After our lunch on the balcony, we needed a good dinner. Google Maps had a few suggestions, but one looked quite appealing to us. It was nearby, the photos looked inviting, and the food too. It was a local eatery just across the road from the main taxi station in town. Nothing fancy, but if the food is good and the price is correct, we are in business. When we arrived, the sun had just set, and the muezzins started calling for prayers. The place was deserted. At first, we thought we were at the wrong location, but it did look like the pictures. We shouted, and all of a sudden, one of the front doors of a house opened up, and a man and shortly after a woman came out. I asked if we could eat here and what she had to offer. Chicken, fish, and beef were all available. To drink, only juices and one coke. That wasn’t a lot to choose from to drink, but we could sort something out. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any beer. We ordered two half-chickens with attiéké and coke. The lady, surely in her sixties, known as Barry Nené, started to light the BBQ coals to prepare our dinner. At a certain point, she came to me and asked how many beers we would like to have. I looked at Alex and answered four, two each. Nené asked her cook how much everything was and sent him off across town by moto taxi to get us four bottles of Guinea’s finest Guiluxe lager. He returned a little while later, and that beer never tasted any better. Slowly the place started filling up. We seemed to have been the first customers of the evening. While listening to Julio Iglesias’ best French ballads, we were served with half a chicken, ‘poulet bicyclette’, each, bedded on attiéké with a bit of salad around it. When I asked her if we could take a picture together, she told us, laughing, that she wasn’t ready for this and not pretty enough. We left it at that and surprisingly, a few minutes later, she returned in her best dress and head wrap, just for the pictures! What a lady! The meal was very delicious, although some parts of the chicken were a bit dry. We had so many good laughs with her. In the end, she very much liked to have the pictures sent to her by WhatsApp, which I did. We had a fun dinner out in a local eatery with local food and local beer. Happy days!

Early start after a somewhat restless night. Alex got woken up by one of the hotel staff washing clothes under his window at midnight. He was furious and told him in his best French that he wanted to sleep. The staff was pretty noisy throughout the night and also woke me up at some point.
After a quick breakfast from the muesli bar of the car and Moroccan milk from the cooler that had already gone a tiny bit sour but was still considered consumable by us, we set sail and headed towards Kissidougou, in the west of the country. The first stretch was to Faranah, 185km with bad reputation and even worse road surface, Christoph and I already got the treatment on the way up. Usually you calculate around 5 hours for that stint. The initial 50 or so kilometres were pretty full of potholes and we braced for the rest. But then all the potholes had disappeared under a nice fresh layer of gravel equalised with the remaining tar. This must have happened in the past six weeks or so. It was smooth sailing across all these patches but now we had to battle the dust. Due to the increased speed the dust plumes coming off trucks and cars were enormous and took your entire vision. That meant that you had to slow down until you could see a bit of the road and other traffic again. Some idiots were flying blindly through the dust clouds and hoped for the best. The Chinese are building complete new road next to it, hence the lack of maintenance as the road will be replaced soon anyway but that can still take a few years as some of the bridges are still far from finished.

Although we made good time, it still took us around five hours to reach the outskirts of Faranah.
About ten kilometres from the city centre of Faranah, we were stopped at a police checkpoint. A female officer came to my window and greeted us. She was super friendly but was clearly on a mission to get something of these white guys. Our paperwork didn’t reveal anything she could fine us for. So she politely asked if we had the two triangles, first aid box and fire extinguisher. Also politely I confirmed that they were all on board and functional. She obviously didn’t believe me and demanded to see them. I opened the back door and showed her the two triangles. To my surprise she didn’t want to have them unpacked. On to the first aid kit. I opened the side cover where it resides and showed her. She wanted to look into it as she didn’t believe it was full. When I opened the lid and she saw the content list with check marks and all the products she asked whether I was a doctor. To that I only responded that I was only a good citizen obeying the road traffic regulations. She smiled although with a more grimm face. Then she spotted an orange bag I had stashed at the back for future use. She wanted to have that and took it. I wouldn’t stop her in this case. Now on to the fire extinguisher. That became a problem as a big tanker truck had just pulled up next to us and blocked the access. So I had to endure even more minutes with her behind the car doing small talk. She kept asking if I had something for her. And I kept repeating that the travel was so tiring and she could only have my smile. Finally after a felt eternity, the truck pulled away and I could open the rear door for her quickly to see the extinguisher and shut it again before she would get wider eyes about the stuff inside. I grabbed my (photocopied) car papers, saying that I believe I had satisfied here check and wished her a nice day and ‘bon boulot’ (good work=good shift), got into my car and we were finally able to leave. She has actually been the very first police officer who actually wanted to look inside my first aid box and studied it. It was the same checkpoint where Christoph and I encountered the completely drunken officer who wanted to fine me for the back seats. At this stop one of the lenses of my prescription sun glasses must have fallen out again. This time I only noticed much later and was inclined to drive back many kilometres to look for it and encounter her again.

