The Foni Bike Excursion

Greetings again to all my readers, I pray the New Year has met you all well. Things have really been picking up here the past few weeks and I have many stories to tell. You know what, while I’m thinking about it I want to apologize for lying to all of you when I said the next blog entry would be short … yea it really wasn’t. I hope though to make it up to you in this shortened (yes I had to shorten it) addition of my blog entry, The Foni Bike Excursion.

With all the commotion of the new group being sworn in and preparing for the big West African softball tournament everyone was looking for a last weekend escape before digging in for a month or so in village. The thought being that if you put one good hard month or so into trying not to leave your village, to use the internet or eat some American food than maybe, just maybe you can thwart off the guilt of leaving for a week to Dakar to get drunk and play softball with a few hundred crazy PCVs. What to do? Fajara was out of the question. The transit house in the capital was turning too much into a drama filled disaster area than a real escape. The new volunteers had just gone to site for their “three month challenge” so the idea came up between Alex and I that we should do a south bank bike trip to visit all the new volunteers as they trudged through the first difficult months in village. This would not only be fun for us but hopefully a welcoming escape to the green volunteers.

So it was planned. I road my bike along a little dirt trail that followed the countries border so that I could take the back road, at 7 in the morning, to Annie’s new site about a 50 minute bike ride east of me. I got there faster than I thought I would, it’s freaking creepy to ride your bike along a bush road in the middle of no where Africa by the way, visibility not being so hot as the sun began to rise. Waiting there in her village I posted my bike up at the Barak Obama Photo Studio, (no I’m not kidding, a nice little shop actually) and ate a granola bar. I’m not very patient as I’m sure most of you now know so a few seconds after completing my snack I decided to just keep riding until I ran into him going the other direction. It was still too early in the morning and I’m not enough of an asshole to wake the poor girl up before eight so I just rode. I caught up with him a village or two down the road and we ended up spending the next hour or so attempting to locate the one place in the whole freaking village that had eggs for breakfast. After our fruitless efforts to find breakfast we found her house and hung out for the day. Her place was nice and the last agro volunteer did a great job in the landscaping department. It was that afternoon that we started the tradition of building a water bidong basket for everyone’s house we stopped at. The sun was setting fast so we said our goodbyes and headed for alex’s village another hour or so down the road. His village doesn’t get any eggs so we stopped at, I’d say, every single shop along the way to ask. Every shop keeper said the same thing, “Try the next one. I’m SURE it’s there.” This got super annoying very fast when the 15 consecutive shops after that each told us the same thing.

Day one had come and gone and day two had begun before we knew it, as the bike trip continued. The Foni region of the Gambia is really a beautiful place, lined with tributaries and palm groves and a few hills along the way to mix things up. Breakfast wasn’t as hard this morning as a woman in the compound next door to Alex’s ended up making fresh pancatoes. The ride was nice and cool and we made it to the next village on our trip pretty quick. Jessi seemed abnormally positive actually for just getting plopped into a new environment and turned out to be an amazing host… no apologies for finishing your stash M&Ms. It was a nice house, a real ceiling (which any PCV will tell you is a HUGE plus to keep out the rats), and a cement back yard. Overall a pretty nice set up, what made it even better was the extremely funny “Politically correct Jesus” picture hanging on the wall that not so subtly made sure to have a young child of every ethnicity enjoying Jesus’s company. And so the epic 100 or some kilometer bike trip up the dusty south bank road continued, onward through Jola country we peddled and sadly, to quickly, we became bored, which almost always eludes to trouble.

