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Getting around in Africa goes beyond the Western cultural notion of "travel". If one is interested in going beyond the limited areas where the Western culture standard of travel is available, one quickly finds oneself in a situation fashionably referred to as "adventure travel". That is, one never knows what might happen.

I had never been on a bus like this in Africa. Gleaming paint job, not a dent or a scratch, automatic doors, upholstery intact...in fact, perfect. Was I dreaming? In a malaria delirium? As new passengers boarded, they emitted "Hmmm's" and "Ah's," and stroked the paint and upholstery. The bus seemed entirely out of context, as we rolled past village after village of simple houses made of forest materials...mud, bark or hand-sawn boards with palm-thatched roofs, and an occasional commercial building made of concrete blocks with corrugated metal roofing. Everything was coated with the thick red road dust of the dry season--a 2 month reprieve from the heavy rains of the equatorial rainforest. We had caught the new bus in Yoande, Cameroon, and were heading south to the Yengue river crossing into Equatorial Guinea.

We knew that public transportation was available to Kribi and on to Campo. From there, we weren't sure how we would proceed. We had heard that once we reached the river, we should be able to catch a boat travelling upriver to Yengue, or out to sea and down the coast to Bata, Equatorial Guinea's largest town on the mainland. If we went via Yengue, we knew there was a road from there to Bata.

Feeling lucky to begin our trip in the lap of luxury in this spanking-new bus, we arrived at the transport depot in Edea two painless hours later. Cars were parked in an apparently random design, like fallen pick-up sticks, yet the regular patrons understood the non-linear sense of order. Nearly anyone in the crowd whom we inquired, even children, could tell us how to find the location where a car leaving for our destination could be expected to park. Once the car arrived, which could be any time from immediately to several hours, passengers would begin to board. When the vehicle was loaded with passengers, that is, packed to the gills--which also might happen immediately or take several hours--it would depart.

The thing that was unusual about this transport depot was that there was a structure here--a cement pad to sit on, and a roof. We found an open space to set our bags, then sat down on top of them. People sat in clusters, apparently grouped in extended families. Very few travelled alone, or in a pair, as we did. There were lots of children. I was always surprised at how well-behaved African kids were in public. No whining and crying, just playing quietly together.

The crowd got dense, then thinned, in cycles. Vehicles of all descriptions which had been enrolled for public transport came and went. The new bus was quite the exception but there were a few vehicles in relatively good condition. Others were wrinkled-bodied, rattle-trap sedans which required a push-start from the passengers. In using this genre of public transport, we had found it wise to conduct an inspection of basics before getting in: do the tires have any tread? do the brakes function? if travelling at night, does the car have working lights?

The theme of extreme disparities is common in Africa especially in countries that had means of attracting foreign exchange, such as Cameroon, Gabon, Nigeria, Kenya. These countries displayed the same extremes in architecture--slick skyscraper bank buildings with fine stone work, gardens, fountains and monumental art installations sat next to squalid public markets with rickety stalls and garbage piled head-high.

In Equatorial Guinea, however, if we had seen a new bus, we could be sure it was an apparition...or hallucination. In Guinea, there was no such wealth to display, unless it was a car in the president's fleet. Economically, the country was still on it's knees from the devastating Macias regime. (1968-79).

Over a 10 year period, somewhere between 30-50% of Equatoguineans were either executed or exiled. In an attempt to halt modernization, cars, any type of internal combustion engine, streetlights, infrastructure, etc. had been destroyed by Macias . Twelve years later, the pace of recovery was a slow crawl. Whether it was progressing forward, or crawling backward was difficult to say. Mail and phone systems were very limited, and operated only sporadically. To make a phone call to the United States, we had to leave the country. There was no press, and throughout the tiny country, the size of Maryland, there was not a single bookstore or newstand.

By the standard of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which measure success in terms of hard currency exchange earned through cash crops such as cocoa, coffee and hardwoods, there was little that could be termed "recovery".

In the village life, however, the severe darkness of los tiempos malos, the bad years, which was about the only thing people had to say about the Macias period, was beginning to loose it's grip on the collective psyche. The men cleared patches in the rainforest by hand, and the women farmed them--as they had forever. What family had not lost a member, or several, to the terror, prisons, torture, or exile of the Macias days? Yet, at some point, the wailing must stop. New children had been born, bringing their innocence and joy; and the women then remembered why to go on. The men who returned reclaimed their roles of leadership. Light still gleamed in the children's eyes, the forest was still abundant, and the people needed little excuse to set down their machetes to celebrate this festival or that.

