The Path of Totality

It sounds like a cult, or something, doesn't it? We'll actually be quite a bit north of the path of totality in Merzouga in south eastern Morocco, but apparently -I'm taking my friend George's word on this one becasue the NASA website is full of charts and coordinates, and terms like "grazing eclipse" and "lunar limb profile" that puzzle me- we'll still see the full eclipse for forty seconds. But, seeing as I don't have any number 14 welder's glass or aluminized mylar, I'll probably spend most of the time staring at the sand.

The Tropic of Cancer

I got a ride from a Moroccan business man transporting something or other between Nouadhibou and Dakhla(Dakhla's technically part of the Western Sahara, I think) in the back of a windowless van; the kind of vehicle assassins drive around in, or people trafficking plutonium. I sat in the back with a Moroccan guy who spoke some French. He bought several bags of snacks before we left Nouadhibou and ate -bananas, oranges, cookies, bread, fruit juice boxes- more or less continuously throughout the 12 hour trip. He kept patting his paunch, looking at me and saying: 6 mois, as in 6 months, I'm six months pregnant. He also, during the stretch of unpaved desert between where Mauritania ends and the Western Sahara begins, took out an FHM magazine (the French equivalent of a Maxim with lots of topless women and women wrestling each other in various substances), flipped through it and kept elbowing me and turning the magazine so that I could see the pictures too. I was saying no, no I wasn't interested in perusing FHM with him, shaking my head and thinking about the fact that we were passing through the portion of desert with landmines still buried in it, and thinking that this particular moment would be a funny one to be blown up and die -with my last visions of a green, three breasted woman illustrating the "What if Your Girlfriend Were an Alien?" article in FHM magazine.
Also, bizarrely, there's some kind of license plate trafficking that goes on in that no man's land between Mauritania and Morocco. All these cars were parked together, like a used car lot in the desert between the two border control posts, and apparently -my pregnant seat partner explained this to me many times, but I never really got it- people drive used cars purchased in Europe through Morocco to this spot in the desert to buy a black market Mauritanian license plate that permits them to avoid some nasty tax consequence of buying an official Moroccan one.
They dropped me off at a hotel in Dakhla, the first town in southern Morocco, situated right on top of the Tropic of Cancer on a peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic, around midnight. I slept and then took a 24 hour bus ride to Marrekesh the next day. Nothing of interest happened on that ride except that the landscape changed for the first time, after hundreds of miles of flat Savannah, and Sahel and desert, I woke up to green hills and olive trees. The desert was a disappointment. It wasn't the sinuous, prettily wind rippled thing I expected, but a parking-lot flat stretch of craggy, wind battered sand. I spent the night at a -for me- expensive hotel in Marrekesh with an underwhelming breakfast included; I watched The Wizard of Oz in my room, which made me crumble with nostalgia, as had several songs by Brian Adams and Toni Braxton played on the bus...the trip got me in touch with my feminine side...No, I was just spent, totally spent and weary, and luckily I arrived in Fes the next day.

Yes, all you smarty pantses who said Allen Ginsberg coined the title "Dakar Doldrums" were right. He also wrote a series of poems called "Denver Doldrums", in case you were wondering.

