Huw and the District Chief, near Shenge, Sierra Leone. © Listen to Africa

[Update (6th April 2010): The diagnosis was eventually confirmed as Blackwater Fever and Huw's recovering in the Yorkshire Dales, doing well.]

When we said we were going to take some time away from the blog, we didn’t plan to take seven weeks away – sorry about that. But then we didn’t plan to get quite so ill and get evacuated first from Liberia and then from Ghana. I’m going to write the long version when things have calmed down a bit but, for now, here’s the short version:

We got stuck in Freetown for far too long, got moving, got a few kilometres before Huw’s bike spontaneously imploded, got moving again, got blown away (in a good way) by Sierra Leone and (in a bad way) by its poverty, got close to nature (primates and green mambas, most memorably), got to Liberia and, on New Year’s Eve, got engaged (in a brothel).

A couple of days later, we got malaria and / or E Coli, depending on which hospital tests you believe. I mended very quickly but Huw deteriorated and developed jaundice, among other things. With our (excellent) insurance company (and us) worried about organ damage and the quality of medical care in Liberia, we were evacuated from Liberia to Ghana by air ambulance. At excellent hospitals in Ghana, Huw got a bit better and then a lot worse, suffering acute renal failure (the doctors suspected Black Water Fever, a (rare, nowadays) complication of falciparum malaria that can be triggered by quinine). After two days of dialysis in Ghana, we were evacuated by air ambulance to the UK last Thursday.

Huw’s now doing well in hospital in London and, while the doctors are very excited about all sorts of rare tropical diseases, they say the chances are we’ll now never know what he had – although they have ruled out a few of the nastier possibilities. Whatever it was has cleared up so now we’re just crossing fingers and toes that his kidneys start working properly soon – the signs are encouraging and getting better by the day.

Neither of us has the headspace at the moment to think about what happens next; for now, we””re just focusing on Huw getting better. Whatever we decide after that, we’ll let you know – but we’ll certainly be spending at least a couple of months here in the UK.

While Huw’s recovering, I’ll slowly be writing a few blogs about the last couple of months, adding a few galleries and posting some sound recordings from Sierra Leone (primates, mostly). Once those are up, you might find yourselves Listening to London for a while instead of Africa…

For the time being, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone sending us good wishes – and especially to Renee (in the US), Ralph (in Liberia) and Dean (in Liberia) for all their help. And to these people and these people.

We’ve had a pretty scary time but, that said, we’re very aware of how privileged we’ve been in all this compared to, say, the majority of Liberians, who have no choice but to muddle through with the country’s abject lack of medical staff and facilities. (In both Sierra Leone and Liberia, we learned that civil wars keep killing people long after the fighting is over, but that’s another story.)

In the meantime, here’s to a slightly less eventful rest of 2010, wherever it takes us!

Right, I’m off to find more ways to procrastinate over writing the long overdue update about our last two months on the road (too much to write!).

We're planning to use these more. © Listen to Africa

Over the past nine months, we’ve travelled through some spectacular lands and feel privileged to have seen and heard what we have. We’ve also slowly come to realise that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things we want to do. We’ve spent considerably more time in front of computers than either of us envisaged (for example, the only serious injury I’ve sustained is RSI in my mouse hand…). So we’ve decided to change our working practices.

We’re going to spend more time:
1. Cycling
2. Recording what we hear
3. Photographing what we see
4. Doing nothing
5. Enjoying life

We’re going to spend less time:
1. On computers
2. Meeting self-imposed deadlines
3. Holed up in grubby hotel rooms in cities
4. On the internet
5. Feeling stressed

So what’s going to change on the web site?
1. Less frequent blogs
2. More creative content
3. More soundscapes and wildlife recordings
4. More pictures of Bex and Huw smiling (maybe)
5. More stunning multimedia (but you may have to wait for that)!

