MADRID, SPAIN
It's April 2007 and my sister and I are sitting in a hostel in Madrid listening to Marco, a young Italian, explain the odds stacked against soccer team AC Milan in the Champions League. They're outnumbered 3-1 by teams from England in the play-offs, he tells us, odds that have never been beat. But in futbol, he says, anything is possible. He predicts his team will win in Athens in a month.
The conversation turns and we explain our own plans, or lack thereof, to get across West Africa in the next six weeks. We get dubious looks from some and a warning from two Swedes about rampant con artists and pickpockets. We'll get by, I tell them. In Africa, anything is possible.
CASABLANCA, MOROCCO
I was all but talked out when a young Moroccan woman, in a white headscarf, sat beside me, visibly excited. I had just received a crash course in Arabic and was pondering the many symbols for "d" while struggling to fold my map when she noticed my trouble. "The map is very hard to fold," she said, and laughed. Najat - I later learned was her name - didn't fully stop laughing till the train separated us three hours later. With the paperwork she had gotten that day, she told us, she could go to Canada, which meant marrying the man she loved, after two failed arranged marriages. When I asked her how that worked in Islam, she claimed she could not be bound to the types of lovers her father had chosen. If I understood her right, that was because one had polio and the other was mentally retarded. She laughed heartily when she told me one was named Hamid, "thankful" in Arabic. "What does he have to be thankful for?" she said. We talked more about religion and I told her I didn't believe in Allah; she laughed uncontrollably as she described the punishments that awaited me.
DAKHLA, WESTERN SAHARA
Our first taste of Dakhla was its smell. Before dawn, as a police officer probed us with his flashlight and recorded our professed occupations, I wondered if the whole city stank of rotting fish. Miles away Abderzak, whom we met later, used the faint glow on the horizon to get ready for work. If he hadn't done so already, he pulled on a pair of nylon pants, a pair of jeans, and a third pair with more holes than pant.
The police signaled us on. We had driven nearly 1,000 miles along the N1 highway to get there, through a militarized country where army checkpoints were among the only signs of life among endless sand. After talking with locals, we envisioned Dakhla as a quaint seaside town. We had dared to hope that we would find a clean hotel with modern amenities. The rising sun revealed little besides crumbled buildings and wind-ravaged signs.
We found Abderzak that afternoon on our way to the ocean. Acres of trash on the outskirts of the city slowed our walk and we noticed the figure of a man in the distance, leaning against the wind with a shovel in hand. "As-salaamu Alaikum," I greeted him in Arabic and tried in English to ask him his name. He reached for a wad of tinfoil and unwrapped a small glop of red meat which he offered us. I signaled No thank you. I pointed to myself and said my name. I pointed at Jen and said hers. I pointed at him and he pointed back with the food.
I changed course and asked him to show me what he was doing. I picked up a pickaxe and he showed me where to strike to lodge something free from the rubble of concrete and packed garbage. A few pieces crumbled and I tossed them through a screen nearby. He even showed me how much he got for work - about $5 a day if I understood him. I returned to the name game. He reached for his food.
NOUADHIBOU, MAURITANIA
Hitchhiking in the makings of a sandstorm on the outskirts of Dakhla, we got picked up in a five-seat Toyota with seven passengers already on board. I shared the front passenger seat with my sister and another man. Four hours later, at the border, it was all I could do to get my legs moving again. A Tuareg guide picked us up there and guided us through five miles of land mine-covered No mans land, informing us that two French visitors had been killed there earlier in the year.
At the entrance shack to Mauritania, we bought $10 entry visas and drew a detailed map of the US on the wall for border patrol agents curious about Florida and, curiously, Ohio. We stayed one night in Nouadhibou, then hitched a ride south on a road that wasn't on our map.
We took off at 50 mph from a herd of goats in the middle of town. Our driver planned the angle of his turns to within inches of fruit stands, donkey carts and pedestrians.
Just as Jen whispered to me her growing weariness of Maghrebian music, the driver switched tapes. An imam came on, yelling, moaning and hovering on guttural "h's" and "g's." We stopped suddenly in the midst of sand dunes. Everyone got out. The driver walked furthest away. The folds of his white garment spilled onto orange sand as he knelt to pray.
