaming. The guidebook mentioned some stone circles in a place called Wassu. Briefly I became excited by the idea.

‘Are they old?’ I asked a guy at our hotel.

‘Ye-es,’ he said, uncertain, his face coming over a little misty, ‘maybe eighty years?’

There was a picture of them on the back of one of the Gambian notes. They looked older than eighty but not very inspiring.

‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘we have some like this in England.’

‘I know you do!’ said a cheery young Gambian, a charity worker, ‘Stonehenge!’

I glanced for the last time at the picture of the modest stone circle of Wassu and decided not to suggest a visit there to Seth when he returned from his photo mission in the sleepy market. Luckily he would discover a very living Farafennian feature come the close of the day.

Earlier, we had been strolling around town in the company of a little group of children. At the sight and sound of revelry up ahead, they stopped dead in their tracks and conversed anxiously amongst themselves in Wolof.

‘Don’t go there,’ translated little Abdullah at last, pointing ahead, where figures seemed to be frolicking in the dust. ‘Come, we will go this way…’

‘What’s wrong with this street?’ asked Seth, ‘It sounds like a festival.’

‘Bad people -criminals. If you don’t give them money, they kill you.’

‘With knives,’ added a little girl clutching a schoolbag, genuinely scared.

To please them and hedge our bets, we returned to Eddy’s Hotel Bar and settled in the courtyard beneath a big tree full of bats, the sounds of the festival of terror growing ever closer. A young man in a baseball cap joined us to chat, explaining this was a once a year festival for Farafenni, offering to take us out onto the street to see it. Seth accepted his offer but I opted to drink a Julbrew and hang out with the garden toads and bats. The drumming and shouting drew closer. I looked at the sky and thought about Asia, especially Japan. I realised I was missing it. I had a head full of bamboo groves, lamp lit inns, steaming bowls of udon, the gonging of temple bells, priests in purple robes. That person who walked eight hundred miles, to eighty eight temples – was that really me? For some reason on this day I was having trouble living in the now. The now was boring me. I wasn’t interested in what was going on outside; just interested in musing. I knew the writer in me should be out there on the street but plain simple Lu, stripped of any further identity, just wanted to chill and be a little moody and enjoy the beer. Seth burst back onto the scene, wired and hyperactive, as though he had popped around the corner, downed twenty espressos, and popped back.

‘Louie, that was such a good one for you to miss!’ he told me, breathlessly, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t come.’

The festival, it transpired, centred on a man dressed in tree root tendrils who ran at people with machetes, brandishing and clashing them in their faces until money was produced. With him were a gang of loud shouting men, adding to the general impression of being attacked.

‘I gave 10 dalasi,’ explained Seth, ‘and 25 extra for a photo.’ He showed me the image on his camera screen. It was taken with an unsteady hand and showed a group of mad looking men and an unearthly figure clad in orange foliage, the eyes only just visible, holding sharp machetes aloft. This mythical creature, the Kankaran (spelling and facts here in need of much further research) danced and ran through the streets, causing mayhem. ‘If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on, I would have just run screaming down the street!’

Seth’s guide suggested that you could clap instead of giving money if you wished, but as a foreigner money would be expected. So, we concluded, it was kind of like a festival of mugging. I noticed the guide looked just as flustered as Seth, and both of them drained their first Julbrew notably fast.

‘You have to work hard and train to be the Kankaran, ‘ said the guide.

‘Are there always men who follow him like that?’ asked Seth.

‘Yes, but at night, maybe he goes alone.’

I tried to shake the thought of the Kankaran arriving at our door in the night. Clearly there was a lot more to learn about this festival, its significance and the Kankaran, but for now I knew that Farafenni was not so featureless after all; I had just been looking for feature in the wrong places.

90km lay between us and our next destination. I figured it could only take all day. Our minibus was turned back by the police for not having a reflector in its front window. Grumbling, the driver took an hour long detour, bought a big road works sign and stuffed it in the window (obscuring a disturbing amount of his actual view out but hey…) Many hours, two more buses and a boat ride later, we were on the island of Janjanbureh, right in the middle of the Gambia River, a strange dusty place from where we would sail out, come morning, to try to see hippos. (Known locally as heepos, which sounds even better.)