Only time will tell what the actual changes will be. What I can tell you is that, for at least the next few weeks, there probably won’t be many Twitter updates / microblogs (Bex has been pulling her hair out trying to register our Sierra Leonean phone on Twitter; I don’t really understand the problem as I don’t talk Twitterspeak but it seems to me if you haven’t got a European/US/developed world SIM card, you can’t do Twitter by SMS anymore – doesn’t seem very fair…).

Anyway, we’re now cycling off to Tiwai Island, so you’ll have to wait a week or two for a blog. We are going to do lots of the first list and none of the second list and we’ll see how the third list pans out.

Goodbye for now – I’m off to enjoy myself!

The ferry to Guinea. © Listen to Africa

The day after I last wrote, a bright orange Land Rover rolled into Bissau, carrying Lynn, Tim and Will of Atlantic Rising – an excellent 32,000km journey circumnavigating the Atlantic, creating an educational network and documenting what will be lost if climate change predictions come true.

We’d previously been in touch with Atlantic Rising about the precarious situation in Guinea and our dilemma in common, and they’d tentatively mentioned the possibility of giving us a lift across the country if they decided to go ahead and traverse it. When they arrived in Bissau, they were still waiting to hear back from a shipping company before making their decision.

In the meantime, the obvious thing to do was to all go to a stunning, white-beached island in the Bijagos archipelago in search of salt water hippos.

Walking to shore. © Listen to Africa

[View as slideshow »]

Instead, I’ll start this story when we’re back from the islands, in Bissau again, where Will, Tim and Lynn decide to go ahead and drive through Guinea, and where we spend our days in the wifi-casino and our nights in the mosquito-infested car park a kind man offered to us all as a camp ground. We meet a French radio journalist working on a story about the ill-treatment of small children in many of Senegal’s maraboutic schools. We get to know the Guinean security guard in our camp ground, and his fury at Africa’s poverty. We research and talk about the latest developments in Guinea. We re-pack the Land Rover so it can absorb our eight panniers, two bikes and large wooden box, carefully hiding any journalistic-like kit deep in the heart of the chaos.

Eventually, we all climb in and drive towards the border-that-isn’t-marked-on-the-map between Pitche in Guinea-Bissau and Farafenni in Guinea. The landscape changes, the people change, we whizz through.

We arrive at the border just before dark. Customs is lounging in a reclining chair on one side of the road. Immigration is on the other side, sitting primly at his desk. We start traipsing between them.

Is it OK to camp here?

“You can camp over there,” says Immigration with a scowl.

“You can camp over here,” says Customs with a smile, and he calls two children to pull weeds from a patch of ground.

We need to leave at dawn so we can keep a rendez-vous with a man from the Guinean government’s agricultural department, which has offered Atlantic Rising a motorbike escort through the country, so we ask if it’s possible to go through the formalities now and leave at first light.

“Absolutely,” says Customs.

“Absolutely not,” says Immigration.

“Don’t listen to him – you are free,” says Customs.

“Don’t listen to him – he only deals with goods,” says Immigration. “I am responsible for people and you are people. If you stay here, we will keep your passports and you will have to wait until we open in the morning.”

What time do you open in the morning?

“Time?” laughs Customs. “We are in Africa. Here in Africa there is no money and there is no law and there is no time.”

“Eight o’clock,” says Immigration.

Eight o’clock is too late for us, so eventually we all agree that we can do the formalities now and get our passports back as long as we camp in no man’s land, out of sight of Immigration, so that he cannot be considered in any way responsible for us. We set off, with a huge bag of peanuts given to Huw by a woman (who lives on the Customs side of the road) whose water container he filled up at the water pump.

Village in Guinea-Bissau. © Listen to Africa

At first light, we’re off, bumping along the track, sploshing through cavernous puddles, steering through bushes and branches and forest debris. When we reach the river, little cloud-like wisps of mist are just dissolving from its surface in the early morning sun. A clunking great machine tilts in the water at the near bank, attached to a chain stretching between the two banks.