Slow Train

There is a slow food movement. There isn't, to my knowledge, any slow transportation movement, but if there were I could lead it's enthusiasts to the perfect mascot. The iron ore train, that transports (shockingly) iron ore from Zouérat to Nouadhibou traverses the 460km between Choum (where I climbed aboard) and Nouadhibou (where I staggered off) in 13 hours. The train is supposed to arrive in Choum at 6pm and therefore leave you in Nouadhibou, before dumping the wagon loads of rocks at a plant on the coast, at 7am the next day. The evening that I waited for the train, a full moon lit night -which, by the way, in case any of you have ever wondered, is not sufficient to read by- the train arrived at midnight. At first the people I was waiting with, or the one who could speak some French, told me he was sure the train would come at 10pm -after the 6 o'clock train did pass, but didn't stop. Around 10, say 9:30 to 10:30, we stared glumly into the darkness where the train, with it's light and noise, ought to materialize, and had to acknowledge, eventually, to ourselves and each other that the train did not appear to be coming. But there was no one to complain to since the train is principally a cargo, not a passenger train. The tracks were lined with empty gas bottles. People who live in Choum send their bottles on the, at least, 24 hour trip to and from Nouadhibou to be filled because it's free, instead of paying the equivalent of eight dollars and travelling with the bottles to Atar which is about 3 hours away. We, me and a bunch of Mauritanians, who had come in the same truck from Atar, were camped out with our luggage next to the railroad tracks in Choum -a sparklingly desolate whistle stop town, littered with black rocks, where the mine workers and their families live. When the train arrived around midnight we dashed at it, climbed the metal ladders and crawled into the wagon. The men rolled away the bigger rocks at one end of the wagon, combed the dust and spread a blanket out, and we all flopped down in a heap, stretched a blanket over ourselves, tucking it under our feet and heads and passed a freezing night pressed up against one another, twisting on top of iron ore. I was wearing jeans, socks and tennis shoes, a long skirt, T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, a coat and a scarf, and several times during the night, laying awake under the blanket with my cheek pressed into grit and my nose pressed against a stranger's back, I reflected that I had made a serious mistake when I decided to ride in the cargo wagon, that life was fairly terrible and it would be a relief to die. It was OK once the sun came up and the mist burned away, and I could sit up on the rocks and watch the desert wobbling and shuttering by, and look at the people in the other wagons, men all of them, wound up in turbans, making tea on the red rocks. When we arrived in Nouadhibou -the train just stops in the desert and everyone struggles off with their luggage and gets a taxi into town- I had become one with the iron ore, which is to say that every exposed part of my body had turned a shimmering burnt sienna color. The color of a flower pot, or Spanish tile, or Cedar chips. I looked like I could have played Tigerlily in a stage production of Peter Pan.

I feel a vague sense of accomplishment having arrived in Nouadhibou, the last stop before Morocco. Just turn the corner and there's Morocco. Only landmine studded dersert between me and Modern Standard Arabic 1. Nouadhibou is a sandy, flat place like Nouakchott, but Nouadhibou is industrial, grittier and therefore has an excuse for being ugly -or at least it's ugliness has a point. (There's a ship graveyard here! A bay filled with huge rusting abandoned ships). Whereas Nouakchott is just grimey and sandy and sprawling; it has a transient, impermanent feel to it -a nomad's capitol that the desert will swallow again one day.

Go North, Young Woman!

Saint Louis is a strip of coast and two islands linked to each other and the mainland by bridges, in north western Senegal. It was the old colonial capitol of French West Africa; any Africans born there were awarded French citizenship. Saint Louis embodies, to my mind, a compromise between the ragged, teeming life of West Africa and the stuffy, sanitized, bleached produce world for white tourists. There is a smooth gradiation, a gentle decline from one island to the next: meticulously maintained faded colonial loviness to uncut, pastel painted, salt worn, raccous delapidation. So gradual that one is surprised, suddenly, to find oneself standing on a stretch of beach packed with dead fish as far as the eye can see, or to look down and realize the sidwalk has disappeared and your bike -that you rented on the neatly paved and swept toruist side of the island- is sinking in sand. I love delapidation. Leaves of siding sagging and pealing away, bone thin carriage horses, the worn paint on concrete, the garbage strewn beach at sunset with flocks of garbage picking birds and boys playing soccer and women building fires in oil drums, the sunken, broken fishing boats, the sand dune grave yard that goes on for blocks with signs for headstones stuck in the sand. The huge sandy expanse of beach, the tide coming in in the evening with a strong cold wind, and the air lit up in a hazy, yellow mist. The boys, the rude boys who grabbed my bike, coming down the streets in troops of jeans and T-shirts were softened and haloed.