In Faranah we reached the bridge over the river Niger. Its source is in the Guinean highlands, not far from the Sierra Leone border. Almost where we were. So the almost 4200km long river here is still in its infancy and has to become mighty further down stream. The unusual bit about the Niger is that it first flows north into Mali and then completely around Burkina Faso, through Niger and later discharges in a massive delta in Nigeria. It therefore makes a crescent bend in West Africa. Most other rivers in the region flow North to south to the Atlantic coast. There was a standstill in front of the bridge and I could only see some sparkling light and signs with Ageroute on it, a government agency that maintains roads and infrastructure in each West African country. Possibly road works that was later confirmed. The motorbikes and pedestrians were allowed to cross via the pedestrian part of the bridge in alternating direction. We waited 15 minutes. Alex got hungry and went to buy two, what he called vetkoek, a deep-fried dough dumpling from a local stall next to the car. We had been waiting thirty minutes. Now school was out and hundreds of pupils flocked onto the street in their mainly kaki uniforms. Some picked a ride with one of the many moto taxis. We watched the colourful hustle and bustle. More cars and trucks had lined up behind us. Then a moto taxi pulled up next to us with a king size mattress on the back and tried to squeeze through but got stuck a little further. African life!
We were waiting for 45 minutes and finally we saw movement in the queue. One by one we were allowed to cross the old steel bridge. The repair team had apparently replaced and rewelded a number of steel plates we drive on. It looked more like a patchwork quilt than a reliable bridge surface to cross on. But what can you do, heavily loaded buses have managed to cross and it is the only bridge for a couple of hundred kilometres radius. We crossed it like everyone else. Happy to have made it, we continued through the city and headed further South.

The landscape changed and the vegetation changed. It became flatter, still hilly but not mountainous anymore and less dense forest and more open savannah type with lots of grass and some trees. The road surface improved greatly, hardly any potholes and if, then they were small.
Still a 140km to go on a narrow country road with lots of idiots overtaking without being able to see properly and hoping that the other will avoid a collision. Not for the faint hearted and requires still a lot of concentration although the road surface was good. The icing on the cake are the speed bumps. There are many of them at the beginning of, in the middle of and at the end of most villages. However, they are usually very hard to see and most are so nasty that you really have to standstill before crossing these usually concrete made obstacles.

We arrived in Kissidougou to be greeted again by police at the city border. All very friendly. We drove into town and I saw too late that the street divides, of which one way becomes one way on market days. Today was market. I accidentally drove about two meters past the sign and got stopped by two policemen. Of course, I immediately apologised for my mistake and with a little contribution to buy some water, we got sent into the right street. At the end of this street we got stopped by another policeman, who was clearly under influence of something other than alcohol. He just wanted to see my documents which he needed to study very carefully as his eyes apparently didn’t want to work as he wanted. After faffing around a couple minutes, he returned them and wished us a nice day.
Around the roundabout and we had arrived at the hotel for the night.

Not luxurious, a bit rundown and in disrepair but clean and will do for the night.
After a little siesta, we had to sort out dinner. The owner was very helpful and wanted to ride his motorbike to town for us to pickup some food. We thanked him and dove into our own stash of provisions. Out came two tins of Panzani’s finest ravioli. They got poured into a pan and heated on my little multi-burner stove, engulfing it in flames. Within a couple of minutes with careful stirring they were hot. Accompanied by Guinea’s finest beer, we had a bachelor meal!
During the afternoon we could see the clouds rising and turning into a thunderstorm. Around dinner time, it started lightning at the horizon. At exactly eight pm the gates opened and we saw our first rain, Eeyore and me since Marrakech, 6 weeks ago and Alex since leaving Abidjan two weeks ago.