We look at the mist, inspect the ferry, talk to the policeman living there. “How are things in Guinea?” I ask. “You know,” comes the answer, “Africa is so hard. There is always war or poverty or misery. There is always one, we are never free.”

Land Rover driving onto the ferry. © Listen to Africa

On the Guinean side, off the ferry, we reach our first checkpoint. They look confused by our arrival, and a half-hearted preamble to a demand for money peters out before it’s really begun.

At Farafenni, Tim does the border formalities and in no time we’re in the village, breakfasting on peanut balls, honey and sardines. By lunch time, we’ve seen hills (hills! It’s been so long…) and bumped far enough along the track to reach the first major town, where we’re meeting the government escort.

(We don’t know whether having a government escort in Guinea is a good or a bad thing at the moment, but this worry turns out to be academic anyway; our escort whizzes ahead and we barely catch a glimpse of him all afternoon.)

Infinitely varied and stunning landscapes fly past the windows: rivers and hills and tidy villages and forests. And for all of us, there’s a bit of regret here, not to be able to slow down and breathe in this extremely beautiful country. Guinea with its Fouta Djallon highlands where so many of the region’s big rivers originate. Guinea with its forests and rivers, its bauxite and iron ore. Guinea, whose people seem more conscious than any other West Africans we’ve met of just how much they don’t have.

Guinea, which was the only Francophone African nation to stick two fingers up at de Gaulle and vote for independence in his 1958 referendum. (“We prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery,” said Ahmed Sekou Toure, and that’s what Guinea got; when France pulled out, it pulled out all of its aid, its civil servants, its doctors, its businessmen, engineers, teachers and administrators. What it couldn’t pull out – files and records and furniture and bulbs and medical supplies and windows and crockery – it smashed and burned.)

Guinea, which at the moment of independence, had only six graduates and a primary school system that educated just 1.3 per cent of its children. Guinea, which then watched – and fled – as Toure descended into a world of paranoia and purges and fear and executions, in which football results and cholera outbreaks were all proof of plots against him. Guinea, whose next, also long-serving, president, Lansana Conte, brought the country into repute as the second (equal) most corrupt country in the world after Haiti (Transparency International, 2006).

And Guinea, whose new “President” – an opportunistic young army captain called Moussa Dadis Camara who came to power in a coup hours after Conte died – seems to have ordered the murder, mutilation and rape of hundreds on September 28th (the Human Rights Watch report is here – although I haven’t managed to stomach reading the whole thing) and is now reported to be stirring up ethnic tensions, training ethnic militias and generally creating the whole range of conditions needed for another West African civil war, which some commentators are expecting to break out imminently.

Which is why Peace Corps and French embassy staff and mining company executives have all been pulled out, and why we are now in a car instead of on bikes, and why the country is now flying past the windows.

At Boke, the main town of the region, we finally catch sight of our escort. He tells us there is a choice of hotels. One has a “court” – a courtyard, we suppose – so we choose that one, for camping-related reasons. The court turns out to be literally a court – a youth centre’s basketball court. We set up camp there and then find a restaurant in which Huw asks whether there is a toilet, is told “yes, there is,” and is shown to a bush on the pavement. We are serenaded by musicians, we watch an expert game of boules and we fall asleep on the basketball court under fluorescent floodlights which blot out the starry sky.

It’s morning. It’s still dark and we’re already packed and caffeinated. Today, we’re taking the main road from Boke to the Sierra Leone border, past the turnoff to the capital, Conakry. This is where the problems will be if there are any; this is where all the army checkpoints are (amazingly, we haven’t seen one checkpoint so far).

Our escort is nowhere to be seen. When we’re just about to leave, he turns up on a motorbike, in clothes that look suspiciously like pyjamas. He gives us directions and we thank him for his help and he goes back to bed, probably.

