Less Miserable… Dakar d’accord

No, I haven’t taken to writing way-off-off-off-Broadway plays. I’d only end up blogging them for release to the public. No, sometimes when it’s fourth and ten and you’ve got linebackers rushing the punt, you just gotta’ grab the ball and do an end run. So I reverted to plan B. You’ve got to have a plan B. This is an axiom of free-style travel, especially if you’re going to a region for the first time, especially if the travel guides steer you wrong, as they sometimes do. I’m still pissed off. I respect my readers more than that, both of you. I’ll tell you the truth, even if it hurts (sales). I won’t play up to false political correctness that does you no good when you’re standing on the side of the tracks on the edge of town at five in the morning without a clue, without a brew, all strung out on her or him. No, I’ll tell you the truth, even if it causes you to re-think a certain portion of a certain trip. The truth is that the ethnologist in me found Mali awesome; the traveler in me found it awful. Words fall short of the reality. Still I try to be positive and put the best face on things. I have to, because I have to go back. This happened once before, in Haiti. Plan B was the Dominican Republic.

I’ll tell you straight up that even though Mali is probably one of the most incredible places in the world, sometimes the most incredible places are locked in some of the most impossible situations, e.g. Burma, Cuba, etc. In Mali that situation is not political so much as simple under-development. I just can’t afford to really like Mali whole-heartedly. It’s not practical. It would mean I’m slumming, watching poverty from the safety and superior vantage point of my tour-bus window, enjoying the spectacle. Poverty in the countryside can still have dignity and status, that of tradition and homeland. In the city it just plain sucks, though it still speaks volumes. You can see the history of West Africa laid out right before your eyes on the streets of Bamako, likely part of the larger area where black Africa became black Africa, in a large population pool from which the Bantu speakers spread out to dominate the rest and populate the continent, displacing the aboriginal ancestors of the modern Khoisan speakers. They arrived at the cape not long after the Dutch. Of course many Africans from this area wound up in the American South from the slave diaspora. I think I see some familiar faces. Still, Bamako is hardly a city, more like a hundred villages in search of one, a dozen tribes in search of a nation.

Mali is like the Guatemala or Cambodia of Africa, picturesque and inspiring, but cumbersome for travel. But cost-wise it was starting to look more like Bhutan. I don’t mind some culture shock. This was sticker shock! Guatemala and Cambodia are cheap. Do the math; the numbers just don’t work for Mali. So I booked a train to Dakar, Senegal. If Senegal doesn’t get the same marks for authenticity, it at least gets higher marks for ‘livability,’ at least for West Africa. “The roads are bad,” they say, so I booked a seat on the train, thirty-five hours, but at least maybe I can get some sleep, train tracks not being so bumpy, usually, by definition. The train leaves in the evening, so I’ll arrive in the morning, and what I save on two nights’ hotels will pay for the trip. Well, the travel writers blew it again. They don’t tell you that this is the train from Hell. One look at that sorry caravan made me quickly regret that I had contracted for thirty-five hours of such abuse. It gets worse. Apparently that thirty-five hours refers to only the actual travel time, not including the interminable delays and waiting time on the tracks, nor the meal and pee-pee stops at least three times a day. The bathrooms were unspeakable, of course, so I held my own for the whole time, which only works if you don’t eat much. I didn’t, surviving mostly on something like rose hips and the kindness of strangers. Times like these are when you do that long-postponed fast, when you finally shut off the caffeine to your free-wifi-with-coffee-addled brain and concentrate simply on being and nothingness, staying awake, thinking outwardly, no internal dialog, pure perception without the curse of consciousness that language brings in its wake. There were some magic moments, too, like when the whole car breaks into song at one extroverted lady’s instigation. Bunuel’s Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride) has got nothing on this. Then there were the endless expanses of baobab trees, looking nothing so much like little African baby dolls rising from the landscape with thick trunks gradually tapering to tufted hair and stubby limbs. It was like a dream and a nightmare handing off the baton through the night.