When my husband, Doug and I had first arrived at our post, deep in the territory of the Fang (pronounced like long) people; from their perspective, we might as well have been from the moon. We were asked, "America...is that a province of Spain?" To grasp the grief and loss that these people had experienced, I knew was impossible. Yet on a soul level, or somewhere within me, I felt it. It was like wading knee deep through black soot. The sum of my past encounters with sorrow, with darkness, were paled by comparison.

The adjustment to living in this culture had been vast, and when our time for a break came around.....we were ready for a vacation!

Now it was time to head back to our post. We'd had our reprieve, a month-long touchstone to the modern world and the niceties of Western culture. Dinner in the dining car on the overnight train trip from Nairobi to Mombasa, complete with silver service and the setting sun over the herds in the game parks. Wine in pink crystal at a cliff-side restaurant on the Kenyan coast. Many hot baths in deep old-fashioned tubs. We were rested and reassured that the world we had come from was still there, and would be there when we were ready to return. For now, we were ready to get back to our work. It was fine that there were no new buses in Equatorial Guinea.

Our 3-hour wait at the transport depot in Edea passed easily between people-watching and daydreaming.

Two days earlier, we had visited Foumban, the seat of one of Cameroun's small kingdoms within a country. I now ruminated on mental pictures of the sultan of Foumban's palace, which was made of red brick in the 13th Century. We had seen men dancing with cobras in front of the palace, accompanied by clarinets 3 yards long. And the slit drum we saw! Humongous! Six men would stand surrounding it to play it. Made from an enormous tree trunk, about 9 feet in diameter and 18 feet long, that had been hollowed out, it was said to carry a message 50 miles. The ceremonial building that housed the drum had a flamboyantly shaped thatched roof, and the walls were covered with stories captured and held in time by wood carvings.

My husband nudged me back into the present: the van that would carry us to Kribi was getting ready to leave. No embarrassing questions were necessary. This van appeared fit for the road, so once it was stuffed the way frat boys in the fifties stuffed telephone booths, we took off. My husband's head was crammed against the ceiling in the back corner of the van. Pulling out of the lot, the driver accelerated over a bump, slammed on the brakes, causing the passenger load to slide forward, then quickly opened the back doors of the van to pop in 2 more passengers in the newly available space. There is always room for one more! Good Lord! How far to Kribi?

Luckily, only a few hours. On arrival, we tracked down the local Peace Corps volunteer through the grapevine. She was visiting her friend from Senegal who sold watches at a booth in the local open-air market. Her friend fetched some warm beers, and we chatted. She graciously offered to host us for the night. We had a spaghetti dinner at the home of her friends, a Cameroonian, and the Senegalese. They plied us with questions about how they might break into the imported beer business in Equatorial Guinea. They were bright, funny, and eager to make a profit.

The next day we took a bush taxi to Campo. "Bush taxi" is a common term throughout Africa to denote the rattle-trap end of the vehicle parade. We didn't know how to say "Does this thing have any brakes?" in French, so we said our prayers and crossed our fingers. That night we stayed with another Peace Corps volunteer.

We were now only about 10 kilometers from the river Ntem. Our host helped us get a ride from one of the few vehicles in the area down to a village beside the river the following morning. "Hey!" We thought, "This looks like a breeze!" As we walked through the village, we turned many heads. Not many white people passed this way...and on foot, carrying luggage? As usual, when we walked somewhere, a stream of children followed us. They were at first wary, and stayed about 50 yards behind us. My husband could not resist, however, and periodically turned around, flailed his arms, stomped his feet and made boogey-man noises. They saw right through him, as usual, and quickly cut the distance between us. Now they offered to carry our bags, and asked us questions. Where is your car? Did it run out of gas? I could carry your gas can for you as you go back...cheap! Why don't you speak French? Where is America? Can I have your sunglasses?

As we left the village, the kids dropped off and back to their own doings. The road had led us down to a logging yard and dock on the river. Here, we hoped to find a boat going upriver 18 kilometers to cross into Equatorial Guinea at Yengue, or, possibly, a boat going to Bata by the sea.

