After breakfast, as Sira and I were getting ready to go out and do some sightseeing, a Guinean girl came to our room and just stood awkwardly in the doorway. I couldn't tell if she worked at the hotel, or was a guest, or what.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"Do you speak French?" she asks me.
"Yes."
So she came up very close to me and whispered in my ear, "I trust you."
"Um, okay, thanks. But can I help you with something?"
"I trust you."
All this time she is looking around at our stuff in the room, and I start to think she's here to look around and see what might be worth stealing after we've left. Sira sees that I am getting nowhere communicating with this girl, so she tries to speak to her in Pulaar. No luck. Finally we get the girl to leave, and Sira and I decide to take all our valuables with us while we're out for the day, even though we don't feel super secure carrying it all around with us, either.
Then as we are almost ready to go, one of the European tourists we had made friends with came to me and asked if I had had rubber straps on the luggage rack on my bike (which was locked up in the courtyard of the hotel). I had. She told me that the man they had hired to drive them to some nearby waterfalls for the day (who, coincidentally, was the same man who drove us the day before from Pita to Dalaba) had just taken them off my bike and stuck them in his pocket. Of course he was still at the hotel, waiting for the tourists to be ready to go, so I went and found him and asked him if he had stolen my bike straps. He gave them back without any fuss, and I lectured him a bit, asking him what he thought he was doing, taking other people's things.
I was starting to think that people in Dalaba are just weird.
Finally we were able to leave the hotel, and we went first to the tourism office, where the European tourists had told us they sell a booklet with instructions for going on hikes in the area. (Although they warned us that the instructions included lots of things like, "turn right at the red door" when the red door had long ago been painted another color or taken down altogether).
So we got the booklet and decided to try biking to the "Pont de Dieu" (Bridge of God). The directions, of course, told us to get there by taking the road heading south out of town and then turning off into the bush, when in actuality we should have taken the road north out of town. So it took us a while, but we were able to ask people along the way for directions, so we made it eventually. And discovered that the Pont de Dieu is a natural rock bridge over a pretty little waterfall with some nice little swimming holes. And absolutely no one else around! So Sira and I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon there, just swimming and lying on the rocks and reading.
In the late afternoon we biked back into Dalaba, this time along the correct path, which took us through bamboo groves and a pine forest – beautiful! We got dinner from a restaurant shack right next to the hotel: millet with fresh onion and tomato, only about $1 for enough for four of us (we invited two of the tourist girls to eat with us, so they could tell us their horror story about their day with the crazy driver who stole my bike straps). Guinean food is delicious. And so cheap! If I could get a good internet connection, and a job I could do over the internet, I think I would live there.
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