When the train finally rolled into the station, almost sixty hours had passed, or would have, anyway, if it had actually rolled into the station. It didn’t. The train dropped us off at the edge of town at five in the morning, we final travelers looking and feeling like compost after being squeezed together for the better part of three nights. What to do now? Bite the bullet. Find a hotel and hope it’s late enough that I’ll only be charged for one day if I leave the next morning, a small consolation prize. No such luck; they hit me for two nights and I didn’t even have a key for the door since it’s mostly for short-term use, if you know what I mean. There was a condom on the floor, if you know what I mean, mute testimony to some disembodied desire at least filled full, if not exactly fulfilled. On top of that, the taxi driver over-charged me. On top of that, I got a signal on my cell phone but I couldn’t get a message out to my wife ‘out there,’ might as well be the moon. Worst of all, my feet were so squeezed on that train that I got a case of swollen-foot thrombo-phlebitic ‘economy class disease,’ and feel a screaming bout of gout coming on. There’s some pills left over from last year, but they won’t last long. I’m traveling in a foreign country and now I can’t walk? That’s usually almost all that I do. I could use some inspiration. Still I never lost my faith in my fellow men, and that’s what sustains me, the basic goodness of men and women, cultivated through religion and honed through practice. These are ‘people of the book,’ too, the Qur’an, and it shows. I was never offered so much food and drink as on that train, even by Thais, and they’re good at that, and including Deep Southerners, ditto. This, too, will pass.

The whorehouse wasn’t that bad, really, right next to a honky-tonk that I could look right into from my window. I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway after sixty hours on a train and an attack of gout. If you don’t know what gout feels like, count your blessings. The pain is excruciating, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it can go away as fast as it comes on. That doesn’t mean that it will, of course. So when the Senegalais band started playing around midnight and went on until four or five in the morning, that was fine with me. I got a free concert. I’d only be drifting in and out of consciousness otherwise anyway. The next day will be better. It has to be. I get an early start and start walking. The foot is serviceable. I pick up some speed, and then a sudden realization hits me. I have no idea where I’m going. I had expected to be let off at a train station, which usually confers a certain centrality to its location. Why that train dumped us on the edge of town I’ll never know. There’s a ‘cyber café’ open, so I check my e-mail and look for maps online, spurning the advances of a little baobab doll of a teenager looking for a ride to the US. I couldn’t understand much of what she said anyway, since they’ll never speak their language the way they expect you to speak yours when English has to be reverted to. It’s the white man’s curse. Anyway, the maps are junk, so bid the little girl good-bye and revert to instinct, in no certain order. She’s cute, but it would’ve never worked. I flag a taxi and ask to go to the train station. There has to be a real one somewhere, and I’m betting that it’s close to the center. It is, and the taxi driver didn’t even rip me off. My French must be improving. At least French actually gets used here between locals, which I never heard in Bamako. There’s an obvious Arab middle class here, probably Moroccans in addition to peripatetic Lebanese, so that must be the difference. Still there are no hotels in sight. This is a breach of logic, a traveler’s last line of defense. Anywhere else, Asia or Latin America at least, and there’d be bunches. It’s time for the sixth sense, a kind of traveler’s radar, to flush out the elusive goal, a cheap but good hotel.

Fortunately I travel light, rule number one. Like an ant following familiar smells where no lines are drawn, I gravitate toward the dense part of town. It shouldn’t be far. It’s not, and there’s an auberge sign pointing up above a commercial courtyard. They size me up quickly and show me a room back by the staff’s kitchen, my kind of place. The price is right. We’re in, and right in the center of the city. Dense commercial area? Hmmm… I wonder. I flip the lid on my laptop and look for a wi-fi signal. It hems and haws, then locks on, Skype and all. We’re really in! I need a line! Quick, Trinity, give me a number! The Skype rate to Thailand from Senegal is the same as from the US! The phone is ringing! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit… A voice comes on the line. Could it possibly be? “Sawatdi kha.” It’s a miracle.