A punk looking Kombo dude was riding his bike in a hurry down the road with a basket full of bread for sale in the back. “WOOOOAAAA! WOOOAAA!” Alex let off some siren noises that I’m sure the guy didn’t hear and I rode closer. “Sir, SIR! Pull over the bicycle now sir.” I said as he kept riding, “Do you have license and registration for that foleyosuwo (bike in Mandinka, literally translated to ‘rubber horse’) sir? I’m with the village defense league and we’ve been getting reports of people smuggling nudy magazines through these parts” “Sorry what did you say? Do you want to be my friend?” he replayed. “Alright sir, you are free to go, please ride safe, and greet the wife for me, thank you”. 15 minutes went by and we hadn’t passed any one, when this poor kid, not knowing what trouble in the form of two exhausted aid workers in their mid-20s in west Africa was coming his way. We turned on the sirens, “WOOOOOP! WOOOP! BEEP! BEEP!” “Boy! Boy! Please pull over the bike son”. He stops. “Son, do you know how fast you were going?” I asked authoritatively. “My name is Ousman.” he said smiling. “uhhh, do you know how fast you were going??? This is a 5k section of road and my radar says you were going 6” “Morning, morning, my name is Ousman. I am going to school.” He responded cheerfully. Wow that was like the fasted way you could ruin the fun kid, thanks! Ok so I’m really not that much of an ass, so I told him to have a pleasant day and to study hard at school and blessed him with a day of peace in Mandinka. Alright now that that was out of my system we could continue with the trip and finally, after another half hour or so, we made it to Bwiam, a bigger village in central Foni.

I had been to one of the three volunteers now staying there once before but it was a long time ago and I was amazed at actually remembering where they lived. We all hung out, took a nice hike through a palm grove, and then grabbed some beer at a shop. We parked our bikes outside the door and went to sleep. Come early morning I get up and wake Alex so we can catch a gilly gilly back to my village. What the fuck? Where are the bikes!?!? I spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where the police station is in Bwiam and then, half awake, proceed to attempt to track the thieves by following the tire marks in the sand; that’s weird because I don’t really see any new tracks? I look again, yep only to pairs of tracks coming into the, gated mind you, compound, and none leaving. Well at least that limits the thieves to Dracula, Harry Potter, and those monks in Tibet who can levitate. That will make for much easier paperwork for the police. I walked back to the house confused when one of the volunteers host brother’s walked outside. I greet him, “Good morning, you haven’t by any chance seen I fanged man wearing a cape lately or a scrawny boy on a broom have you?” I ask. “Oh are you looking for your bikes? You shouldn’t have left them outside all last night so I put them in the house for safe keeping.”… why thank you, that would make sense.

Catching a gilly was easy and we decided to even drop back off at Kafuta and take the bush road back to my site. Along the way we stopped real quick at a skill center that I read about on BBC that was close to my site, sponsored by some guys in Jersey, UK, then headed back to Jiboro. The road that connects my village to the main national highway was just starting to be built, but currently was in complete disarray as bulldozers cruised down building what seemed like a superhighway. They say it’s going to be paved by the end of March but I’m not going to get my hopes up. So instead of taking the dust vortex of death that is the road currently we take yet another back road to the Brick (what PCVs call Birkama). Riding up we run into a group of pigs; now this might not sound strange to you the reader but let me tell you, in the Gambia, it is. We jumped off our bikes and tried to catch a few. I don’t think we actually planned on catching any so it was really more an effort of humor. It looked like there was a small Christian compound that owned them down the way. The road jutted north and we came across a long segment of deserted road, when suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I see a man about our age riding up to us. As he passes he smiles and keeps riding, holding a freshly lit joint in his mouth… what every passes the time around here I guess. It’s illegal but generally known as commonplace to the locals. Boys everywhere will go off to an old tree and light one up. I though, being a good peace corps volunteer, always refuse.

Up in B-town we spend the day hanging out with a few PCVs in the area, one of which, Olga from my group had a friend in town from Japan. We all sat down and chatted away at Jokors, a local bar and nightclub till it got dark. I’d find myself again in the Brick a week later to watch the inauguration of President Obama. The speech was moving I thought, I even yelled at the guy working the bar to change the channel to CNN from BBC because we really couldn’t be bothered watching a “red-coat news station for the inauguration of a great American leader”, was a tad drunk (for some reason I have a huge beef with the British when I’m drunk? I’m not exactly sure why, they’re the original fast talking-prick imperialists). The winning of Obama is probably the most celebrated event in Africa since Mansa Musa built Timbuktu. He’s a house hold name, they’ve even started calling me Obama for the very fact that I’m American. For an entire week after his inauguration I woke up every morning to the “Barak Obama Song”, yes there’s a song, I think written by a Jamaican dude. It goes something like, “Barak, Obama, Barak, Obama, Bama bama.” Ok it doesn’t really work when I write it, but look it up online or something. It’s pretty much the new Macarena.