Slash and burn in Guinea. © Listen to Africa

The checkpoints begin an hour or two’s driving away from the turn off to Conakry. At the first one, we’re nervous and not nearly self-assured enough; we eventually hand over a tiny part of the money that’s demanded – our second bribe of the journey, and Atlantic Rising’s first. But we get into our stride and, at the next six or seven checkpoints, no money changes hands. Some of the soldiers are gentle and talkative and interested, others are belligerent and steaming drunk and demanding money, and we keep smiling and handing over papers and official-looking documents and smiling and standing our ground and slowly we inch forward towards the border. (In the middle of all this, the immaculately-fixed puncture blows, so we whip it off, put the spare on and quickly carry on.) It feels edgy, but it never tips over into feeling dangerous.

Just before dark, we reach the border – and suddenly we’re in Sierra Leone.

It’s a party. The Sierra Leonean side of the border is a party. Our hands are shaken, our backs are slapped, we’re handed all sorts of mobile phone numbers, Will and Huw have found wives, I’ve found a new best friend with a gold front tooth, and we haven’t even left customs yet.

We finally extricate ourselves and drive to the nearest town, where it’s dark but filled with little paraffin lamps that throw half-shadows on the faces of all the people sitting at their roadside stalls and moving about in the dark. “Hey, IMATTs!” someone shouts at us, and we get lost and a man climbs into the car and sits on Tim’s lap and shows us to a hotel, where we eat goat and rice, drink Star beer and start relaxing into Sierra Leone.

The next day, we drive along another dirt road towards Freetown, flying through villages, being offered gold and diamonds by road workers and bananas and cassava by villagers who gather around the car at checkpoints. There’s no angling for money here; just signs and billboards telling us to “help fight corruption” and “report corruption” because “corruption kills development”.

The road turns into tar and the public information signs carry on all the way into Freetown: “Be a patriot – pay your local tax” and “Protect your baby – test yourself for HIV during pregnancy” and “Nor piss ya” ["don't piss here" in Krio, we presume] scrawled in white paint across tempting walls.

In central Freetown we hit traffic jams and traffic jams and eat frozen yoghurt and fried cassava and dried plantain as the car inches its way along until we arrive in a smart guesthouse that’s far too expensive for us but it has a fan and a bath and tomorrow we’ll look for somewhere else but today we’ll just stay here, and we’ll slow down and we’ll catch up with ourselves and we’ll sleep.

Lagoon in Senegal. © Listen to Africa

Part I of our “about the sound recordings” series looked at wildlife sounds. In this second part, we look at natural soundscapes of living things (“biophonies”). We’ll write about soundscapes from non-living sources (like weather) and from human environments (eg villages, towns and cities) later in this series.

When we first had the idea for this journey, Huw and I were expecting to mostly record wildlife (single species) and people (interviews, oral histories etc). While the latter has turned out to be trickier to organise and more time-consuming to edit than we expected, the former has sparked a new interest in both of us: expanding our wildlife recordings to encompass a wider exploration of the natural world. As naturalist and sound recordist Bernie Krause says:

“We are beginning to learn that the isolated voice of a song bird cannot give us very much useful information. It is the acoustical fabric into which that song is woven that offers up an elixir of formidable intelligence that enlightens us about ourselves, our past, and the very creatures we have longed to know so well.”

This “acoustical fabric” or “sonic environment” (R Murray Schafer) is the soundscape.

Soundscapes, we feel, can give a more immersive sense of place than either words or photography. They can stimulate or relax the mind. They can allow the imagination free reign. And they can occasionally put a smile on someone’s face.

If any of our soundscapes do any of these things for anyone listening, we are utterly delighted. But beyond that, through the soundscapes, we’re also hoping to make a tiny contribution to the body of work that phonographers around the world are building, sonically documenting parts of our natural world through field recordings.

They’re documenting a world that’s changing – degrading, disappearing – terrifyingly fast. Species are becoming extinct faster than at any time since 65 million years ago. Countless habitats are being degraded through pollution, human population pressure and the rape of the planet’s resources for human consumption – ie through humans acting as arrogant exploiters instead of as modest partakers. And all of this is smallfry compared to the changes we’ll see (or won’t see…) if we allow human-created climate change to continue unchecked.

