The Road To Mali

Greetings one and all from Bamako, Mali.


Agrandir le plan

This is it, this is as far from home as i'm gonna go on this trip. 8000 km of peddling. Its my birthday today and i have made it to Bamako, thecapital city of Mali. Today is sunday and, as Amadou and Mariam, the now world famous blind Malian musicians sang in Dimanche a Bamako,  today is the day of marrages and I have seen plenty around town. There's one just around the corner with a band playing that classic relentless Mali sound as the griots sing the praises of all present and bless the famillies whilst they in turn are blessed with cash from the beautifully attired ladies dancing in the circle. The event is taking place in a marque on the busy, dirty street and for me appitimizes the contrasts of this place.
 I am very happy to be here and the first couple of days in this city has already been filled with playing music and meeting good folk. Having said that this is the dirtiest, poorest, most polluted hectic place i've been on this journey and life here is a hard struggle for many. Open sewers and streets litterred with rubbish and overwhelming amounts of crazy traffic, crumbling ghettoes, dust and fumes and the awesome hustle and bustle of city life. This is all a bit of a shock after 10 days of cycling through forests and staying in villages and, to be honest, i don't know if i can handle the stink and hecticness much longer. My birthday present to my self was a face mask that all the scooter riders ware (and there's thousands of them) and it somehow makes it bearable to be on the street.
What an adventure it has been to get here. Thats not to say it's all over in any way as i still have to make my way back to The Gambia and i'm planning to travel through Guinea Connakry, Guinea Bissau and the Cassamance to get there so planty more of the road to come but for the meantime i'm going to spend a week or so learning Mali style guitar and jamming with musicians. At least thats the idea but I'll have see if i can stand the stink first.

 I delayed my departure east to Mali for a week as there were so many worrying news stories of fighting in the north of the country as Toureg rebels who had been teamed up with Gadaffi's militias returned across the desert armed to the teeth with serious weaponry. The Malian army simply couldn't cope and the rebels have taken control of a number of nothern towns. Some 60000 refugees fled in all directions to neighbouring countries and retaliation demonstrations kicked off in Bamako causing the Tuareg resident in the city themselves to flee for their own safety. Some still believe that this could become a serious civil war and as a result of such stories on the BBC world service and the worry of my gambian friends i decided to go to a festival In Kartong on the the Gambian coast for a week and await further news. It was a little holiday away from the open road and great to dance into the night to the varoius Mandinka, Wolof  and Jula bands and just take it easy doing very little. I didn,t even take any photos so you'll have to imagine all the fun that i had. Go on let your imagination run wild!
Well even after all that the calling of the open road bekoned me on as ever so i loaded up the bike again and left the village of Kwinella heading up river into the uknown once again. The first night was spent in the compound of the regional director of Action aid, the next with a Fulani Imam, then a French hunting lodge, another Fula family, a community of migrant gold diggers and more villages of mud huts and grass roofs. Here's a few of my wonderful hosts.....

The experience of heading off each morning and not knowing where you will spend that night, or if there will be a village with food or water continues to be extremely rich and empowering. Somehow each day something or someone appears that just touches my heart and blows me away. The journey inland from Gambia takes you into dryer and poorer lands. Firstly there are far more Fula people and fewer Mandinkas. At least the Mandinkas become the Malinkis and then the Bambara of Mali. These peoples are all related as the Mandinka travelled from the great Empire of Mali many centuries ago. The Fula are a wonderful people and from my experience all ways very welcoming and accomodating when a rondom Engliush cyclists turns up looking for a bed for the night. They were traditionaly semi nomadic cow herders and continue this tradition of looking after the cattle all across west Africa.