I found the logging yard absolutely dreadful. Stacks of enormous tree carcasses were strewn haphazardly, like bodies on a battlefield. I didn't perceive them simply as "wood products" at all, but as akin to beached whales, that the life had been bled out of slowly, but certainly. It was very painful for me to be there. In my time in Africa, I had not yet confronted the phenomenon of resource glutting so directly. These raw, whole logs would be shipped out of the country unsawn; no value added as lumber or manufactured products, and with no regard for either the rainforest or the local long-term economy.

Not only were the circumstances difficult for me on moral grounds, the spot was just plain uncomfortable. The only available shade was under a huge gasoline tank where the ground was greasy and the fumes were bad. We sat and waited. We bemoaned neglecting to bring food or drink. When the sun had passed its zenith, I headed back to the village. The best I could find was a warm beer and stale crackers. The kids were all gone. As I slowly sauntered back to the logging dock in the mid-day equatorial sun, I imagined that I would simply evaporate, leaving not a trace. Doug would find only my clothing, lying in the road. When I got back, I was actually grateful for the greasy spot of shade.

We saw that there was some excitement down by the river's edge. A man with binoculars was running and shouting that he had sighted an elephant. We went to investigate. Someone pointed out through the heatwaves a distant, faintly recognizable water-stream shooting skyward way up river. This little spec, that someone said was an elephant was the only one we saw in West Africa.

Around 4 p.m. a big cayuco (a dug-out canoe; in this case, reinforced with sideboards and a hefty outboard motor) pulled up. He scalped us for $45 for the trip upriver to Yengue. He knew he had us; we would have paid twice that. He was making a run with beer cargo.

Sitting on the front deck with light spray cooling us, the dread of the tree graveyard began to fade. This was one of the finest ways to see the rainforest. The black-green soup of the water swirled by slowly, with a fullness like the tone of a bass viol. A very deep stirring tone. The jungle growth poured over the banks as if it were trying to take over the river. The variation of greens were so profuse, so vibrant, that they gave the impression of a full palette, even though it was all green. The plethora of life was rich, exuding a sense of endless vibrancy, a potent endowment of germplasm stored in this short stretch of river. I let myself be mesmerized, drinking in as much green with my eyes as I could hold.

We arrived in Yengue in an hour. We hauled our bags up the bank and down a path about a quarter mile to a little hut that housed the customs official. After questions and inspections, we were ushered to another hut and questioned by the police officer. We joked with them both. They assured us that there was a "hotel" in Yengue. They sounded quite proud to be able to offer commercial lodging. We were imagining what it would be like. No doubt, the lap of luxury.

We were exhausted to the bone, and certainly not in a position to be picky. We were greeted at the door of the hotel by a girl about 9 years old.

"Where is your Mama?" I addressed her in Spanish, the official language, a remnant of colonization.

"She's in the bosque (the forest)."

This meant she was working her slash and burn plots in the rainforest. This time of year, she would probably be cultivating her peanuts, and harvesting malanga (tarot), yuca (cassava) and greens. Nearly every woman in Equatorial Guinea has slash and burn plots in the forest, even residents of the two small cities farm the forest.

The girl showed us in. The hotel was not the traditional design of the dominant local people, the Fang. I wondered if the design was Nodoe-influenced (one of the beach tribes) or colonial. Probably Spanish, I thought, as there was a small veranda in front of the reception room, which had some chairs and a coffee table made from local poles and hand-sawn boards. The next room was a dining room, with one rectangular table, suited to seat 6 or 8. A small door to one side of the dining room led to a small, enclosed courtyard, which was for the use of the matron's family. I had never seen an enclosed courtyard in Equatorial Guinea before; it appeared to be another Spanish element.

In traditional Fang design, the housing complex of one family would comprise three main buildings. First, what was referred to as "the house", or "the reception" was the most substantial and best constructed. Almost always of local (that is, very local--within hand-carrying distance) materials, such as mud, bark or hand-sawn boards, it contained the reception room and the man of the house's sleeping quarters. In front of the house, was usually the second building, a small half-walled hut, the "mbe," or, in Spanish, "casa de palabra", house of the word. The house and the mbe were men's territory, the house being the private domain of the man, his special invited guests, and the wife that he chose to sleep with at that time, and the mbe being a community gathering place for the men to tell stories. Often, the women would serve their men dinner in the mbe so the story-telling could go uninterupted into the night.