If you’re from a visually-oriented culture like I am, you probably conceive of these losses visually: you’ll see an endangered species, or you’ll picture a degraded habitat. But the world is also losing a wealth of its sounds. As well as the direct loss through biodiversity reduction and species extinction, there’s also the drowning out of natural sounds through ever louder human noise (noise being sound in which information has become meaningless). When was the last time you heard a soundscape that had no mechanised or industrialised interference? No traffic, no planes, no TVs or radios, no humming fridge, no running taps, no mobile phones…

(I’m writing this – with pen and paper – five kilometres away from the nearest village on a tiny, remote and sparsely populated Atlantic island, two days’ travel by boat from mainland Guinea-Bissau. Even here, between the lapping waves and the birdsong, I can hear: the crackling of a two way radio; a diesel fishing boat chugging in the distance; the splashing of a fisherman’s net in the sea; the clunking of a wheelbarrow on a bumpy path…)

The impact of this noise on human beings and the ways in which we relate to our environments was explored by R Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977):

“The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life.”

The noise also profoundly affects other living things – in ways that we hardly understand yet. Many nature recordists report that they perceive natural soundscapes as orchestral symphonies, as music in its purest and most complex form. Bernie Krause has suggested and continues to research the idea that the natural soundscape of living things is an intricately orchestrated “biophony” of individuals and species occupying distinct acoustic niches in the audio spectrum. The disruption of these biophonies and masking of individuals’ vocalisations by mechanical and industrial sounds may have implications for other animals – in terms of predation and mating, for example – that we don’t yet really understand.

If the erosion of natural soundscapes is a symptom of environmental destruction, soundscapes also offer us a way forward towards environmental protection. Because they carry vast amount of information, they can give us clues about an area’s biodiversity, an ecosystem’s age, or the stress felt by individual species: natural soundscapes can help to measure the health of ecosystems. Bernie Krause again (pdf):

Through my field work, I discovered that in undisturbed natural environments, creatures vocalize in relationship to one another very much like instruments in an orchestra… For instance, in healthy habitats, certain insects occupy one sonic zone of the creature bandwidth, while birds, mammals, and amphibians occupy others not yet taken and where there is no competition. This system has evolved in a manner so that each voice can be heard distinctly and each creature can thrive as much through its iteration as any other aspect of its being… This biophony, or creature choir, serves as a vital gauge of a habitat’s health. But it also conveys data about its age, its level of stress, and can provide us with an abundance of other valuable new information such as why and how creatures in both the human and non-human worlds have learned to dance and sing. Yet, this miraculous biophony — this concerto of the natural world — is now under serious threat of complete annihilation. Not only are we moving toward a silent spring, but a silent summer, fall and winter, as well.

If the world is changing fast, Africa is changing at breakneck speed. It’s on the frontline of many of the social and environmental changes mentioned above. Its urbanisation rate is faster than anywhere else in the world (pdf), putting additional pressure on natural resources where there is little or no capacity for sustainable resource management. Parts of the continent are treated as a toxic dumping ground for Europe. The level of deforestation is catastrophic. And, with industrialisation yet to be played out in full, and few resources to mitigate the impacts of climate change, vast swathes of this continent look likely to keep on changing beyond recognition.

Huw and I are privileged enough to be here now, and to have access to both technology and to a few of the less documented parts of this enormously diverse continent. While all of this is swilling around in our heads at the moment, it will probably influence what we record and how we present it more and more as the journey goes on. For now, we have three immodest hopes for the soundscapes: that they may inspire somebody somewhere to help work towards protecting their own local habitats and soundscapes; that, maybe, one day, some of them might be useful to somebody, probably in a way that Huw and I don’t yet understand; and that one or two of them might put a smile on your face for a minute or two.