 I have had so many great encounters with people and this internet is again painfully slow at uploading photographs that i'm afraid i don't have the time to tell all. Each lunch time has been an interesting routine of finding some place to feast on rice and then relax during the heat of the afternoon. So often people won't even let me pay for food which says something about their hospitality when they really have so little them semlves. We've had the guitar out on several of these occasions and one night the entire village was gathered in the compound to witness this crazy cycling toubab playing the guitar. We sang and danced into the night and the magic of music transformed our hearts and brought us together.
On the road to Mali i met a guy on  a bike heading home after spending several weeks unsuccessfully digging for gold. Then that night i stayed in little encampment of folk who also turned out to be gold diggers. We were at a noisy dusty junction as trucks passed by 24 hours a day from the gold mine to the processing plant. These men worked for an absolute pitence whilst the french owned company trucked riches out of the African soil. It seems sometimes that little has changed here and so often the experience of poverty becomes heartbreaking when the injustice is so blatant.
The landscape changed little for several days heading into Mali with hundreds of miles of sun baked forest with just a scattering of small traditional villages of mud huts and grass roofs. Strangely the road was one of the best I have cycled here and stretched all the way from Kedougou in Senegal untill Bamako. It turns out to have been built by the Chinese and travels straight through the heart of gold country....

So birthday greetings from me in Bamako.
The dude here has run out of internet tokens so times up.
Much love to one and all
Ed

A month in The Gambia

A month in The Gambia….

Time passes and gradually I have really started to feel at home here. I have noticed on this journey that once I have stopped somewhere it doesn’t take long for the inertia to kick in and make it harder to leave to hit the road again even after a short rest, but this time it feels particularly difficult. Arriving in The Gambia well over a month ago did somehow feel like reaching my destination as it is here that I feel most connected to the place and people having spent more time over the years. However I did always have it in mind to continue my journey to Bambako in Mali. I was there once before but it was long ago. I have always loved the music, both traditional and more modern that one hears out of that place and it feels like a logical destination for this ride. The Mandinka people of The Gambia originally came from Mali and when I tell people that I’m heading that way, once they have got over the initial shock of the idea of me traveling there alone by bicycle, they often tell me how they have relations there. Tata Dinding told me how his family of musicians or ‘griots’ traveled from Mali and how he would love to visit there one day but sadly was not up for joining me on a bike. Now that the time has come to part with my friends and family here it’s so hard to leave. But Once again the open road calls and soon I’ll be back in the red dust of that highway heading east this time and following my dreams.

                                          looks like some one's hitched a ride.

But what of my time here? Well as I mentioned in the last post about the Fresh Start Foundation I have had a chance to connect with their projects here and help out in a few ways as well as get up to all sorts of other adventures including hosting Ramsey and Tom from the Visions Series filming for the big movie. They stayed for 10 days and we had a great time interviewing all sorts of characters talking about my cycle ride, the power of music in community, education, climate change, and how we can bridge cultures creatively. We interviewed Lamin about the work of Fresh Start and the inspiration to bring about truly positive change and even went out into the bush and took a boat on the magnificent River Gambia with my old friend Wandi to see some of the stunning wildlife of the region.

                                          

I took them to meet Tata Dindng in Brikama and we were blessed to be able to film a fantastic jam in their compound that will provide some great music for the film. The following day we traveled with the band along sandy bush tracks across the border with Senegal to a village in the Cassamance region. This area has been troubled by rebels fighting for independence for years and just this week more fighting broke out not far away and I have recently heard that Kwinella village is preparing to receive over a thousand refugees. Presidential elections are due this month and reports of trouble across Senegal has been coming through the crackly air waves of the little transistor radios that play in the shade of mango trees as the heat of the afternoon passes. We were in the village for a music festival and thankfully all was peaceful whilst we were there. The people of Dombondir village are largely from the Jola tribe and the music and performances was very typical of their culture. The drumming and dance was stunning and some great bands played over the weekend but the highlights were the kumpo dance and the traditional wrestling on Sunday afternoon.

