The third day of our vacation my friend Sira and I decided that we would bike to the town of Labe, about 120 km away. I was pretty intimidated by this plan, but Sira really wanted to do it and I didn't want to be a party pooper. And Mali is a higher elevation than Labe, so we hoped that it would be a fairly easy, mostly downhill ride. And I've often ridden between Tamba and my village, which is 70 km and takes only four hours, so we thought we could make it to Labe in one day.
So we got up early, stopped for breakfast in town (just coffee and bread) and by 8:30 we were off. The first several hours were great - mostly downhill, and we were able to go fast enough to get a nice breeze, and there was lots of shade and almost no traffic on the road. We passed through several villages that just reeked of vinegar. It took us a while to figure out what it was, but finally we realized that the smell was coming from rotting mangoes. They have so many mangoes that not only can the people not eat them all, but the goats and sheep can't either! This is unimaginable luxury in Senegal. We stopped in one village and asked a woman if she would fill up our water bottles (we had little chlorine pills to put in them so we wouldn't get amoebas or anything else). After she filled them up we tried to give her about $0.10 to thank her, but she didn't want to take it - giving water to travelers is just expected here. Finally she agreed to take it, but insisted on giving us some mangoes - and they turned out to be the best mangoes I have ever eaten. I started thinking about moving to Guinea - I could live there a really long time with almost no money, with food as cheap as it is. Only problem is I couldn't live without internet!
The good times couldn't last forever though, so by about 1 pm, just as it was starting to get pretty hot, we came out of our nice mountains onto a flat plain with no shade. No more coasting downhill, and pretty soon we were going uphill. The soft dirt and gravel road made it really hard to get traction for the bikes, so we ended up having to push them uphill a lot. It was hot and exhausting. We would push our bikes up a hill, praying that around the curve the road was flat or even downhill. And every time, it was just more uphill. For hours. And every time we would stop for a few minutes to rest, gnats would attack us, trying to get into our eyes and nose, forcing us to get up and keep going. I was hating life. If I had been by myself, I think I might have just given up, laid down by the side of the road and cried. Or at least tried to hitch a ride on a passing truck. But I wasn't going to be a wimp in front of my friend, so I kept going.
By 4 pm we had only made it about 80 km (compare that to the 70 km in 4 hours I can do in nice flat Tamba!), so we decided it was time to give up for the day. We started looking for a village where we could ask to spend the night. The first place we stopped, hardly more than one family, and the woman we spoke to said that all the men were away from the village, so she couldn't give us permission to stay here. So we had to keep going. Up the never-ending mountain. Did I mention I was hating life?
But at the next village we came to we had better luck. The villagers said that we could sleep at their primary school, where the school principal and his family also live. So they opened up one of the classrooms for us, and we set up our tent inside (mainly to keep bugs out). The principal's wife gave us dinner - a sauce made of cassava leaves and crushed peanuts over rice. It was delicious. It would probably have been polite for us to sit around the fire and socialize with the family a bit, but we were both too exhausted. Hopefully the family didn't think we were too rude for going to bed right away.
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