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Published: August 24th 2006
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At this point I am a little behind on the blogging, but will do my best to catch up here. I am backdating the entry to because I don't want to skip writing about Guinea although at this point we have been in Ivory Coast for several days.
Alright, we left Guinea Bissau I think on August 12 and headed for Guinea Conakry, which I will refer to as Guinea. I had started to get a cold the day before so I was somewhat feverish and out of it for the drive. We left Bissau that morning and arrived in Koundara on the Guinea side a little after midnight that night. The roads were good on the Bissau side except for a small section and unbelievably terrible on the Guinea side. In Guinea Bissau and Senegal I had complained a bit about the cramped cars; like the subaru station wagon size cars with eight people in them...Okay well in Guinea they have the exact same cars; except here standard number is 11 or 12 not counting children on laps. In Guinea if the car is not physically painful to be in, there are not enough people in it. Some of
the roads were just as bad if not worse then the one going to Varela. There are some roads for instance where in neighboring Ivory Coast where everything is paved you could go the exact same distance through basically the same type of land in five hours where in Guinea it can take 12 to 14 days. So travel is really really slow and unpredictable...although there are a few paved roads; things are still vastly overcrowded.
One of the worst trips I think for me at least was from Koundara to Labe. We got to gare, the place where the cars leave from early that morning because i wanted to leave town as quickly as possible. I was still feverish and congested and the nasty stuffy hotel we had had to to stay in hadnt helped anything. We had arrived as I mentioned around midnight and the only thing available was dirty, no air flow, hard slat bed with nonexistent mattress, condom wrappers on the floor, drunk people wandering around, pit toilets with feces and roaches...just really gross. So we got there early but we had missed the first car going to Labe, and had to wait for the next one. We sat there for about six hours before we finally left on what was supposed to be about an eight hour journey. The roads were muddy and slow,and of course we had mechanical problems and flat tires. Basically every single trip I took in Guinea we had at least one flat tire, so that goes without mentioning.
For the majority of the time there were only three of us in the front seat, but when it started raining a fourth got down on off the roof and squeezed in for a while. Alex was kind enough to give me the window seat because he is lot more tolerant of pain and discomfort than I am. I tried to sit in his seat for about an hour but was fidgeting so much he begged to trade me back. It had a really hot to touch emergency brake and console that he had to sit on; periodically cutting of circulation and causing nerve damage that would last a few hours. I was in the extremely uncomfortable but yet more comfortable seat next to him with shooting nerve pain from the compression of being squished and cramping back pain. Plus I still had my cold. At one point there was a river that had to be crossed and a rusty old barge that was hooked up to a pulley system and made it across the river by cranking and moving these chains. The car made it on the precarious boat with a few other cars and a big truck like the rice truck in varela. When they docked on the other side they couldnt get all the way to the shore. So we had to try to get across some of the water. I of course fell in the river and soaked myself up to my thighs, got covered in mud and cut my foot in about six places. So then I got to get back in the car sick and wet and dirty and cut and then be squished again. As if I wasnt miserable enough. The big truck got stuck and couldnt make it off the ferry and up the little hill to the road. They tied a big rope to it and about two hundred people pulled it out like a massive tug of war, it was really a sight, and I would have taken a picture if it wasnt already dark. It made it out though. Basically the car ride continued as before, slowly and painfully. at one point it really started raining and the car leaked, so then the top half of me was also soaked and i was shivering. About eleven hours from the time we left we were fifteen minutes away from our destination. Fifteen minutes away from dry clothes and hopefully a decent bed. But instead the driver decided he was suddenly too tired to drive, too tired to drive the last fifteen minutes. And instead he pulled off the side of the road and preceded to take a FIVE HOUR NAP. It was just far enough and rainy enough that I couldnt walk the rest of the distance. So I just had to sit and wait. Someone in the back gave me a coat after I sobbing for a while. I cant even describe how upset and miserable I was. But I lived, and the next morning we got to a hotel in Labe around six AM and I recovered, now a lot more sick, for a few days.
Well that is part 1 of Guinea and I am almost out of internet time. Will write more later. Love Alana
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