The Kumpo involved all the women on one side singing and playing hypnotic percussion rhythms on bits of metal and all the men gathered in a line opposite them. Into the space in between leaped the crazy Kumpo dancer completely covered with long grass like a huge whirling hay stack sending ripples of excitement through the crowd. Every one sang beautiful call-and-response songs whilst the men or women would break away from the lines running towards each other, or the spinning hay stack, to bust some crazy cheeky dance moves and then escape back to the safety of their lines. Other costumed characters appeared including a scary black baboon and a one armed figure dressed in sacking who danced beating the earth with a stick. The whole event was accompanied by full power drum rhythms specific to each of the costumed dancers and involved everybody who was up for it. It was dark and I was too enthralled to take any photos any way but I did get a few snaps of the wrestling the next day.

These guys know how to work a crowd and must have spent a good couple of hours strutting about and dancing before any wrestling actually took place. Wrestling is a big deal in Senegal and top wrestlers are famous stars in the country so it was all taken very seriously and in the end one team won…. And the other lost.

Tom and Ramsey had left the festival early to go and do some more filming with Tata’s band and so when it came to trying to get home on Monday morning I was reminded of one of the reasons why I had chosen to travel by bike in the first place. I hate waiting for lifts in Africa! I was ready by 9 in the morning for a car that by 4 in the afternoon looked like it wasn’t going anywhere after all. Instead I walked with a friend through the bush, passed beautiful rice fields and crossed the river that is the border between the two countries. We never did see any immigration officials or actual border controls and it all felt wonderfully clandestine out in the wilds of Africa.

Tom and Ramsey are back in the UK now armed with lots of great footage to make the movie and I’m ready to embark on the next stage of the adventure. The money’s all finished long ago but the road lies ahead calling and the journey continues.

There’s so much more I could say about the joys of village life in rural Africa but I’ll leave that up to your imagination for the moment and for my part step back out into the reality of the unfolding experience as I’m reminded of an old eighties kids TV program that sang out those immortal words;

 “Why don’t you… switch off the TV and do something more interesting instead!”

Time to get off the computer and water the vegetables in the sun baked plots over in the garden..

Much love to one and all

Ed

The Fresh Start Foundation

The Fresh Start Foundation

As many of you know I have been raising money for the Fresh Start Foundation here in the Gambia and I thought it was about time to tell you a little about the fantastic work that they are doing. I have been in the country for just over a month now and soon it will be time to hit the road again, this time east towards Mali but whilst here I have had the chance to check out much of the charities work and even lent a hand as best I could. You can find out more about their work at www.fsfgambia.org.

First of all thank you so much to all those who have donated money through my just giving page for this project. Having witnessed first-hand the importance of this work I can assure you that all the money will be used responsibly and go directly towards the positive change that is the focus of Fresh Start. Your donations will be used specifically to support an ambitious tree planting project in the village which I am really happy about and know will be extremely important for the future.

The charity was set up by my good friend Lamin Daffeh. He is the eldest son of Daffeh family with whom I lived in 1995 and on every visit since so that now I have been adopted as a member of their family and am always so well looked after.  Lamin now lives in the UK and set up the charity a few years ago initially to help with the education of vulnerable children in the village of Kwinella but now their work has expanded in so many ways and I will try to outline some of their different projects here.

Education and Skills Development

• Fresh Start has provided educational materials to 12 different schools in the region of Kwinella and continues to support the village school in various ways.
•  They funded and built a wall around the school grounds, created a library and continue to provide books, computers, resources and pay staff to make it a positive learning environment, they renovated class rooms and other facilities, dug a borehole that provides much needed clean drinking water, they provide funds to supplement the school meals with fish and vegetables, seeds for the school garden, and support a number of orphans throughout their education.
• Fresh Start recently received funding to run a series of workshops on the theme of climate change in a number of local secondary schools and as you may know I have run many similar projects with Movingsouunds in the UK and so offered my services to provide a week of workshops to all the year 7, 8 and 9 students. This was great fun and very different to UK schools in terms of the issues it raised and also the response of the students.

                                          In the school getting down to some climate change education.