NOUOKCHOTT, MAURITANIA
While wandering a stretch of clean, white sand beach, the first we had seen on our trip, Jen and I came across a group of Senegalese fishermen, struggling together against a rope that was longer than any I'd ever seen. We joined in the fray, pulling in cadence, without a clue as to what we were dragging. Half an hour later, the rope still stretched far out to sea.
Another group, rope in hand, closed in on us from further down the beach and it was only as the rope turned to net that I realized we were pulling in the same thing. Pandemonium broke out as fish started flying, donkey carts stampeded in from the horizon, and up came a huge net with what must have been every breathing, swimming thing from a square mile of ocean.
BAMAKO, MALI
Today we left Bamako after an anything but unusual wait of 3 1/2 hours at the bus station. We couldn't wander far from the rickety bench where we waited half in and half out of the scorching sun because we didn't know when the bus would fill up and leave. Any sign of discomfort on our part was met with emphatic assurance of imminent departure from random bystanders, some just walking by. So we just sat there, or, sort of balanced there, staring blankly at the sandals and cologne being hawked in our faces. I declined when a boy offered to polish my REI sandals. He was followed by a younger kid who looked me over to see if I had any jewelry that needed shining.
MBOUR, SENEGAL
The prophetic words of our Swedish friends Spain defined our experience in Senegal. In Morocco, someone stole a water bottle from us in broad daylight, we got scammed at a restaurant, and we came close, I think, to being stoned by a group of unruly kids in Tan-Tan. But in Senegal, it got more personal. A scam artist in Tambacounda stole $40 from us after acting like our friend the whole day. We also caused a knife fight between taxi drivers at the border. And I got pickpocketed at a taxi station, though I didn't lose anything valuable.
We heard things would be better in Mbour, south of the capital Dakar on the coast, and we caught a night bus heading that direction. They drove us out of the city before deciding they didn't want to do the run. Though they gave us our money back, they left us standing in the middle of nowhere at night. We ended up jumping onto the bumper of another bus that was already full and riding, for the first half hour anyway, reaching over two guys to keep a pinch on the bus' rain gutter.
In Mbour a fisherman got a crush on my sister and took us out on his pirogue to go fishing. He wooed her while I fished. I caught almost 30, mostly on a hand line baited with shrimp, and all small.
DOGON COUNTRY, MALI
Hiking into Dogon Country in the dark without a guide, we got lost and ran low on water. We stumbled onto a puddle of water in the middle of the night and filtered it through our shirts to get out the guinea worm, which Senegalese beauty queens had graciously warned us about on billboards in the capital. We put in iodine too. Back on track, we found the road leading down a cliff and into the valley where the Dogon people live. With one airline blanket for bedding, we laid down on top of a dune and slept. Nothing could have prepared us for the landscape we saw in the morning. Here is my journal entry from 5 a.m.:
"Writing, but not quite light enough to see. I can hardly tell ink is coming out. I would use my headlamp if it wasn't for the pink clouds on the horizon. As faint as they are, their color brings life to a shadowy scene of dramatic cliffs behind me, a ridge line with two trees on the horizon, and a valley between them so endless, I feel like I'm looking into eternity.
Now the scene lightens and I can see the features of the escarpment: rainbow roofs, distinct bands and stone-age ruins hanging almost magically 1,000 feet off the ground. The sound of cows, chickens and life in the village below bounces off the wall in a unified, moaning wail. This place would almost certainly be one of Africa's premier climbing destinations if it wasn't for the UNESCO protections in place. The throng of unmolested birds on the cliff give witness: This is Dogon Country."
MAY 23 SYNCHRONY
We left Dogon Country on the backs of dirt bikes and stood on the outskirts of Bandiagara for a ride to Koru in southern Mali. I was feeling sick after taking malaria medicine on an empty stomach and my sister did the work of thumbing down a ride. For the first time on our trip, clouds covered the sky and temperatures were dropping below 100 degrees.