More information:

The niche hypothesis, Bernie Krause (pdf) »
Loss of natural soundscape, Bernie Krause (pdf) »
The tuning of the World, R Murray Schafer »
The World Listening Project »
Wildsanctuary »
The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology »
World Soundscape Project »
Listen to Africa soundscapes »

• Facebook: for chit chat, some photos and – when I can get it working – the podcast
• Twitter: for short SMS updates and general banter
• Brightkite: for location updates
• Flickr: for some of the photography
• Last.fm: for some of the sounds

We can’t promise we’ll keep them all up to date (we’re still in France, as far as Flickr’s concerned), but we can promise we read – and love – all the comments and messages we get from random oddballs like-minded folk across the web. Although obviously we like the commenters here best of all ;-)

(As for where you can find us in the real world, we’re still in Bissau, working through our backlog of sound recordings, waiting to see if that small chance of a lift through an unstable Guinea I mentioned last week turns into a reality, and generally sleeping in a car park.)

Street scene in Bula, Guinea-Bissau. © Listen to Africa

First off, here’s a thunderstorm for you, recorded yesterday afternoon in Guinea-Bissau’s capital, Bissau:

While you’re listening to that, here’s a bit about our last week or so on the road:

If the border crossing into Casamance was good, the crossing into Guinea-Bissau was wonderful. The immigration officer smiled at us fondly, shaking her head and repeating: “Williams [Huw's surname], Rebecca – welcome to Guinea-Bissau!” The country – ranked the fifth poorest in the world by the UN – gets less than 5000 foreign visitors a year. Not many of them, we suspect, arrive by land, never mind by bicycle.

Across the road, at customs, a beaming man stood and beamed at us. His beam grew broader when we greeted him in Portuguese (I grew up in Brazil). We chatted. He beamed. We chatted some more. Finally, we gently reminded him he was on duty: did customs need anything from us?

“Oh, just a document,” he said. A passport? “No, a document. Like a paper or something.” We couldn’t think of any papers he might want to see. “Oh. Well, if immigration thinks it’s OK, then I suppose that’s fine,” he beamed, and we cycled into Guinea-Bissau.

There was another customs house in Sao Domingos, the first town we came to. Outside it, another beaming man beckoned to us. Did he need anything from us? “No,” he said. “Here in Guinea-Bissau, it’s no problem.” (He wasn’t joking. Here in Guinea-Bissau, an estimated one tonne of pure Colombian cocaine leaves the country every day; this little nation has been called “the world’s first narco-state“.)

He just wanted to know whether we needed anything in town – a restaurant, maybe? A restaurant sounded great, so he walked us to a place where “two steaks please” meant two steaks, two plates of chips, two fried eggs, two salads, two bowls of rice and a big basket of bread. We decided we loved Guinea-Bissau.

We wobbled off into suffocating humidity, and sheltered pointlessly under a tree when it finally broke into a rainstorm. Two peanut farmers joined us. They were cycling the 50-odd kilometres from their village to Ziguinchor in Senegal to sell their produce.

“Guinea-Bissau is good,” they said. “There is freedom here. But the government doesn’t have any money to buy our groundnuts.” So, having bicycles, they took the peanuts to Senegal. “The problem is that, when we get to Senegal, the soldiers often take all our groundnuts for themselves.” They just take them? No payment? “Yep.” They smiled wryly.

Bissau's port. © Listen to Africa

Beryl, who had been in the village for four years and in West Africa for ten, invited us to make ourselves at home in his church – a room half filled with sacks of cashew nuts and decorated with a candle, a few wooden pews and some scribbled-on whiteboards. He offered us a tour of his project, taking us first to the cashew fields, where we met teenagers who were packing up for the day to have their shelled nuts weighed by Beryl. He showed us the cashew shelling shed, and the land that they were reforesting. He told us about his plans for slowly expanding cashew production over the next few years, and hopefully getting the villagers access to the fair trade market, making the project self-funding and giving villagers without land the possibility of a long-term income.