• They provide sponsorship to a growing number of students through their secondary school education to help with school fees and this makes a huge difference to the poorer families and enables the young people to continue their education.
• Fresh Start is building 2 very ambitious skill centers, one in the village and one nearer the city to provide education for orphans and further education and vocational training to young people to help them find work.

                                          This is the skills center currently under construction

Health

• Clean drinking water is critical for good health and Fresh Start now provides the village’s main source of clean water through solar powered boreholes. This has made a huge difference to the lives of the local people.
• They have provided equipment to the local regional health centre, renovated the building, wired in the electrics and built accommodation for the health workers.
• They provide regular eye screenings to villages in remote areas and fund much needed cataract operations. With so many incredible life changing success stories this has become an important focus for their work.
• They also provide follow on support, drugs and reading glasses when needed.

Agriculture and the land

• Their ambitious Kunko project in Kwinella aims to provide a community garden for the village with a reliable water source and training in horticulture. I spent many happy mornings helping to create beds for the veggies and water the banana plants. I can’t wait to see the gardens blooming in a few years time.

                                          The first seedlings are transplanted into the new beds.

• They plan to also support animal husbandry projects and initiate a small agricultural revolution by educating about organic farming methods and sustainable land use. As most of the food eaten here is grown locally this will have a huge impact on the lives and diets of the village community.
• Provide seeds and try out all sorts of new varieties to see what grows best.
• They will be planting 1600 trees in the region and educate about the importance of the trees in terms of environmental stability and biodiversity. Gambia is extremely vulnerable to the impending impacts of climate change and deforestation is a huge issue here so this is important work and will be funded by your donations to my cycle ride.

This is just a brief outline of some of the work that the charity is currently undertaking but having met the team I know that so much more is going on than I could mention here and new projects are being developed all the time. Lamin came to visit a few weeks ago and I was amazed to see the response of people to his inspirational work and I hope to be able to continue my support of this project.

Once again many thanks for your support and if you feel so inspired it’s very easy to make a donation, however small at my just giving page. 2p provides a school meal so every little helps.

Much love to you all and more tales of my time in Gambia will follow shortly.

Ed

Back home in the Gambia

Well once again it feels like such a long time and another epic journey since I last wrote a post from the Daffeh's compound in Brufut on the coast of the Gambia. I spent around 5 days there with the sisters and Dembo who was visiting from Finland. Dembo had been my student in the village primary school when I was teaching here in 1995 but now lives in Finland and is part of a new generation of Gambians living the dream of a European life. It was so hard to leave the warmth of the family home but the time to move on came once again.

First 30km south to Kartong, the last village along the coast before the border with the troubled Casamance region of Senegal. This is a lovely area further away from the tourists and infamous beach bums and hustlers that prey relentlessly upon toubabs (white people) on the beach up north by the hotels.  I had planned to stay with an English guy called Peter Verne who I had met at sunrise festival in the summer who has a wife and compound here. I met him through our mutual friend Billy, otherwise known as Undercover Hippy, from Bristol, who spent a few months here with a guitar a year or two back winning over the hearts of the Gambians with his musical talents. I have met many people who talk fondly of him and he seems to have made quite an impression on the crew here. Peter was away in England having left just a couple of days earlier but Mamboi, his wife, and the rest of the family welcomed me into their forest compound with true Gambian hospitality. Here was another example of people living the dream amongst the palms and trees of the forest; Oh the simple life out in the bush!

I stayed just a few days but had a great time exploring the village, forest and nearby coast a little and just hanging out with nice folk in the compound. 

the boys fixing the generator again.....

Mamboi and the kids making baobab juice from the fruits of this amazing tree.....

Palms on the river bordering Senegal.