Our boatman, Sadjo, took us out to what is known as Junction 6, a point in the river where a tributary forks away from the busy thoroughfare, away from ferries and fishermen, and hence a quiet spot perfect for wildlife. The heepos were there, comically elusive, popping their round heads, flapping ears and beady eyes above the water long enough to let out an indignant snort, then plunging under again. Waiting for them to resurface was a bit like that whack-a-mole game you play at retro arcades in places like Scarborough; heepos would pop up where you least expected them and plunge down before you had a moment to collect yourself. All of this led to lots of squinting at riverbanks. Those blessed with the awesome gift of perfect vision will never know what such scenarios are like for those of us who see like bats. Sadjo couldn’t get his head around how I could be missing so many hippo surfacings, and seemed to conclude that I had mental difficulties.

‘There!’ he yelled, annoyed, for the fiftieth time, pointing at a seemingly featureless patch of water on the other side of the river, ‘there there there!’ He was our boatman, and I liked him, but I don’t think he knew how close I was to pushing him in the river in these moments. I resolved never to come heepo spotting without my glasses ever again.

Possibly sensing my frustration, a kind heepo surfaced just a few metres from the boat – snorted – winked? – then descended. Excellent. On the way back, baboons watched us from the river bank, the bigger ones eyeing us as though they would have liked to give us all a big bite. It was a hot ride back, and I thought about contact lenses, but all in all there’s nothing quite like your first heepo sighting, however fuzzy round the edges.

Travel by public transport in West Africa; it’s totally exhausting, overwhelming, new, strange, and not without its moments of absolute brilliance. I’m sure that in this blog I come off a little serious, and perhaps a little complaining. It is due to being knackered, which is always a sign of good travel. I want to leave you with the ingredients for the epic journey we just completed:

A Recipe for getting from Janjanbureh, The Gambia to Bamako, Mali
1 x taxi to island’s south bank
1 x tiny ferry over Gambia River
Wait one hour in a tiny restaurant chatting to locals over a warm Sprite, then add…
1 x minibus to the town of Basse Santa Su
1 x taxi to the appropriate bush taxi depot
Now wait for three and a half hours for fellow passengers to join your party. Read. Get covered in dust. Begin to lose faith until finally…
1 x ride across Gambia-Senegal border in bashed up shell of a car with almost entire upholstery stripped, broken doors, holes in the floor and no glass in the windows, in the company of ten adults, a baby, plus a boy on the roof. Stop twice when bumper and exhaust fall off respectively.
Arrive in Velingara, Senegal, and take…
1 x taxi to bush taxi depot
Wait for one hour in the dark, then add…
1 x slow journey to Tambacounda, stopping at numerous police checks and passing alarming numbers of bush fires
Partake of 11pm steak and beer in tiny bar by cheap hotel where you have
1 x sticky night’s sleep
Then, stirring in one more taxi and a mission to the bank, add…
1 x minibus to the Senegal-Mali border, taking a mere six hours and at one stage reversing slowly through a busy market for no reason at all. NB, many live goats being tied to roof racks.
After an hour of police immigration formalities, take…
1 x taxi over border to Diboli, Mali
…where you can indulge in a feast of fishy crunchy rice and a plate of goat parts, including rectum, then stir in…
1 x 18 hour bus journey from hell, stopping randomly for many hours for no reason, while ill woman behind you wails and appears to be suffering from hallucinations, and two babies scream each time the vehicle stops
And there you have it! From Janjanbureh to Bamako; piece of cake.

[Lu]

We slept at Stansted Airport. I say we, but in truth Seth slept and I woke up every fifteen minutes freezing cold and wondering why my wrist was in so much pain. Realising that this was in fact due to vigorous cleaning of the oven before moving out of our flat the previous afternoon, I knew it was my most pathetic war wound to date. Such banalities, I thought, will at least be left behind for the next six months, while in Africa… yet here I am hand washing my clothes and hanging them out on the balcony to dry. I guess some banalities follow you (though I don’t think they were on the same plane as us…)

