Shortcut to Senegal

I bought a pith helmet.

Does that statement need explanation? Is it a little too colonial? A little too Heart of Darkness for our modern sensibilities? Well, like everything, there's a story behind it, and here it is.

After two weeks scrambling around the canyons, waterfalls, and plateaux of Doucki, I was exhausted. However, I still had one major challenge before me. In order to meet up with friends in Kedougou, Senegal, I had to take the mountain road down from Mali-ville in northern Guinea. All the guide books said that it was only 50km from Mali to the border post at Segou, and Kedougou was 12k farther along the road. It's possible to hike in 6 to 12 hours, say the guidebooks. All downhill, with shortcuts through the bush and amazing scenery, as if any of these writers had done such a thing. But, exhausted by two weeks of hiking, I got it into my head that this would be a good idea.

I was wrong.

I stopped off in Labé, Guinea to get some supplies and have a rest before I attempted an all-day hike in the middle of hot season. (See any problems with this idea yet?) It was here that I bought the pith helmet, but the shape of the hat, which I found in both Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, didn't really sink in until I was well on my way into Senegal.

The story is this. I hiked about 30k down from Mali through some amazing scenery. The weather wasn't bad, rather cool because of the elevation, and at the end of the dry season, the trees had lost their foliage, making the trip a bit eerie in the ashey haze from the harmattan winds. The beginning of the hike was like a nice, autumn day. But after 30k, things began to unravel. I came off the mountain onto a middle plateau, and the heat and the sun really started to pick up. I'd seen no one for a few hours of this trip, and around about 1:30 in the afternoon, a guy on a motorbike drove by and stopped. "Where ya goin?" Senegal! "Oh, you've missed your road. You can still get there on this road, but it's another 30k." Well...damn. "Jump on, I'll give you a lift...idiot (which is what he must have been thinking at the time)."

It was a good thing I got a ride, because another 30k of hard hiking lay ahead of me, and I did not have the resources to complete the hike. When we got to Loungha, the Guinean border post, he said that he had some stuff coming along in a camion (a huge truck) and that I could catch a ride all the way to Kedougou with them when they came through. Now to explain things a bit, the road from Mali to Kedougou is barely even a road. It comes off the highest part of the Fouta Djalon plateau and is a twisted mess of unpaved, rocky, on-in-four grade track. This guy had done it on a motorcycle, and the 50k had taken him about 5 hours. It was even worse in a truck.

So I waited around this border town until 4:30 in the afternoon. Just when I thought I'd had enough and it was better to spend a little money on a moto into Senegal, I heard the roar of a big truck. Here was my camion. After about two hours in customs (i.e. bribe negotiation) we were on our way. Since I didn't have any money to pay these guys, I was in the back of the camion, which is kind of like a dump-truck when you get right down to it. There was a car seat back there crunched in between two enormous truck axles. Looking at these, I could only help thinking, "If this truck flips...I really have no escape plan," but, I settled in, my head and shoulders just peeking out from the lip of the truck bed and off we went. As we drove away from the border post, waving to the customs officials, I realized what a sight I must have looked. Here I am, dirty, sweat-streaked, in torn clothes (all my clothes are torn now, the shirt and pants I was wearing have each been patched about six times), sitting in the back of a camion like I'm Teddy Roosevelt on my way to the inaugural ball. But, like any good fool, I was smiling, ragged, and looked a mockery of any kind of civility. At that moment, I felt as if the only thing I needed was for Jambe to bring my hammock and my pink gin sundowner. My pith helmet is made of grass. My clothes, patched with bright African pagne fabric are a laughable embarrassment that will be completely replaced when I reach Dakar. My hair has gotten long after four months traveling, and like my first year in Niger, it's become rather sun-bleached. Charlie Chaplin could not have conceived a more ridiculous scene. Arriving in Kedougou, tired, hungry, dehydrated, beat up, and sore, I couldn't help thinking how appropriate it was that I entered Senegal, the last leg of my trip in sub-Saharan Africa, totally wrecked by four months on the road, but grinning like a happy fool nonetheless.