From Kartong I travelled just a short distance inland to Brikama; possibly Gambia’s largest town and stronghold of Mandinka culture. Here I stayed with another old student of mine and good friend called Famara but like so many Gambians is better known by his nickname of Killy. He took me around town to visit all sorts of people including almost a hundred members of his family. We also visited some local musicians and had a fantastic time hanging out with Tata Dindin and his band. I took a few lessons from the guitarist learning some funky little Afro Mandinka riffs and one afternoon went with the whole crew in a heavily loaded minibus, with the entire sound system stacked up on the roof, to a concert in a neighborhood to celebrate the president’s recent election victory. It was a wild experience and quite unlike any party I’d been to. The band rocked it with their Kora driven afro funk and the audience of women dressed in wonderful colorful patterned dresses praised the band by literally throwing money at Tata as he sang. Tata continues the Mandinka tradition of the griots as praise singers and the more he praised the individuals of the local community the more money the women lavished him with in celebration. Take note all ye poverty stricken Brighton musicians if you want to make some cash!

We also paid a visit to a couple of up and coming reggae singers called Philantropist and Messiah… Yes there’s a singer here that calls himself The Messiah which seems kind of extreme in terms of bigging your-self up even for a reggae mc. They were both sound guys though and once again the whole crew were fantastically friendly and welcoming and were very happy to spend the day in the yard chatting, jamming and cooking up a feast of rice and peanuts in new variations….. Yes I have eaten a lot of rice and peanuts by now but still I love it. Tonight we had rice with fish cooked in palm oil, another classic of West African cuisine.

From Brikama it was time to make the trek up river 120 km to the village of Kwinella where I lived all those years ago and taught in the primary school at the tender age of 19. I lived with the Daffeh family here, and it was to their compound, the Daffeh Kunda, that I was now heading. Of course all the children have all grown up and moved on and Ba Felidge (the dad) complains of the place being too quiet now. On my first visit both his wives, Kadi and Fatou, were here and at least a dozen of his children filled the place but now things are quieter and the old simple rooms have been knocked down and replaced by new larger buildings that even have water and solar electricity. Development is slowly coming for some Gambians whilst it seems for others the simplest amenities such as water, housing or enough rice to feed the family can be a real issue. It is here in this village that the Fresh Start Foundation concentrates many of the projects but more about them to come.

It is so good to be back here. Every day I am greeted by people who remember me from back in the day. Some people that I haven’t seen for 17 years but still joyfully sing out my name in greeting and very quickly the kids all join in the call. It really is somehow like coming home after all those thousands of miles traveling through unknown places and meeting people for the first time but here there is history and shared experience and so much kindness and openness that’s almost overwhelming at times. As well as catching up with old friends I’ve been helping to establish a community allotment project set up by Fresh Start and have been digging the rock hard sun baked earth and watering seedlings. It’s so inspiring and great to get down to doing something useful. I am also running workshops on climate change in the secondary school all week which will be a whole different story from working in the UK.


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 I’ll be here in the village for the next week or so and then Ramsey and Tom from substantial films will be here filming for 10 days.

Check out the movie trailer here…..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tVFHv6a-A
and their visions project here.... http://visions-series.com/

And then the adventures will continue into Mali!
Much love from West Africa.
Ed

From Senegal to Gambia to welcome in 2012

It was so hard to leave the wonderful crew from Guinea in St Louis but after a week on the beach the calling of the open road was to strong to resist. I left a couple of days befor Christmas trusting that i would be in the right place for the special day and excited to be on the road again diving back into the unknown, and that's really how it felt this time.