Yesterday I drove from Rosso, at the border, to Nouakchott. I attached myself to a Mauritanian woman, Fatou, in the car from Saint Louis. When we got out at the border she told me to follow her and not speak to anyone. I snaked along behind her through the throng of hustlers and money changers, the border parasites, keeping my eyes on the ground and her silver high heeled shoes, squinting in the mid-day sun and the river glare, wishing I could hold onto her skirts and be towed along. We drove to Nouakchott at night, and the sand dunes in the moonlight looked like they could be covered in snow. We kept slamming the brakes to avoid donkeys and camels on the road.

Dakar Doldrums

Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can't go any further 'cause there ain't no more land!

The road that connects Kayes to Dakar is the same width as a residential street in the midwest. For hundreds of kilometers outside of Dakar the landscape is a flat plain of dry, trampled yellow grass and a few trees. I can now say with some authority that a lot of West Africa looks like that: like what's left after the state fair pulls out of town: an expanse of trampled grass and garbage strewn dirt where a few vendors linger to unload what's left of their goods: cigarettes and peanuts and plastic plates sold under bare bulbs on the side of the highway. The first change in scenery since day break came when I looked up from my book and saw the ocean where the plain had been and knew we were finally closing in on Dakar. Dakar: the only turn, a right, of the entire trip. It's quite a place! A real Europeany type city, which makes it too expensive and torturous for the likes of me. Ice cream palors, shoe stores, jewlers and restaurants! Lord save me, so many restaurants. The expensiveness is compromising my ability to enjoy; I get angry paying for things and try to reep small revenges and get my money's worth. I leave the fan running constantly in my $20 a night hotel room, and make a thurough mess of the bathroom thinking, well that's what they get for being so damned expensive. It leaves me with a bitter, frustrated, wasted feeling like I've spent a month and a half on a semi-rigorous diet only to blow it all two weeks from the end.

Okay, obviously that quote at the top is from On the Road, but slightly less obviously, so is the title of this blog. So, I propose to give a prize, a secret surprise prize from Dakar itself, to anyone who can tell me the real-life name of the character who is responsible for the phrase "Dakar Doldrums".

Bamako

I spent five days in Bamako. It astounded me by being more choked with bodies and motos, actually more chaotic and harder to walk around in than anywhere I can recall in Cameroon. It's exhausting, psychologically, being a white woman traveling solo in Africa. It's like I radiate some signal out in all directions, emit a sound, like a dog whistle that attracts lonely men and sloppy, amateur conartists. Example: I was standing on the side of the road in Bamako examining a sign board for the African Cup in 2002 when a twenty-somethingish guy comes up to me saying he recognizes me from the Maison des Jeunes, where I was staying. He's missing one front tooth, and has a bandage over his eye, and speaks in a slurred, labored way because he's drunk or high, or something. He explains that he got into a fist fight with a Malian (he's Senegalese, he says) the night before over a cigarette lighter, Malians are all mechant, and oh, would I like to go see crocodiles with him? No, I say, I would definitely not like to go see crocodiles with him. He was like a villan in a cartoon, all that was missing was goofy, sinister back ground music and a waxed mustache. All the hustlers that I've encountered so far -and I'm extremely thankful for it-are so incredibly conspicuous I wonder how any of them manage to eek out a living.

Queen Hobo

And if I could choose a king it would be the tall guy wearing the floppy hat and sweatsuit, making his way to the Gambia with a bale of wooden masks and a bale of wooden statues lashed to the top of the bus. He was so tall! Standing in the aisle the tops of the chairs came up to my chest, but they wern't even flush with his hip.

I was persuaded not to take the "Express" train straight from Bamako to Dakar -sorry, I know there were certain parties eager to hear about that particular slice of hell- by an employee at the train station who told me the train was "shit", that since it had been privatized it had gone to shit, and if I left on the Friday morning express I might be in Dakar by Tuesday. He then escorted me to a nearby bus station, that being a table set up before a store room filled with sacks in an alley way, and many people milling around with luggage, where I bought my seat on the Saturday morning bus that would deposit me in Kayes (just east of the Senegal border in south western Mali) sometime in the evening.

