Very pleasant morning today in Toubacouta. I slept great. The bed is very firm, a homemade straw mattress. In my opinion these are superior to the foam blocks available in stores here, which are marketed, as are all mass produced (read: Chinese) consumer goods, as being an improvement over the things your grandparents, who had no money, used. So many examples of this in West Africa, and around the world, really. Various forms of plastic taking the place of more locally made items. I don’t mean to completely disavow global supply chains and modern consumer society here, I use Amazon plenty, but the bed situation here is pretty stark. The foam rectangles suck. When they are consistently compressed, (from, say, sleeping on them), permanent depressions form in the foam. After just a few months you have divot, which becomes a self-reinforcing crater in the middle of your bed, and it becomes uncomfortable and infeasible to lay anywhere else. I thoroughly enjoy the village straw mattress, which is susceptible to no such degradation.

When I wake up, I make some coffee in my room. I was on the fence about bringing my little jet boil stove and gas, because there are cafés all over the place in Guinea, with delicious local espressos. But out here, amongst these small mountain villages, there are no cafés, and people here tend to not drink coffee at all. So, I have a few packets of Nescafé in the morning. As I make and drink my coffee, I set up my iPad on the seat of a chair, sit on the side of the bed, and manage to write, undisturbed, for about an hour and a half. Quite pleasant.

My host, Mamadou Jaxité (MJ) comes by with a piece of bread and some sugary coffee, which I would typically decline, but this morning I drink. MJ has truly been one of my favorite hosts on this trip. He’s been patient, accommodating, and generous. He even offered to wash my bike clothes yesterday evening. I accepted on the condition that he would let me pay him. On our walk to the gardens yesterday he was very helpful answering my questions about farming, and Jaxanké vocabulary, and I learned a few new words. And this morning, despite the fact that he has no formal education, and my iPad represents about as much money as he might make in 4 years, he nods and chuckles at the sight of me tapping away on the little fold out keyboard on his chair in his son’s room and leaves me to my bizarre toubab ways. The truth is that personal space like this is rare in Guinean or Senegalese culture, especially in a little village, and I am very glad to have a morning like this. At about 9 o’clock I put away my iPad and start getting ready to leave.

I step outside to greet some people, and am offered some mangos, which I greedily devour. I notice that a nearby house has a largish solar panel on the roof and inquire if there is a charging station. There is, so I bring over my external battery and phone and leave them there while I hang out and pack up.

It is a bit of a drag that I have to constantly be seeking out ways to keep my devices charged, but it’s kind of important. I leave them there for an hour, and they do get some juice. I really have no idea what the next village on my route will have in store in terms of a charging setup, so I have to take it when I can get it.

I take my time packing up. There is really no other way. I have to be very thoughtful and deliberate about not forgetting anything. Virtually everything I have with me is important. Leaving behind a single item, like a multi tool, pump, or charging cable, could make my life really difficult. Besides that, my bike has to be packed in a very specific way. I’ve rushed the process in the past, couldn’t fit everything, and had to restart. So, it’s a bit of a morning meditation, making sure everything is snug, well secured, and ready for the daily abuse of Guinean roads. Then I get my phone back, take some pictures of and with my hosts, and it is time to roll.

The ride today starts out, to my surprise, with some of the smoothest and most fun trails I’ve encountered in Guinea. I don’t know what explains this, but there are a few stretches at the beginning of the day, that I would, in my more effusive moments, almost describe as flowy, like a mtn bike trail one might build somewhere in the coniferous forests on the west coast of North America.

This, of course, did not last very long. And reality reasserted itself in the form of abruptly steep sections of trail strewn with loose stones, jagged rocks jutting at all angles from the middle of the trail, and plenty of dust. And it was all totally gorgeous.

For my route today I could have backtracked through Doungee, where I left yesterday morning, to get to Kerouané, but it is my ambition on this trip to never ride the same trail twice, or at least to do so as little as possible. So, using the satellite imagery available on Google Maps I am able to piece together a different rout that takes me along a ridge running roughly north south, to the west of the road that I took north yesterday from Doungee to Toubacouta. It is not a particularly long ride, and I take my time to admire the beauty. The ridge line spits me out onto a huge, open, rocky plain, with a panoramic view of the river valley I biked north through yesterday and the day before. I can see Doungee, and other Pulaar villages I’ve biked through. Lands I have known. At the southern end of this plain the trail swings east, and I descend, seemingly forever, down towards a creek. On this slope my brakes start to squeal in a slightly metallic way. Finally, after unknown hundreds of miles and thousands of ft of descent, I am finally going to have to swap out my brake pads. I’d put it off as long as possible and got many more miles out of these pads than I’d ever expected to.