The first day back on the road was just a short trip down the coast to the next town of Gandiol. I had heard about a lodge on the water side that was meant to be very nice so I payed a visit to the Zebrabar. It was strange to be in a place with lots of toubabs (white people) again. The name apparently comes from 'two bob' as in money back in the day, and seems to maintain some of it's original meaning for sure. It was such a paradise that i couldn't resist staying a night and i spent the afternoon on the lagoon in a kayack borrowed from the lodge. It was bliss and well worth the cost of staying the night. Most of the other people staying there were driving 4 X 4s across Africa but there was also an English couple driving an old Morris Minor to Cape town. It seems that we really are an eccentric nation and long may it continue! Another way is always possible.
The next day the road continued along the coast for a while through fishing villages with palm trees and pirogues pulled up on the beach. This was my first day having to deal with the red sandy routes of West Africa and i rattled over the corrugated tracks and got stuck in the sand but i was so happy to be here it really didn't matter. Then the road turned inland and i was back on tarmac again. I cycled for hours through vast open bush with occasional grazing herds of cattle or sheep accompanied by their shepherds. There was very little traffic on the road but for the odd horse cart and overloaded mercedes vans that are the local public transport. Here they are wonderfully decorated and adorned with pictures of the great Marabout of Touba where i was now headed.
I decided to spend that night in a village but in the first place that i stopped and asked, people seemed quiet bemused by me and no one spoke any french so i continued to the village of N'Diagne. Here i was taken to the compound of Iba Guisse where i could pitch my tent and pass the night. Iba was a wonderful character who was both a vet and an artist. I witnessed him treat a sheep with a prostate uterus that evening and this was something i remember well from my own childhood growing up on the farm, but needless to say the approach to treatment here was quiet different and i don't need to go into all the details now.

We spent that evening chatting and drinking atire (sweet strong green tea) which is the favourite pass time around here. As an artist he felt apart from the rest of the village who were all farmers and saw the world in a different way. He had moved from the city to seek the peaceful life of the village and was actually quiet an enlightened character and we very much enjoyed our conversations together. This was Christmas eve and the next day i would reach Touba, the most holly city of Senegal.
Another day of riding through the dry bush of Northern Senegal on potholed roads and passing only a few small towns but plenty of small simple villages of thatched houses and the endless calls of "Toubab toubab, donne moi agent!" and i arrived in Touba. Iba's friend Talla had arranged for me to stay with a friend of his there called Magga Tall, so eventually i found his home among the sandy streets. Magga is a welder and a hard working man. He runs a metal workshop outside the front of his house with a whole bunch of lads working with him. Once again i was blessed by the great Wollof hospitality of 'Taranga'.

Touba is a very special place and probably the most holy city in Senegal and this is why i had decided to be here for Christmas day and visit the Grand Mosque of Touba. It was indeed a great blessing to be here on this day and also the day of the new moon that is of significance for Islam and the 'Baay Fall' here. The stunning mosque houses the tombe of the saint and Marabout; Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba. There are wonderful stories surrounding his history involving great miracles including laying his prayer mat on the waters of the ocean to pray. This website has some nice info on the place and some stories of this legendary spiritual master if you want to know more as the stories are to many to begin to tell them here. check out: http://sacredsites.com/africa/senegal/touba.html/

From Touba it was another 3 days ride to The Gambia cycling through so many villages and open wild country side of bush land and flat delta country. I stayed one night in a bar-hotel in Fatick run by Christians which means that they were completely sozzled on boxing day but i reckon they are drinking there most days anyway. My last night in Senegal was back at the waterside but this time surrounded by mangroves on the river banks. And then to The Gambia!

For the final 40km to the boarder i felt like a long distant runner sprinting towards the finish. I had rested well the night befor and had the wind behind my so I cruised triumphantly into The Gambia.... well sort of. I was held up for quite a while by the immigration officers who seemed keen to get something from me; but the didn't, not a penny and on i went.

My first mission was to find an old friend I had met first back in 1995 here in The Gambia but then have had crazy coincidental meetings with both in the Gambia and in South Africa over the years since then. I have so many stories to tell of the fantastic Njankob Njob but you'll have to wait until the book is written for he shall have a whole chapter to himself. Any way, I found him sure enough, drunk and out on the street ranting at passes by. This did not bode well but we had some great times together over the next few days once he had straightened out a bit and was making more sense... well, a little more sense anyway for it seems that the years have taken its toll on this great man and many would call him crazy, or simply mad.