“People are waiting for me to build a hospital and a school – that’s what white men do. But that model really, really doesn’t work.” We silently cheered. So many of the aid projects in Africa are capital projects – new schools, new hospitals, new roads. New roads are built but not maintained, meaning yet more new roads have to be built a few years down the line. New hospitals are built, but the ongoing costs of medical supplies aren’t funded. New schools are built, but teachers aren’t paid. In this village’s school, there’s no money to pay two of the three teachers, so now one teacher takes every subject at every level.

Several of the teenagers we met were working the fields to pay for their own schooling; an improved income for villagers through agriculture means they can pay the teachers the government can’t or won’t pay and children can keep getting an education – whether it’s delivered in a building or under a tree.

An agnostic with secular instincts, the work of missionaries sparks mixed feelings in me – in theory. In practice, missionaries and religious organisations seem to be more-than-usually successful at improving the quality of life of the people they work with in Africa. Whether it’s because they live almost as frugally as those around them, or because they – like most rural Africans – live a life centred around spiritual belief, missionaries seem to be able to succeed where many organisations fail.

That evening, Mario came around to take us to his friends’ house (rural families in Guinea-Bissau tend to live under one large roof instead of in individual huts within a family compound as in Senegal). Mario’s friends, Julio and Quinta, lived with Julio’s brother and Quinta’s sister in a clean, spacious and sparsely decorated home. After talking for an hour or two and a quick lesson in Kriolu (Portuguese Creole), Huw and I said we should be leaving. Quinta suggested we first pray together.

As five people around us sat praying aloud in three languages for our health and well-being, I found myself thinking about the sentiment Ryszard Kapuscinski (yes, him again – we don’t have much space in our panniers for books…) wrote about in The Shadow of the Sun:

“The European in Africa sees only part of it, usually only the continent’s exterior coating, the frequently not very interesting, and perhaps least important, part of it. His vision glides over the surface, penetrating no deeper and refusing to imagine that behind everything a mystery may be hidden, and within as well.”

The next morning we found ourselves firmly back in the physical world, cycling through villages that seemed to have more bars than shops, and natural landscapes that gave the first tiny hints of the jungles to come.

At around midday, we were pulled over at a roadblock: a rope pulled taut across the road by unarmed men in plain clothes. The man flicking through our passports had an inch-long fingernail with the remnants of white powder stuck to it. This, we guessed, wasn’t an official roadblock. It was a friendly one though, and we were waved on with “um abraco” – a hug.

After accidentally falling asleep for four hours in the afternoon, we didn’t reach Bula until after dark, cycling through dusk past men with hunting guns, and other men carrying pigs or dogs tied around poles. For food? We we’ren’t sure but in Bula, we found out. The first restaurant we went into had only meat – no rice or chips. We were hungry – what kind of meat?

We were shown to the back of the restaurant, where the lid was taken off a pot to show what we are sure was a steamed dog’s head. We weren’t that hungry. In another restaurant, we plumped for the safe option: spaghetti. Unfortunately it came with unidentified scraps of dark meat which I pushed around my plate gamely.

Bissau's port. © Listen to Africa

If rural Guinea-Bissau is the cheapest place we’ve been to so far, Bissau itself is the most expensive, and the inequality between the city’s (usually foreign) rich and (local) poor is vast and shocking. Ironically, it’s most obvious around Che Guevara Place, where shoeshiners and hawkers ply aid workers, expats, government ministers, the odd tourist and possibly drug barons for trade.

This square also gave us our first glimpse of the consequences of the cocaine racket on Guinea-Bissau’s people. Two shoeshiners – one of them obviously high – got into a fight in front of us; this was the first serious physical fight I’ve seen in Africa. When cocaine first washed up here, it was found by local fishermen who used the white powder to mark out a football pitch. Nowadays, people clearly know exactly what to do with it.

A few days later, we’re still in Bissau. Our trip’s taken a pause while we catch up on the latest news from Guinea – where over 150 protesters were massacred a little over a month ago – and look into our options.