Twelve hours later, we were sat at a beach bar in Agadir, trying to convince each other that we really were at the start of our epic trip, that we really were in Morocco and that this was it; the beginning. Six months to track down the alphabet, in order, in Africa. It was a great feeling, a little surreal – like Agadir itself. A giant, hazy sky sat on the flat beach, running for miles in both directions, giving the place the same feeling as an empty room in which words bounce off the walls. A huge earthquake fifty years back devastated Agadir, taking apx. 18,000 lives and pretty much everything traditionally Moroccan in appearance with it. All that is really left is the old kasbah on the hill above the beach, which we found to be a wasteland in which foreign visitors kicked up the dust and tried not to get blown off the cliff edge and into the Atlantic. To shake the feeling of the beach-holiday-tourist-trap, you have to dodge the gauntlet of waiters who fly at you with laminated menus printed in ten different languages, and look for the places where Moroccans either go or are. Such places include the small meat and vegetable markets away from the tourist souks. Another is the port, where ships are built, fish are sold and from where thousands of boats sail and return with the catch. Loud seagulls outnumber fishermen. An enthusiastic old man even demonstrated the variety of fish available by picking them up from his friends’ stalls and dangling them in our faces. He even went as far as to blow up a dead puffer fish to illustrate how it looked when inflated. Basically, I thought, that’s just kissing a dead fish. The hotel we stayed in had character, in that it was full of them; the baby that screamed all night, the passive-aggressive British guy who kept provoking mild arguments in the courtyard, various drunk people who got locked out then tried their keys in the wrong doors, and the sacred house buntings who drank from the communal squat toilet. Before leaving town, we bought a trinket (to be procured in every alphabet town, and a, after all, was for Agadir.) It was a metal symbol for the Berber letter ‘Z’, also known as amazig, a symbol of the people. To get a ‘Z’ in our ‘A’ was somehow pleasing, and the gentleman who sold it to us had a workshop straight out of ‘Gremlins’, full of strange objects glued together (horseshoes, jawbones, doorknockers, planks of wood.) He worked at a brilliant old desk besides which a tray was piled high with empty tea glasses; the sign of a true artist.

From Agadir we journeyed southeast, via the walled city of Tiznit, to a place called Tafraoute on the edge of the Anti Atlas. Here, great granite rocks, boulders and mountains were surrounded by palm trees and villages full of squat cherry red houses. There were valleys full of bright yellow and purple flowers, so bright it was like walking through a cartoon. Seth is showing a sudden interest in wild flowers and is taking lots of photos on them. We even hailed grande taxis and hitched lifts to find the places where the valley was carpeted with the most flowers. ‘Perhaps I’ll become a botanist!’ Seth announced. ‘You could find out what all these ones are called,’ I suggested. ‘Nah, can’t be bothered with that,’ came the response. Don’t think he’ll be a botanist any time soon. It was on the way north that I finally saw goats in trees. I’d read about it and seen pictures, but it’s not until you are actually looking at four goats balancing on the branches of an argan tree that you genuinely believe it’s possible. I grinned for about an hour afterwards. I had been staring out of bus windows for four bloody days trying to see goats in trees. We reached the town of Demnate after dark, with no map, and no clue whether hotels would exist. Thankfully, there was one, though the receptionist disturbed me a little by tugging on my sleeve when Seth wasn’t looking and giving me a demonic look that was perhaps intended to come across romantically. The next morning, we reached the town of Ouzoud (it means ‘olives’, and the area is full of them), deep in the countryside, to visit the famous waterfall there. I can say with entire honesty that I have never in my life seen a place so beautiful. Spring had brought to Morocco not only flowers, but also storms that had even caused flooding in some parts of the country. For the Cascades d’Ouzoud, already in their best season, it meant the water fell faster and heavier than ever, tumbling a hundred metres down a double layered red gorge, slick with green moss and inhabited by daredevil pigeons who flew across the spume. A rainbow hugged the falls, and you could crawl to the very edge of the rocks, where the water sped up and plummeted downwards, and look over the edge. Retreating from doing so, I found my legs were shaking. Heights and wild water scare-fascinate me. Those people who go white water rafting – in my eyes, they are totally insane and also kind of incredible. (As for bungee jumpers, I am one; it is far better to stand at a great height with a chord tied to you than to do so without.) In the late afternoon, climbing out of the gorge in the company of barbary macaques, through olive groves above the roar of the falls, the sky suddenly turned a deep grey and thunder began to rumble. From the roof of our tiny guesthouse, a full panorama show of electric lightning streaks began, flashing across whole stretches of the sky in streaks of purple, bright blue and white, while water crashed down. With torches, we tramped through the mud and rain to the only restaurant open in Ouzoud, an outpost of travellers huddled over tajine pots, munching olives, drinking tea while rain thundered on the roof.

It took a full day and four grande taxis (shared taxis) to reach the outpost town of Midelt in the Middle Atlas. At the penultimate stop, it was raining and dark, and we sheltered in a crowded teahouse while the driver tried to round up more passengers. About twenty pairs of suspicious eyes fell on us. I suppose tiny Boumia rarely saw foreign visitors. It seemed to be a place totally composed of tiny butcher’s shops, with huge hunks of red meat hanging on hooks and chickens rendered slightly silly, headless, plucked, and dangling. Earlier, I had seen a man carrying about seven live cockerels by the feet, swinging them casually as you might an umbrella. We’d also followed a lorry full of donkeys. It was a good travel day.