Still it was a pleasure to see him again, we played music together in the shade as the fisherman tinkered with their boats. I stayed at Lou's riverside compound known simply as 'Paradise' and it was beautiful and once again a lovely crew of folk living there who looked after me so well and again i didn't want to leave but i had it in mind to reach The Daffee Family for new year. Which i did, and this is where i have been staying for the last few days resting up and preparing myself for the next chapter of the journey.

In 1995 I came to The Gambia and worked in a little school up river in the village of Kwinella as a volunteer. I was the tender age of 19 and had never been out of Europe let alone the wilds of rural West Africa. The experience blew me away and became a profound time of learning and growth. Whilst here I lived with The Daffee family in the village and  have kept contact with them ever since. They treat me as a member of the family now and all the children are grown up doing all sorts of things all over the world. Lamin their oldest son now lives in England but has set up and runs a great little charity here called the Fresh Start Foundation and it is this charity that i have been raising funds for through this cycle ride.
Remember you can easily make a donation at  http://www.justgiving.com/ed-cycles-south 
Take a look at their website as they are doing some incredible work here. I will do a post soon all about what they are up to. I will stay in The Gambia for the next month and support a project that they are running offering workshops in schools around climate change. This as many of you know is what i do a lot of in the UK so it will be interesting to have a whole different perspective on the topic here.


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I feel like i have left out so many photos and stories from the journey of the last week or so but this post is plenty long enough as it is and what with the power cuts and the lunch break of rice and fish it has taken most of the day to write.

So I wish you all a wonderful 2012 and much love from The Gambia, the smiling coast as it is known.

Merry Christmas from Senegal

Its hard to believe that its Christmas just a couple of days away whilst here the sun has been shining and the crazy life of a Senegalese fishing town goes on around me. I've been here a week now and it's going to be very hard to leave indeed.


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I have been made to feel very welcome amongst a crew of guys from Guinea Conakry who live together here in a small ecampermant on the beach just out of town. We've been Playing lots of music together and feasting on fine west african cooking involving mounds of rice and plenty of fish, I love it, and it's exactly where i wanted to be. But there is still a few hundred more kilometers to go befor i arrive in The Gambia and soon it will be time to hit the road again.

That one above is my christmas card to you.
Yes yes yes, to white sandy beaches and midwinter sun just a cycle ride away...

One of the high points of this week was a day in a pirogue out on the water casting the fishing nets and catching the most delicious fresh fish for that nights dinner. It was a little dream of mine whilst cycling here to go out in the boats and it was indeed a dream come true and a blissful day out fishing. I'm seriously thinking of a career change.

 

 

The fishing pirogues are some how so iconic for this part of the atlantic coast just like the dhows of East Africa and form the centre of activities in town. I hope to have the opportunity to spend many more days out with the fisherman and messing about in boats over the next month on the west coast.

So i would just like to wish every one a very merry Christmas and festive season where ever you may be. I hope that you enjoy your holidays and get a chance to connect with you're fanilly and loved ones. Who knows where i'll be but for sure it will be some where in Africa, just as i'd hoped.

Much love to one and all.

Ed

West Africa At Last

Well it's time for the next eciting installment of Ed's bycicle adventures and as you can imagine there are so many tales tell and i berely know where to begin.......

I'm in St Louis on the coast of Senegal.
Yes i made it across the desert  and now i have properly arrived in West Africa. I'm staying in a small encampment of musicians from Guinea Connackry on the beach. Living in rickety grass huts and spending the days playing music and hanging out. This is the life! and exactly what i hoped to be doing here. It's a fantasticly vibrant city on an island in the north of Senegal. It's one of the few places here with lovely old coloneal buildings left by the french, however crumbling they may be, and the place is buzzing with so much going on. This is essentially a fishing town and the water side is a crazy hive of activity building boats, mending nets, sorting, drying, smoking and seling fish. It stinks and to an English eye is absolute chaotic madness. Goats and sheep every where, children running about the place, horse carts, trucks, rubbish spread about everywhere, dirt, and every colour of the universe in the most fantastic dance of creation. I love it! I'll stay here for a liitle while so you'll get pics next time but here's a little taster:
Abduli making the all important Atire tea...