Behind these two buildings, were the third, the cocinas (kitchens) which were the women's domains, with each wife within a polygamous family having her own kitchen space. Cooking was done over a fire on the dirt floor in the midst of the unventilated smoke. The kitchen of a woman might sleep 4 generations-- herself and her young children of both genders, perhaps a grown daughter and the daughter's children, and her mother and/or aunts. A kitchen might be a free-standing building but more traditional design connected kitchens in rows, so a woman's kitchen might adjoin her co-wive's, or others close relatives.

At the Yengue hotel, I wanted to ask our young hostess about her heritage, but it didn't seem polite to do so. It was clear the girl wanted us to sit in the reception room, the place designated for guests to relax, but we asked to be shown to our sleeping quarters. We left the main building and were led down a path to a cluster of 3 little shacks. Here, we had a roofed room with a bed, and reasonably clean sheets. Dirt floor, but clean. We were elated simply at the sight of a private place to rest.

When the matron, Eoma, arrived home from the forest, she said she'd be willing to cook for us, but hadn't planned on any guests, so we would have to go to the store to buy food.

The store was actually a shelf in someone's living room. It had 5 items displayed on a dusty plank. The only edible items were tiny tins of tomato paste, small bags of rice, and some disgusting red soda. This was our dinner that night, and our breakfast the next morning.

I sat in the courtyard with Eoma while she cooked our dinner. I had asked her to boil some water for drinking water, and I wanted to see that it was adequately boiled for purification. The courtyard had a cooking fire with several small seats around it, so I settled into one of them and watched the greasy, blackened kettle. Within an arm's reach of the cooking fire was a tiny kitchen cubicle for food preparation and washing.

Eoma came and sat, and we talked. She asked where we had come from and where we were going.

"Oh, yes, you've been in Kenya. That's very far away. I've heard of Kenya. That's in Africa.

And you're working here in our country? In the interior? You work with the women? With agriculture?"

This launched a cascade of questions and concerns about farming.

"Why is it so difficult to grow a good crop of yuca these days? The nyame, the malanga..all the roots are harder to grow every year. They rot in the ground! And the rains are so unpredictable. Even the elders can't tell when they will start, when they will stop. And yes, it is so hard to come by good bosque (forest land) that has been left to lie fallow a proper length of time. The clan leaders squabble over land...the women who were left without family connections after los tiempos malos (the bad times), I don't know how they survive. They are given only the worst land that is the farthest away from the village."

These were the typical women's concerns, which had been told to me many times. There was a sense of impending change, observable differences in weather patterns; farming seemed harder than in their mothers' time...how would they keep up their responsibilities, feeding their families with their hand-grown crops?

She referred to los tiempos malos in passing, knowing that if I had spent any time here, I would know she was talking about the years of the Macias regime, whose reign rivalled that of Idi Amin as a horror show. It was now just 12 years since he had been deposed.

I looked around at the courtyard and house, sensing the relative wealth and the Spanish influence here, and wondered how the Macias years had been for Eoma and her family.

Macias was the first elected president after Equatorial Guinea's independence from Spain. There were coup attempts in his early years in office, which led to his ruling with an iron fist. Churches were controlled, then closed, and priests imprisoned. Schools were closed, teachers imprisoned. The currency became useless and banks closed down. Then, infrastructure was destroyed in an attempt to halt modernization forever. At one point, 600 boats were sunk in the Bata harbor, because they were seen as symbols of the modern world, and to prevent escape.

My neighbors at my post had told me that during the darkest times, it was prohibited to go from one house to another in the villages after nightfall. And it was not safe to speak within one's own home after dark for risk of imprisonment. It was illegal for more than 2 people to gather for any reason. Eventually, any man was fair game for questioning and imprisonment, and so most that could left the country...walked out through the jungle until they reached a border.

Women were generally not imprisoned, for they were not considered worthy of concern. Rather, they were left, in villages inhabited by women, young children and the old and infirm. During these years, the burden of survival fell on the shoulders of the women. The rigorous pattern of slash and burn agriculture fell fully in their laps. Now, not only did they have the women's traditional work of cultivating, planting, weeding and harvesting, but they were also forced into the men's role of clearing patches of the mighty rainforest with machete and hand axe. With each cycling of the rains, twice per year, the children's empty stomachs required the women to cortar y quemar, cut and burn, adhering to the demanding cadence of tradition. Considering the grief they were carrying, the rhythm of tradition may have been just what kept them going.

After many months of building trust, one young man had shared with me his story of the Macias days. He was around 12 years old when his mother convinced his older brothers and sisters that they must leave, taking him, the youngest child. Her husband had been killed and she said she could not bear to loose her children. With machetes in hand, and a little food for the trip, they set off for the border, a 3-day walk.

