There was good news on the Kankan’s gare routière. When I was buying a ticket, the ticketmaster asked me if I want a ticket for this and he pointed to a… minibus! Ah God is great, I’m tired of Renaults, I wanna sit where I have space! It crossed my mind that after a Renault fills up – there was one waiting for passengers – it will take time to fill this huge van of mine – and my ticket was no. 1, which meant I was the first passenger on the list but I didn’t care. Yes, I’ll sit in front, in comfort, finally. The ticket was 150,000francs so possibly the same price as the Renault. It was about 7am. Happy, I went out for coffee, took 3 cups, got into discussion why it’s even possible to drink this kind of coffee without a mountain of sugar.
Then I managed to have breakfast: a big plate of rice with bean sauce, only mildly flavoured. I added some pepper and I saw people adding some other greyish powder. I was told it was soumara, a fruit of Néré. I didn’t put much of it – people were throwing a lot on their own plates – it added some flavour to my meal but not too much. Later Google said it’s also known as African mustard but I don’t exactly know why, mine didn’t taste even as if it was near mustard. For all the botanists out there, it’s parkia biglobosa, a savannah tree.
The good news of getting my first almost-bus in Guinea was soon balanced out. I saw a notification on my phone. An email from booking.com. Booking.com? That service that is almost completely useless around here? What possibly do they want from me?
Inside the email, a message from hotel in Freetown. They are ready for my arrival today. Today being 26 March, I’m in Guinea, going to the forests, looking for coffee, Sierra Leone is still some time away. The it hit me. Fuck. I made a reservation when I was applying for the visa. I only made it coz there was a question about where I stay and phone number to that place. And the hotel was free to cancel… until 24 March. Merde!
There is an option to cancel such bookings free of charge on booking.com but it’s not guaranteed to work, the hotel has to agree. I used it before in Asia and it worked.
Here it didn’t. I’d have to pay, $30 added to the cost of the visa, thank God I didn’t book anything fancier than that!
That got me thinking about insurance that I have. There is a section of “insurance against costs of booking cancellation” but yeah, if I die, or get almost dead then they’ll pay out. Being forgetful and stupid doesn’t count.
We left just before 9am. There were 4 of is sitting in the driver cabin, driver included. Still better than a Renault. The distance to Nzérékoré is 360kms, Google Maps indicates time of travel 7hrs 40mins. Which indicates the road will not be too good.
We arrived 13 hours later.
The asphalt ended as soon as we passed the last buildings of Kankan. The dirt road wasn’t particularly bad, it was fairly smooth. We didn’t make many stops. Yet after 6 hours we only covered 130kms.
There were no prayer stops. We stopped for lunch in a village/town. I had a bowl of millet and a piece of fish, all a bit bland in taste, pepper didn’t help, for 13,000cfa. We were all covered in dust. Normally you close windows when you pass a lorry or another big car that generates a cloud of red dust but this van had windows permanently open.
There was a lock on the glove compartment, the kind you put a padlock on (there was no padlock), presumably to keep the glove compartment closed. It was scratching against my knee. It did get me thinking how everywhere there is something sharp to scar your skin. In each car in place of the inside door lock there is invariably a spiky wire sticking out, the windows are open but they never open completely, there is always a bit of glass sticking out, so you can’t comfortably put your arm out of the window, which is necessary if you wanna create space in those sardine cans. And if you put out your arm, there are dry bushes lashing at you when the road gets too narrow. I nevertheless couldn’t complain, this was infinitely better than a Renault.
When we were 240kms away from Nzérékoré (Google travel estimate: 4 hours) we lost a tyre and we spent some time waiting for the driver and his helpers to replace it.
It wasn’t until 120kms before Nzérékoré when we finally found ourselves on tarred road.
We passed few villages, some of them just a few thatched huts. There was maybe one police checkpoint, when a policeman tried to sell me a BMW parked there, for 50million gnf (€4850,$5500,20800zł). We also had a village checkpoint, that was before we stopped to replace the tyre. Not sure what it was for.
At one point, unexpectedly, a thunder hit next to the bus. Immediately everyone took out their phone to switch them off. I was also reprimanded and switched off mine. I considered starting a discussion about airplane mode or in general how mobile phones are safe but I didn’t want to be left on the side of the road. Then rain came, and for a short while it was heavy. Immediately rivers of water ran down our road, I was wondering how soon before the road gets too slippery to maintain the control of the vehicle. I once drove in a weather like this, in Zimbabwe, and I remember how at one point the car didn’t respond to braking, to the steering wheel, this red ground turns into a red wet ice rink.
I was wondering how soon before the storm experts allow to switch their phones back on, when we saw another beautiful lightning and a thunder at the same time.
Finally the man sitting next to me switched his phone on, the permission granted.
Even when we reached the asphalt the road felt slow. There were cows on the road, there was a fair share of motorbikes without any light whatsoever and then every other vehicle which had lights was running long lights and wouldn’t change them when we approached it. Every bridge on the road was practically reducing the road to a single lane and even when the road was empty it was quite winding and it took us three hours to cover the last 120kms.
I stay in a Catholic guesthouse, next to a cathedral. It’s 100,000gnf for a huge room, with its own seating area. It’s a very good deal but the electricity is off at midnight and there are no ventilators and it’s a bit stuff at night. There is running water.
I went out to find food after arrival. I ate on the street, a woman had roasted fish and she made a salad, with her own vinaigrette sauce, 45,000gnf, very good dinner. Then I thought about beer.
I had to take a moto all the way back to Nzérékoré’s gare routière, where there is a string of bars. I had my Guinness and came back to the guesthouse shortly before midnight.
I went out only with a handful of banknotes with me, each of them 20,000gnf. As I stood outside the gate of the guesthouse in complete darkness, the ground was slightly downhill and there, me standing there, slipped down on the ground and almost fell over, scratching me knee against the gravel. I walked on but the knee was bleeding and stingy. I stopped at the first shop and wanted to buy a water in plastic sachet to clean the wound. They didn’t have change and just gave the water to me for free. The next day I returned for coffee and baguette breakfast and the man still didn’t want the money for the water. I know it costs next to nothing, yet still. That’s how people roll here.
There is a sound track that comes to my mind every time I see how people share water around here. Every time we stop on the road at a village for tyre change or I have to wait for a truck to take me further, a bench, plastic chair is brought out and water is given away. The track is appropriately named “Shall we share water brother?” and it’s by my music hero Edward Ka-spel and you can listen to it here and here. It’s mesmerising.
Coming back to Maman 