So How did i get here?
Well the last post i wrote in Boujdour in Western Sahara and the going was pretty tuff. Thankyou so much for those folk who left comments on reasons to do a journey of this sort. I found them all really inspiring and the last couple of weeks have been a huge learning experience for me. After a few more days cycling through the desert i was in a pretty good rhythm with it all. Long distances and endless emptyness. Most days had a hazy layer of cloud that kept the temperature down and created a mysteroius white washed effect over everything. I slept a couple of nights camped by service stations as there were no longer any towns along the way and continued to meet good people and largely enjoy life on the edge.

There were even the occasional signs to say i was heading in the right direction!

One afternoon a met a very friendly crew of guys living in tiny fishing huts nestled into the cliffs. These were pretty much the only people living in this part of the desert and they came from the city to work with the fishing for a couple of weeks at a time. We marvelled at one another for a while, drank tea together and i carried on my merry way.

That night i found myself i little unstuck as it was getting late and the service station i was hoping to get some supplies had nothing to offer. There was a campsight 30km further on but it would soon be dark and i was at a loss as to what to do. Just then a van pulled up with two French guys who offered me a lift in the right direction so i jumped on board with little idea as to how events would unfold. It turned out that they where heading to Bambako where Frank ran music projects for blind kids and that night we had a great little jam in the car park of a service station where we camped together. After that i found myself cought up in the flow of things. We were having a good time hanging out and had a lot in common including our route. I ended up excepting the offer of a lift to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauratania. I had had it in mind that i may take a lift of this part of the journey as it is this strectch of 450km of road where there have been kidnappings in recent years and the British foreign office advises against all travel. However if you were to allways follow their advice you would probably be to scared to laeve the front door. There was also a strong east wind blowing so i was happy to be cruising at speed in the van rather than battling the elements and risking dodgy encounters. Having said that I'm sure it would have been fine and infact i found myself feeling like i had missed out on part of the journey and let myself down. But what the heck i was having a good time and continued to hang out with these guys for a few days in Nouakchott playing music and enjoying the connection. I will checkout their projects when i reach Bambako, hopefully in a few months time.

It was as if someone had pressed a fast forward button for a few days of my journey and the xperience in the van answered many of my earlyer quetions as to why i wanted to travel by bike. It is indeed a completely different experience and people treat you in a very different way. I was very happy to get back on my bike for the 300 km across the remainder of Mauratania to where i am now in Senegal.

Entering Mauratania the desert begins to change straight away. First there is 4kms of "no-mans land" to cross after Morroco that belongs to neither country and is littered with abandoned vehicles and has no tarmac but a rough track winding it's way between the frontiers. There are also people looking to buy and sell vehicles or change money and ofcourse quite a scetchy vibe going on.

But once in Mauratania the desert is more inhabited with paople living in huts and Bedouin tents along the road side and for the first time in days there are actually trees and tufts of grass. Heards of camels, goats and even cattle start to appear and more and more villages along the way.

The Capital of Nouakchott is an incredible meeting of black West African cultures with the more Arab peoples of north Africa. There are people from Mali, Senegal, The Ivory Coast and all over, here to do some kind of business or other and the city has that chaotic West African feel thats going to be the norm from now on. One afternoon I paid a visit to the Gambian Embassy and had tea with the Ambassador who was expecting me as he is an Uncle to Lamin from the Fresh Start Foundation. It was lovely to meet the guys there and speak English and we had our photo taken together with the bike so hopefully i will have that soon to put up on this blog.

I have feeling that this post is probably just about long enough already so i'll draw it to a close now and tell you all about Senegal after i have been here for a little but here's a few pictures of the road south from Nouakchott to give you a taste of what a bike ride in this part of the world is like.

all the best to ona and all from the open road.
Ed