My friend secured a job in Libreville, Gabon, which has been called "the Paris of Africa." After 2 years in the relative affluence of Libreville, my friend returned to his village by foot, alone, his heart aching to see his mother. Within 2 days, he was arrested and carted off to prison in Malabo, the capitol city, which is on an island 280 miles away.

The prison was a stuffed pig-sty. Every day, partly to relieve the burden on the facilities, guards would come through and randomly select men to go before the firing squad. Some were shot outright; others were paired, given clubs, and forced to fight their comrade for their chance for survival. Day after day, his heart would pound as the guards passed by. Beginning at age fifteen, he endured this ordeal for 2 years.

My friend believed that he was plucked by the hand of God, and safely set down in the village again, in a miraculous throw of the dice that allowed him to escape. He not only escaped prison, but stowed away on a boat travelling to the mainland, safely exited the boat, and found a ride inland to his village. When he arrived, his family and friends thought he was a ghost. They were afraid of him, and exercised great caution to venture forward and touch his flesh, affirming that he was of this world.

I was staring at the greasy coffee pot. Still not boiling. I did not ask Eoma about her experience in los tiempos malos. I knew she could not tell me.

I said, "You know, in English we have an expression that behind every dark cloud there is a silver lining...and through the absolute horror of the Macias years, I see something that is an important benefit. When I travel in other parts of Africa, I see that in the span of only a couple of generations, in areas that have been industrialized, the chain of knowledge passed from mother to daughter has been broken; and these women actually don't know how to farm. When the Macias banks shut down, a coin or a banknote didn't mean a thing, and the women had no doubt where their survival lay. Their bond with the land, the knowledge of their mothers and grandmothers, is what saved them. With the way things are going, that bond may be the most valuable thing possible in the present, and in the future."

She looked at me funny. She could not imagine a "bond with the land"...or what it was not to have it. She, of course, had her fincas, little shifting farm plots, cut out of the forest...how else would she live? How else could she feed her children? After all, guests came to stay at the hotel only occasionally.

She noticed changes that concerned her: as the villages grew in population, forest plots were cut and farmed more frequently, both encroaching on land of neighboring clans and not allowing the forest enough fallow time to regain fertility. The women could not bring healthy crops to bear on tired soil. Weather patterns were inconsistent, could not be predicted, and springs and streams had gone dry.

My concern about the rainforest arose from lectures in conferences and symposiums, TV, radio, movies. I had been informed by newsletters, periodicals, books, Landsat photos that revealed rainforests melting away like butter, graphs and charts, and cartoon graphics on kid's cereal boxes that promised to save the rainforests--a full array of information ranging from the latest geo-techno surveys to green-washing media hype. All of it, (except for the last 18 months "in the field") was in my head, a cognitive soup.

I did not know Eoma's experience of the rainforest, or her sister's, or mother's, or grandmother's; those who had kept alive her people's knowledge of how to live in this place.

I felt the distance of eons between us, and at once, an electric magnetism, a solid sense of commonality, a sisterhood.

"If you have an agriculture project in the interior, what do you do there? Do you farm? Do you teach people? What do you teach?", she asked.

I talked a little bit about using nitrogen-fixing trees to help create a on-site source of fertilizer, planting arboles de abonno, ""fertilizer trees", in rows a few meters apart, and pruning the trees back to providing ongoing nutrients to your plots.

"The idea is that once this system is established you don't have to keep cutting new plots in the forest. If one chooses to work with these methods called agroforestry, to make the transition to live this way, one could have a permanent farm in the same place. This is a way of farming that protects the forest for the wild things. All around the world, there is concern about the rainforests being destroyed. They could actually disappear altogether.

Agroforestry takes experimenting, though, and patience. The transition to living this way is like a long bridge, it takes about three years to make the change. If a family chooses to try it they need to learn about it, and the most important thing is to remember the traditional knowledge-- to take all the knowledge from the grandmothers about how to live here and blend that way of knowing the land with these new ideas to find a third way--your own way. Its so important not to lose the storehouse of traditional knowledge."

She burst into the raucous, infectious belly-laugh of her people. "You're really different! You're saying we know something. We women! Well, I'm interested in these arboles de abono...sounds like maybe they could save me a lot of work, if I could have my farm by my house, and not have to haul my ncue (huge cargo basket) through the long forest trails full of firewood. But I can tell that you are a foreigner...you don't know the forest...the forest can't be destroyed. It is immense, vast, and mighty. People don't have the power to destroy it."

