Leg 6: Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, Senegal.

Claude Marthaler left his native Switzerland in March 1994 with a plan to cycle around the world. His journey has taken him through East Europe, the Baltic States, India and Nepal (he loves mountains!), China, Japan and from the northern-most point of North America through the length of South America. He is now travelling north through Africa on his way home.

Claude rides under no fixed itinerary or schedule. His mission was simply to travel the world, and to meet people along the way - something made easy by cycling. In a series of letters to Travel Africa readers, Claude is sharing his thoughts on the African continent and its people as he progresses through his unusual African safari. This is his sixth such letter, covering his journey between September and November, 2000.

GUINEA CONAKRY

Conakry

My departure from Conakry had been a liberating one: the capital was so ruined that I wondered if it had been built so. Only petrol pumps, huge advertisements, sometimes mosques, kept a bright aspect, something new and durable, an appeal to dignity. They emerged above a rusted, decomposed and non-descriptive world of constructions. Open workshops with dead cars, dying yellow taxis, linen suspended or drying on the ground in a capricious sun. The squalid structures were not keeping up with the exploding population.

I was still the lucky Toubab (in Giolla "the man who doesn't stop"). I possessed a passport and was able to cross the sea at any time. But in Guinea, I was interrupted frequently by police checkpoints - 43 exactly till the Guinéa-Bissau border! Sierra Leonian rebels had recently made several incursions into Guinea. There were policemen, soldiers, bérets rouges (members of the presidential guard) and, less often, teenagers wearing torn T-shirts (knowing how to use their AK47, but ignorant about how to receive a foreigner).

Africans' creativity is perhaps unbeatable in the fields of uniform fashion and checkpoints, made out of rope wrapped with plastic bags or rags, and bent between stools. The repetitive, miserable scene brings them far more income than their salaries. There was an unmistakable smell of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Fouta Jaloun

Quitting Conakry, on a winding road through plantations of fruit and palm trees, and fields of maize and manioca and fono (wild manioca), I saw the Fouta Jaloun range itself.

In the saddle, I rode above the hurled grass or bamboo. Nature, here so generous, contrasted with the human failure. Village markets, dustbins and main streets were the same: Peuls women sold fresh milk and curd next to butchers cutting whole cows into joints. Above, an army of vultures turned tirelessly waiting to prove that nothing was bad enough to throw away, demonstrating easily their superiority in front of dogs turned shy by people's constant jet of stones. Africa makes you lose your senses of proportion and balance.

Mountains looked rather like natural predators: my bike was heavy. I felt weak. Several times I had to walk, out of breath, bent over my handlebar. But the journey - if not Africa itself - had taught me that if nothing is freely granted, neither was any situation totally desperate. Happily, I eventually reached the Crossroad café in Mamou, where Joseph, a Lebanese still traumatised by his country's civil war, received me like a brother.

I had taken the habit of looking for backyards: family-owned restaurants, invisible from the dusty streets, which accommodated merchants in djellabas decorated with fine embroideries. One could sit there on stools made from baobab and eat cheaply. From a common plate, many right hands devoured an Everest of the invariable spicy riz-sauce.

Tropics

The Fouta Jaloun was a kind of geological and climatic mistake. The trail dropped, unending. It became unprecise, muddy, slippery, and seemed to lose itself in a savage forest. Apart from bicycles, four-wheel-drive cars would have been the only appropriate vehicles. Ironically, they were only to be seen on Conakry's paved avenues, cleaned to a shine as an arrogant status symbol.

A ferry moved by two men pushing on cranks along a cable took me across a river to Bantala village. Further on, excessively proud policemen asked first for my passport, then my vaccination certificate and then my bicycle licence - obviously wanting something else: money. I showed them a coloured "Ordre de Mission" signed by the French embassy, made specially by a friend to save me in such a precarious situation. It worked perfectly. Bush-taxis and truck-drivers could do nothing against these unscrupulous professional robbers.

Nothing is granted in Africa but he who controls the road, controls the world.

GUINEA BISSAU

The Border

Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, Senegal: the distance between countries reduced more and more in this region where western colonisers came first to Africa.

There was a sudden overpopulation of unimportant officials in uniforms. At the border, without a visa, I double-checked suspiciously the armed customs' officials lying beside their guns like drunks under a tree. There was a factor of domination putting a huge distance between us - predator and prey.

By chance, a well-educated and soft-spoken policeman, who caught in a second what was going on, ordered me to follow him into the office. His thin body spoke openly for his honesty. We then took a six-place Fiat bush-taxi with 14 other passengers to Gabu - a 62km drive. It got punctured twice. We reached the police station on foot, like the majority of Africans.

The police-post resembled a grocery store where people entered and left randomly. I took advantage of its slackness to switch my mind (a profitable technique acquired when travelling, to avoid impatience) to the more excitable street scene: a continuous flow of indolence and grace, reminding me of Mozambique, another Portuguese ex-colony. Magnificent women were sauntering, showing more skin than clothing. The men seemed unanimously seduced by their open provocation.

I became so absorbed that when the Chief of police approached me, one hour later, I almost started. But the fat Commissaire proved to be human, stamping my passport with the same frankness as he shook hands. The visa stamp itself didn't even take up a full page of my passport - the only one among 19 African visas. It symbolised the size of a 36,000km2 country of 1.2 million people.

