After weeks of metropolitan comfort spent between Bamako and Ouagadougou, the mere idea of hitting the devastated road of Africa again on vehicles that common sense would have scrapped two or three decades ago, seemed just depressing. And, as always happens in these cases, when one must choose between a present of lazy convenience and the promise of an unsafe future, the latter continues to be delayed indefinitely. And how different can look the very same city when cruised with people who live more or less permanently in it! At first call, travelling east, Bamako had seemed to me like another, unfortunate, huge urban agglomeration of Africa, but now, among less nomadic friends, it looked more like a big, chubby town where people find (plenty of) time to fill up the Bla Bla and each other
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