I looked at her, with landsat photos floating in my head, and hoped she was right.

I invited her to come visit me. Then, I could show her some of the things I was talking about and how the women in our area were working with them. It was a 2 day journey, but she said she would.

We looked at each other, the eons between us melting.

A group of older women burst into the courtyard, giggling and guffawing, gathered around one woman who was carrying a basket. They extended the basket, offering it to me with hearty belly-laughs, not a bit shy of their gaping gums, or a lone tooth. The basket was full of big, fuzzy caterpillars in day-glo colors. The women indicated that they were intended as a snack for me. They took a few and popped them in their mouths. I was visibly chagrined. They howled. Then, they each wanted to shake hands with me...with a squirming caterpillar concealed in the hand. It didn't matter that the plot had been thoroughly revealed...each one had to have her try at it. By this time, I had kind of regained my cool, but there was no way I was going to eat one of those things.

Eoma chased them away, all of us in stitches.

My water had now boiled and cooled sufficiently that I could drink it. Eoma handed me a cup; it tasted like grease and ash. I poured the rest in my water bottle, which she clearly envied, and went to join my husband in our bedroom.

We were awakened in the morning by the sounds of a big truck on the tiny road. Thank God. We sat up in bed, cheered boisterously, then lay down for another snooze. We knew it would take them awhile to load the beer from the cayuco into the truck before it returned to Bata. We would have to go to Bata, even though it was out of our way so that we could find a car destined for our district.

We dressed, and went to find the driver. He assured us there would be plenty of time for our breakfast of tomato rice. True to African time, however, the truck wasn't ready to depart until 3 that afternoon.

We, with about 10 others, were perched atop the cargo of beer bottles in the 5-ton truck. The jungle canopy was closed above us, the road following a long green tunnel for the first 20 kilometers. Atop the load of beer, we were so close to the branches that we had to dodge and dart, avoiding limbs, as the truck lurched and heaved through the mudholes. It was like riding a bucking bronc. As if the bucking truck were not enough to get our attention, as we rustled the leaves above us, they dropped a wide assortment of creepy-crawly things on us. I did my best to keep up with the swatting and dodging.

Finally out of the tunnel, where we could relax a little bit, the truck began to limp. The rim of a wheel was cracked. My husband goggled at it like a museum piece.

"I've never seen anything like it...all that steel...cracked right through...get the camera."

It was starting to get dark.

Miraculously, a land rover came along and stopped. The policeman and customs official from Yengue, who had both shared the bucking bronco ride with Doug and me jumped in with us. The driver was going on in to Bata. We began to breath easier.

It was late in the night when we arrived at our transit quarters in Bata and discovered our camera was gone. We remembered putting it back in it's case in sight of our two travelling companions-the policeman and customs official from Yengue- after taking a photo of the broken wheel. We must have left it unguarded at some point after that. Oh! A painful loss! C'est la vie! Who were we going to report it to? The police?

The last stretch of the journey, the 85 miles from Bata to the district where we lived had become familiar as a monthly shopping routine. In a private car with no breakdowns, we had made the trip in as little as 3.5 hours. A trip that fast, however, would take a full day of recovery due to the bone-jarring jolts and pitches of the deeply rutted road. The longest trip I had made on this stretch took 12 hours, due to 5 flat tires. Fixing each flat was not a simple matter of replacing it with a spare; there were no spares. Each flat required breaking the tire from the rim, extracting the inner tube, and mending it. On the fourth flat, we used the last of the inner-tube glue. On the fifth, a knowing passenger tracked into the forest, searching for a tree to tap some adhesive, and returned in just 20 minutes with a suitable sticky substitute.

For the last day of our journey, we went to the Bata market with our bags, and perched ourselves at a certain spot where the bush taxis to our district usually parked. It wasn't long before a faded orange Toyota sedan with crumpled front fenders and hood, smashed-in headlights, and cracked windshield showed up. Time for an inspection. We'd seen a demo of it's breaking power as it pulled up. It had managed to stop. Tires? There was some visible tread--good enough. No lights, but was still morning, we had all day to get home...we'd take a chance. Two hours later, the car was loaded. With a jaunty push-start from the 5 front seat passengers, we were off. By late afternoon, we were home.