Incidentally, for the best description that I've ever read of what Africans carry when they travel read A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. They always seem to me to have an enormous amount of luggage. This was a frequent source of irritation to me in Cameroon: sitting in a sweltering bus, watching it get loaded and wondering, was it really, strictly necessary to bring both enamel basins and the bucket of potatos? Africans always travel with, at least one, of the following: huge 20 gallon pots, with lids, tied up in cloth; a 50lb. rice sack of some agricultural item, corn, millet, potatos or beans; enamel basins, plastic basins or buckets also tied up in cloth; plastic hampers, the omni-present unidentifiable bundle of something, maybe clothes, wrapped up in an empty rice sack or market bag and bound with tape; goats, pigs, ducks, chickens; and children, always strikingly calm, well behaved children who sit, wedged in someone's lap without making a peep for 5+ hours; children who have been scrubbed for the occasion, little girls in stiff, itchey, frilly dresses and lace trimmed socks, gauzy Easter hats.

Little did I know that 60% of the road between Bamako and Kayes isn't paved. I was sitting in the back, like the rest of the suckers going to Kayes -the bus would continuing to Dakar- and during those hours over the rutted dirt path - let it be said that we were in an old Mercedes bus with a piece of plywood plugging a window in back, and seats sagging towars the floor- all of us in the back seat clung to the seats before us and bounced with our eyes closed. Everytime before a big bounce - and I'm talkin feet between ass and seat- my chair tilted forward before launching me -like riding a mechanical bull in front of the super market. The inside of the bus grew hazey with dust and everyone pulled their shirts up over their heads.
The bus pulled over at dusk on the side of the highway, and everyone going to Dakar switched to another bus. We suckers, that left about ten of us, going to Kayes were assured by the staff during the hour and a half it took to transfer the baggage that, soon, soon we would continue on. I should have realized then, but didn't, that we would be spending the night on the side of the road. Since the war in Cote d'Ivoire all merchandise imported into Mali passes over the road from Dakar, making it bandit prone and unsafe at night. One needs a police escort to make it through and apparently we didn't have one. We spent the night where we had stopped, built a fire next to the bus and huddled up in the cold Sahel night like a bunch of hobos. I, predictably (see The Hospitality Lounge) was the only person to howl and rage when we learned we would sleep in the bus. I stompped off in miserable defeat to the edge of the highway and cried watching headlights dialate and zip by, and said to anyone who ventured up to comfort me -in that thick saliva-y way one does when one is crying- to LEAVE ME ALONE! I allowed myself to be guided off when food was ready. This is interesting considering everyone else probably had real lives to get back to, furnished with people who relied on them. Whereas I am just rambling up to Morocco for a class, idling away time and money.
I slept in the aisle of the bus on a mat over a skrim of dust; other people slept on seats or on the ground next to the bus with headlight beams gliding over them all night. A solidarity and affection unfurls among people who endure a hideous, trying ride together. I loved them all; and they were astoundingly sweet and attentive to me considering I was an inconsolable bitch all night.

I'm reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac now. I've read it before, but I think it's been since high school and it's much more suitable to this experience than Emma . Reading On the Road one feels a certain bohemian priveledge in being stranded on the side of the highway in Mali, between bonfires and the stars, with a bunch of boys and men who speak only Bambara, who give you more than your fair share of bread, and offer you the best chair because you're white or a woman, or merely a howling volitale being who ought to -it's generally agreed- be placated in the interest of everyone's sanity.

I'm in Kayes now; the hottest city in West Africa. But it's winter and the weather's nice, and Kayes is so lovely with the Senegal River and the old, stone colonial buildings, that I decided to stay an extra day. I leave for Dakar tomorrow.