Sahel

I left Cotonou early Tuesday morning, October 21, for the long busride to Kandi in the north of Benin. It was a rare, comfortable, western-style bus, playing pop music and WWF wrestling as we passed endless miles of flat African countryside. The landscape changed slowly from the greener coast to a drier soil, less underbrush and more grass, people in longer, billowing clothing, more mosques. I was nervous, hoping each stop was not mine and glad for the comfort and safety of the moving road.

I stayed in Kandi one night, made a bad watercolor from the rooftop of my sweltering hotel room, walked around Wednesday morning along wide dusty streets, stopped in a cafe and made a watercolor of one of the guys there, amused crowds gathering around me.

From Kandi a short 'bush taxi' ride to the village of Alfa Kouara, on the edge of the large 'Parque National du W.'

Bush taxis are the main transport linking smaller villages in West Africa, and they're a chaotic, cramped, unbelievable way to travel. The taxis, either station wagons or old peugot's, are banged-up, creaking, moving wrecks, complete with cracked windshields and missing mirrors. On the inside they invariably smell like gasoline, but to beat the headache and roll the windows down you have to first ask the driver to pass the handcranck, and forget about seatbelts, locking doors, working speedometers, or other luxuries. They don't leave until fully loaded, which means four people plus kids in each row, and three, sometimes even four, in the front (that makes eleven and sometimes twelve adults plus kids in a station wagon). I once sat in a taxi where the driver shifted gears between a passenger's legs. The luggage is strapped to the roof -- huge bags of grain and miscellaneous pots and baggage, often taller than the car itself, laboriously loaded and unloaded at each stop, which means every ten or fifteen minutes. At the larger taxi stations, and sometimes the smaller stops, inevitable arguments about who-knows-what...the roads aren't too good either, paved but little wider than a suburban street in the States, sometimes more potholes than smooth surface.

The park entrance at Alfa Kouara was officially closed for the rainy season, but I got a ride in on a motorcycle anyway, really fun, and beatiful, colorful, long-tailed birds, a troop of monkeys, but none of the big mammals. Ate a meal of paté with the park rangers at night under a thousand stars, and shared a nasty mix of pastisse and syrup, their preferred drink at a nearby 'bar'(I declined to sniff the tobacco powder mixed with 'medicaments').

On Thursday a short ride from Alfa Kuoara to the border town of Malanville, lingering long enough to send some postcards, then the police check and a walk across the bridge spanning the Niger River, Africa's third longest, and into the country of Niger.

Niger is immediately different. At the bus depot at Gaya, a beautiful tall woman with a glossy, blind eye, henna-painted feet, long black headscarf, praying with a crying baby on her back. Miles and miles of even drier and bleaker countryside, now only mud huts instead of cinderblock, thatch traded for corrugated roofs. Many stops, police checks, stops for prayer, who-knows-why stops. People don't always smile back when you smile, or wave when you wave, and they don't ask for gifts unless they really really need it. People who don't speak French. Thinner people, more 'Ethiopian' features, longer wraps, solid colors mixed with the ubiquitous patterns of the coast, headscarves, muslim hats, clothing taken out of a Rafael painting. More cripples, more deformities, a man in a white headcap and his adolescent child with an impossibly small head, eyes right out to the perifery, like someone you might have seen at the circus a hundred years ago. Sweltering heat, forgot to bring enough water, cramped bus, my seat tilted seat in the aisle with luggage, people climbing over each other at each stop.

Arrived in the capital of Niamey Thursday night well after dark, was supposed to stay with relatives of Abdullay from Grand Popo but didn't dare venture into the periferies that late, found a taxi driver I trusted and a hotel. Issaka picked me up in the morning, and I found a city much calmer than I feared, wide streets, spread out city, not unnerving and polluted like Cotonou. Errands, visa for Burkina, bank, phone, tour of the city, a break at Issaka's and two watercolors, the first good ones on this trip, of him and his wife. Stronger colors, more agressively painted. His wife only spoke Hauossa, both had long tribal scars across their cheecks, I couldn't tell if she minded me there. A watercolor on the bank of the Niger, women washing clothes, across to the Harobanda district where I met Abdullay's family. Kind to offer food and shelter but little chit-chat. A maze of alleys, courtyards, mud houses, slept outside under a mosquito net, woke up predawn with a bad dream and the call for prayer, painted the crescent moon rising over the rooftops.

Planning to leave Niamey tomorrow or Monday for Burkina Faso.