In Europe, AC Milan was taking the field against Liverpool in the Champions League Final as we boarded a crowded bus. We sat near the back where the doors were held together by wire. Our fellow passengers stuck their heads out the paneless windows and gazed at the darkening sky.
In the same hours of the same day that AC Milan made history by beating its third British team in the finals, rain fell in Africa. It drizzled at first and the leading drops burst into steam on impact with the ground. Then the sky opened. Rain poured into the bus from every side. Months' worth of mud from the ceiling dripped on us and our backpacks. The rear doors flapped in the torrent. People laughed and talked to each other in Bambara or Maninka. The oldest lady on the bus huddled on the floor with a bag of rice and a beaming, muddy smile.
OUAGADOUGO, BURKINA FASO
There is a land where the desert ends, where people dance spontaneously in the street, where cold water isn't on the same list as santa claus and the tooth farie - I've heard it whispered of but never believed it to be true: Ouagadougou exists. At least, that was our experience at first. We later decided that, much like a whirlpool, the capital in the dead center of Burkina Faso sucks in the same sort of hustlers, scammers, transportation delays and general chaos of its neighbors.
ACCRA, GHANA
We turned right. We had to. Our minibus had already gone through the gates.
We had just been declined visas at the border to Ghana and ordered to return to Ouagadougou to obtain them, with all due process, from the embassy. The official's shoulders cast a shadow over his entire desk. He sat up in his chair just enough to put his elbows on the desk. He picked up a a pen and slowly turned it with both hands.
"You are wasting your time," he said. Only the pen moved. A bright yellow tassel, almost an inch thick, decorated the corner of a starched uniform stretched without a wrinkly across his barrel chest. "If I wanted to go to America, I couldn't just go to the border and ask for a visa." For the first time on our trip a border patrol agent was speaking to us in English, and plain English at that. I explained that we had gotten visas at every border up to that point. I explained that a friend had told us we could get visas here, that we didn't have enough money to return to the capital because our credit cards didn't work, that we were in a hurry to get to Accra to catch a connecting flight.
"Go back to Ouaga," he said.
We emerged from the cinderblock building in a daze. To our right lay Ghana and the first lush green fields we had seen in 4000 miles. Big, dark green trees beckoned to us from rolling green hills. British buildings - simple, square, two-toned British building without a curve on them - dotted the foreground. Young adults walked around in dark bottoms and white tops with a tight black belt between. Jacaranda flowers scented the moisture in the air.
Burkina Faso lay to our left, along with the money changers that had just short-changed us. To our left was a long bus ride to an embassy with ever-changing operation hours, mysterious processing fees and, with the weekend coming, a total process for which we didn't have the time or money.
We turned right.
By the time we got to our backpacks we were firmly in Ghana. Our entourage assured us things would be okay and, after a discrete interaction with an officer at a check point down the road, we began to believe them. We were anxious, desperate maybe, to get to Accra and away from Africa. In our rush to get out of the system, we became part of the system, but we were in. We were heading home.
A spare couple days on the coast gave us time to canoe a river, go on a canopy walk in the jungle, feed 10-foot crocodiles at a place called Hans' Cottage, and splurge for a nice beach-side condo before flying out.
PARIS, FRANCE
In Paris, my sister headed for Switzerland and I to Baudrillard. I couldn't find a taxi so I hoofed it four miles out to the airport, only to find that there were no more flights for the day. I had already missed my scheduled flight. Seventy-five Euro rescheduled my flight to the next morning. I went outside and laid down on the grass next to a big clock so I could know when to get up for the shuttle back to town. I got a E30 hotel room, double the price of any over the last six weeks. After I ate $10 worth of McDonald's I fell asleep back in my room. I didn't wink for 15 hours. I awoke to a strange world of soft light, not knowing whether it was the same evening or the next day. I ran out to the reception practically in my underwear. My French didn't exactly come through for me as I tried to ask a hostess what day it was. Then I saw the breakfast buffet. I barely had time to shower before the morning shuttle to the airport. Fourteen hours later - it seemed very sudden - I was back in San Francisco.