Bissau, the capital

The entry to Bissau, the capital, is disturbing: a five kilometre, four-lane road built by the Chinese, leading to the city centre. I passed a huge yellow advertisement for Western Union, allegedly the easiest way to transfer money. Just behind, a rusted tank, a relic of the 1998-99 civil war, pointed his gun toward the newcomer.

A young Lebanese, owner of the pizzeria "Papa Loca", took me in. As so often, I quietly observed the revolution of the world from a simple terrace. A black Samsung escorted by two four-wheel-drives passed: the President, hidden behind black smoked windows. In a few days, I "saw" him often, like the familiar master of a Lilliputian State. The centre of Bissau, with its lonely roundabout, its faded obelisk surmounted by a star, looked visibly post-war. The Presidential palace had collapsed - the tiles of the broken roof and windows had vanished. The protuberant balcony destined for triumphant official speeches was still there, useless.

Power cuts had the certainty of tides. Phone calls were cheaper to Paris than to a distance of 200km, but Internet, whichconcerned almost nobody here, was working.

Sickness

Leaving Bissau, I felt strangely weak. Had I absorbed the sadness of this world?

I had to bargain hard to cross the river. Soon after, I felt so weak that I could pedal no more and lay down instinctively under a tree, just sweating, and eventually fell into a deep sleep. A family took me under their palm-frond roof. Any strength had left my body without my knowledge. I felt nailed onto the ground; malaria had caught me a third time.

I slept like an animal in hibernation, waking up only at meal times, until my legs finally carried me again.

SENEGAL

Casamance

Sandwiched between The Gambia to the north and Guinea Bissau to the south lies Casamance, a portion of territory sold by the Portuguese to the French who attached it awkwardly to Senegal, like an ambiguous residue of history. The size of the territory was peanuts but, perhaps because of its very fertile land (for agriculture and drug cultivation), there was still an "army of liberation of Casamance" assaulting buses on the road to Zinguichor.

As a result, Senegalese police summarily checked my panniers (three times in a 15km stretch).

THE GAMBIA

The road to Banjul is intrinsically maritime: trucks loaded with fish transmitted a powerful odour and raced on a roadway made from white seashells. Approaching the capital by night, the current absorbed me irredeemably. Handfuls of pupils in green and purple school uniforms chatted in English. Within a few days, I passed from Portuguese, to French, then English speakers.

After one single night in The Gambia, I got the impression that the world - if defined by political frontiers - was fragmented and perhaps not that big. But leaving Banjul's peninsula on a ferry at sunrise, the ocean gave me a clear feeling of unity, continuity and immensity.

Dakar

Dakar came in sight at the end of its peninsula. Europe seemed to come down to Senegal, the very first French colony in Africa. The island of Goré had been strategic in the "triangular business", exporting slaves to America. Thus today, among Africans abroad, you will always find at least one Senegalese.

By coincidence, I met Daisuke Nakanishi, a Japanese man who had been riding around the world for two and a half years. He had slept at my home in Geneva in 1991. We were both kindly hosted by Kondo, a technician at the Japanese embassy. The Japanese food was excellent. I needed such a friendly atmosphere, such decorum, as I was again invaded by strong malaria. I had to withdraw from the world for two weeks.

The view from the tenth floor of his building dominating the Place de l'Indépendance (the centre of Dakar) gave a sense of openness, oceanic, dreamlike. His flat seemed like an island in the middle of Africa.

Upstairs, it was so easy to forget about "downstairs", about the street's life where nothing comes easily: children begging for food with cans suspended around an elbow; people peddling clothes, glasses, watches, newspapers; uniformed security guards; pick-pockets, hawkers, improvised guides. Each had his chosen territory on the large pavement.

I left Dakar with Daisuke. In Thies, he rode to Mali as I headed north. We took a last snap (a compulsory Japanese ritual) without knowing if or when our roads would cross again.

Horse-drawn barouches (carriages) carried farmers' families to the weekly market. With hot breezes and unexpectedly good rains, the mango trees had flowered a second time. White trails of salt and a strong wind suggested the presence of an invisible and unstable world: the Atlantic Ocean.

A huge metal bridge, trembling at each passage of a truck, linked the peninsula of Saint-Louis with the mainland. The homogenous grid design of a typically laid-back French town - with warmly-coloured houses, balconies, trees and flowers - testified to the durability of colonial style. Today, this was still an asset. Numerous French tourists visited.

The River Senegal was much more than a simple river. It incarnated a multiple frontier: climatic, racial, cultural, religious and political. This border was certainly the most significant of my African crossing. It represented the southernmost wall against desertification, an ultimate lifeline between Tropical Africa and the Sahara, the biggest desert in the world. As nomads and warriors, Arabs had moved West from Mesopotamia centuries ago, conquering the southern Mediterranean coast, the whole Sahara and often dominating the Berbers and the Blacks, using and selling them as slaves. They opened new trading routes, brought the Koran and the camel.

MAURITANA

The border

The bazaar of Rosso, born around the border post, had only its main street asphalted. The few sandy perpendicular lanes led to the unending desert. Sheep climbed on corrugated roofs weighed down with bricks to stop the wind blowing them away. Mauritanians sitting against the walls of square, stone houses or behind their grocery counters expressed something hard, closed, silent: the austerity of Islam.After one and a half years, I left the outspoken, easy-going "Black Africa", its exuberant vegetation and rhythms. Maures had a rebel proudness, an assurance, a disciplined outlook, echoed by the homogeneity of the Sahara and the size of their country (four times that of Senegal).

- Claude Marthaler

Published in Travel Africa Edition Fifteen: Spring 2001 Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)