Midelt, like Tafraoute, was less appealing in its centre than in its beautiful environs. Seth had selected the nearby village of Berrem to be our ‘B’, so we walked there, tempted away from the road by a ruined kasbah backed by snowy mountains, then following a path along a river, meeting locals on donkeys along the way. Berrem’s mosque soon appeared ahead of us, with the village built up behind it, every house squat and cream coloured, giving the place the look of a pile of butter blocks. Behind was a deep gorge, and the white Atlas stood proud in the distance. It was breathtaking. What a place for an alphabet town. The river running through the gorge was crystal clear, so we sat on the bridge (built with wooden planks and sand bags), dangling our feet in the water while women washing clothes nearby smiled shyly. In the village, prayers had just finished and we met a man called Aziz who invited us to his house for tea. His house was large, and dark, with high ceilings supported by thick wooden beams. The preparation of the tea was a complicated process, which I watched with fascination. When the sugar went in, it was in a crystallised block the size of my fist, and the tea was from Shanghai. The kettle boiled on an awesome stove, built by Aziz’s brother, composed of pipes that led up through the ceiling, the base of which was made out of a car wheel. He was a stonemason, and when we had had tea and cakes, who took us to the site where he and his friends were working; fortifying a river wall against flooding. Baseball-capped and with a nice smile that came often, Aziz and his hospitality became as central to our experience of Berrem as the village itself. Finding a trinket in a village that only seemed to have one shop open was not easy. We eventually settled on an eraser that depicted an Arabic version of Barbie, wearing a headscarf.

Heading north and west now (in the direction of Rabat, from where to apply for Mauritania visas), we stopped in the imperial city of Meknes. The bus ride there was awful on account of everyone having thrown up on the floor. A bag of warm sick under the seat in front of me began to leak, its contents creeping closer and closer to my feet as we travelled. Great wafts of puke floated around the bus and the heat intensified the smell. The bus driver, in no rush to arrive, stopped often and for no apparent reason. Our moods suffered. Finally in Meknes, free of the scent of vomit, a kid threw a piece of brick at me. It was not the first time I’ve had things thrown at me while travelling, and it won’t be the last, but it was not the right day for it. It’s kids, so what can you do? On this occasion, I spun around, angry, and flipped them the middle finger. This coincided with the exact moment that a responsible adult rounded the corner. It happens.

So, for the rest of the day Seth happily took photos of olives, goat heads, sheep stomachs and perfumes in the markets of Meknes, while I brooded angrily, saying little. Luckily the next day, spent at the Roman ruins of Volubilis, composed of crumbling columns and brilliant mosaics, and surrounded by stunning countryside, revived me. We lazed like lizards in the sun and listened to the chattering of giant storks making their nests. Seth taught me how to take a proper portrait photograph. (Usually when he hands me his camera, he does so with a look of predicted uselessness, as though handing a rubik’s cube to a monkey.) I am now the next Testino.

This brings us to Rabat, Morocco’s capital. We are due to collect our Mauritanian visas in three hours, if all goes well. The washing I did has blown off the balcony and landed several stories down, above the awning of a local coffee shop, much to the amusement of a waitress in the snack joint across the road, and the bemusement of the nightshift receptionist downstairs. I stand out on the balcony and wonder how to describe Morocco. Can an outsider really come to a proper understanding of a place while passing through? I think you come closest by living in the now, knowing your limitations, observing, absorbing, participating, considering. To me, right now, Morocco is about tiles – little coloured tiles absolutely everywhere: under your feet, on the walls of teahouses, inlaid in ancient medina gates, overgrown with grass in old ruins. Morocco’s also the taste of olives – pink, black and green – with every meal, and the taste of some spice – I think it is cumin – that sneaks into everything. From a moving vehicle, it’s a world where a thousand sheep and donkeys scroll by, and where terrain changes so fast and to such extremes, it’s like channel hopping. It’s men in yellow slippers and hooded djellabas in earthen colours, and women in headscarves, the girls and boys in jeans sometimes. It’s frothy coffee in a glass, and streets swept with dry palm tree branches instead of brooms. It’s the tattoo on a Berber woman’s chin, and the flight of an owl startled from the ledge of a gorge. Our time here has flown and there are things that we will miss, but it is not until we move south that our trip can begin to properly carve out its identity.

[/Lu]