We briefly thought about possible boat transport to bypass Guinea but, after seeing the state of the vessels in Bissau’s port, we decided we’d rather take our chances on land… The news we’ve heard from inside Guinea suggests that things are calm outside the capital, so we’ve decided to cycle through Guinea, avoiding towns and cities – although there is a small chance that we’ll get a lift through the country.

We’re leaving on Thursday and we’re not expecting to have internet access until we reach Freetown in a couple of weeks’ time but, as usual, we’ll be updating the microblog whenever we have mobile coverage (if we have it).

The People's Workbook

OK, time for a new series: in praise of random things we stumble across and like (online or in the real world) during our journey through Africa.

First up, The People’s Workbook, which Huw found a couple of days ago via the Journey to Forever website, and the pdf of which we’ve been loving ever since.

Written by a collective (Robert Berold et al) “to give people in the rural areas of South Africa some of the information they need to help organise their communities and improve their lives,” it was published in 1981 by South Africa’s Environmental and Development Agency, an organisation working with small village groups on agriculture, water supply and other projects.

The book is wonderfully written (in plain English) and beautifully illustrated. Even more impressive is its encyclopaedic scope – from breeding geese, making hand pumps and organising seed-buying groups to making a will, dealing with police and starting a library.

While it focuses on South Africa in the 1980s, it’s probably still interesting reading for English-speaking smallholders – and people working to change their communities – anywhere in the world. Alternatively, an updated edition – The People’s Farming Workbook – is available from Practical Action via Stylus Publishing. Meanwhile, I’m off to find out how to build a flyproof pit.

Good things, like the border crossing involving almost no bureaucracy and a large number of compliments (“You people are great!”).

Bad things, like waking up from a siesta under a tree to find 14 soldiers pointing guns at us (the incident ended in a nice chat and an exchange of email addresses).

Exciting things, like rounding a bend to see a group of wild monkeys playing on the road.

Mysterious things, like a group of machete-carrying young men chanting and dancing outside our window, one of them dressed as a lion.

Worrying things, like convoy after military convoy zooming past, carrying soldiers whose fingers were poised over the triggers of their primed M16s while the vehicles wildly careered between pot holes.

Revelatory things, like finally discovering – after several days there – that the escalated military presence was a result of Casamance’s “deadliest attack in three years” (we’d been so busy researching the precarious situation in Guinea before we crossed the border that we’d forgotten to check the news from Casamance. According to news sources, six soldiers were killed. According to a tipsy expat we met in a bar, 24 rebel fighters were also killed, along with most of the herd of cows they took shelter behind to launch their attack.)

Tedious things, like having every pannier emptied and checked by roadside soldiers (there was no hint of a request for money or concern about our journalist-like kit; presumably they just wanted to make sure we weren’t mercenaries).

And hopeful things, like dozens of conversations with young people who hadn’t given up on Africa, as so many of their northern Senegalese and Gambian counterparts seemed to have done.

In short, we liked Casamance. Towns seemed to have more work and less aimlessness, rural areas seemed vibrant and active, and people seemed to be busy building a future. There was a feeling of optimism and purpose here that we hadn’t felt in northern Senegal or The Gambia – whether in spite of or because of the on/off civil war between Casamance separatists and the Senegalese military that’s been rumbling on for years, I’m not sure. Either way, we wish it many good and peaceful things for the future.

An average of 1.5 trees sat under per day. © Listen to Africa

Another one for our “in numbers” series: how lazy and how greedy we were in Senegal (the short answer is “very”).

5411 kilometres cycled so far
2000+ shouts of “toubab!”
597 kilometres cycled in Senegal
78 baguettes eaten (no baguette related injuries)
51 days in Senegal
46 kilometres – average daily distance, on cycling days
38 rest days (including a one month holiday from the bikes)
28 nights in hotels / hostels / auberges / brothels
18 “yasser” meals eaten (delicious)
16 nights in campsites / encampements
13 cycling days
12 kilometres – average daily distance, including rest days
6 nights wild camping
3 punctures (Bex 2, Huw 1)
1.5 average number of trees sat under per day
1 night staying with locals