I arrive in Kerouané from the west. After the long, steep descent, I cross a concrete bridge over a mostly dry creek. Then the road immediately climbs up a steep bank onto a sloping, rocky plain scattered with huts, mango trees, and wandering livestock. This is Kerouané. It’s a lot like Doungee, at first blush, in that it’s spread out on land that is not flat, and there are piles of rocks amongst the fields; farmers' attempts to clear the land for cultivation. Kerouané has, like other Jaxanké villages I’ve seen in Guinea, a single fence encircling the whole community which I enter a little ways up the hill.

I immediately find a Minté, the first person I see, a middle-aged man outside one of the huts towards the base of the hill. We chat for a bit, and he suggests I head up to the mosque to find some Kébaas to greet. I take his advice, but instead of finding Kébaas (old men), I find three middle-aged women sitting under a shade structure next to the road that runs up the hill through town. Two of them are Mintés, and they are all cheerful and we greet each other with enthusiasm. Like seemingly all Mintés, they are related to my toxoma, though in a couple cases it is pretty tangential. My head spins as they describe the chain of relations. “My mom’s dad and Ousmane’s dad’s mom were (half) siblings.”

I sit for a bit with these charming ladies, describe to them my history with Dar Salaam/Jaxankés, and drink some water in the shade. It never ceases to amaze me how much respect people have for my toxoma. What he means to the people in these small villages. He is the Jaxanké version of the small-town success story. Born in a poor, isolated village in Guinea, succeeds in every aspect of Jaxanké culture and society, goes on to meet the president of Senegal. He’s a kind of celebrity in a place where most people have almost no connection to news, social media, or the typical mechanisms by which wide scale celebrity is formed. He is a true folk celebrity, in the purest sense of the term. No one gets information about him in any way other than person to person conversation and transmission, and yet everyone is well aware of his success. When I show people a picture of him on the evening he returned from Mecca, in his finest outfit, they cannot help but emit a squeal of reverence, “allah akbar." A couple of people have looked at the picture in silence, before finally shedding tears. Before this trip I knew he was something of a big deal, but I didn’t understand how universally admired he is. I am very lucky to have Ousmane as a toxoma, it gives me a lot of credibility and social goodwill.

The women under the shade structure point me in the direction of the village chief’s compound, and accompanied by a couple kids, I head in that direction. We on our way, greeting people when walk, suddenly I see a woman I know from Dar Salaam! She’s my toxoma’s 3rd wife’s first (half) cousin. This is tangential, but she actually lives in Dar Salaam, and I know her reasonably well. Her name is Tounko Minté, and she’s, I would guess, in her late 20s. She moved to Dar Salaam about 10 years ago to marry a 2nd (half) cousin Minté. What a wonderful surprise to find her here. We greet joyfully and I learn that she grew up in Kerouané, and is spending about 2 months here during the dry season with 3 of her 4 children. Her mom and grandma still live here.

At this point Tounko kind of takes me under her wing, assuming the role of tour guide. We walk together down to the village chief’s compound. He is also a Minté, and a very direct, kind of stern person. He’s not excessively warm, kind of down to business, but we greet and I give him some kola nuts he does pronounce a “bismillah,” Arabic for “welcome,” to indicate I am a favored guest. I really like the chief’s compound. Between two zinc roofed huts he has a ficus tree with a leafy vine growing over a bamboo trellis shade structure. His hut is full of goat hides, old rifles, and dusty, yellowed government documents.

After greeting the chief, Tounko brings me up to her mom’s compound, where they have just a bit of rice for me. I’ve again missed lunch. I arrived a bit after two. But with this rice I’ll be fine until dinner, I think. Then we go to her cousin’s compound where she says I can wash. Her cousin, a wiry bald man of about 50 or 55 is inside sitting on his bed and introduces himself as Mamadou Lamine Minté. He has one of the nicer hut set ups in the village, with a large solar panel charging station, and a well fenced in backyard where I take my bucket bath. I also learn that he is the “karamoxo” or religious teacher for the village talibé (Koranic students). Mamadou Lamine has a lot going on. Yet he is rather cold with his greetings and sits in the doorway smoking a cigarette with a grimace on his face. I’ve never met a Jakhanké Karamoxo who smoked before. I don’t know what to make of this and take my bucket bath.

When I finish, feeling cool and refreshed, I sit in front of the hut and eat a few oranges in the shade. During this after-lunch hour, the talibé gather to read passages of the Koran from wooden tablets, and Mamadou Lamine is there, disciplining them and helping them with Arabic pronunciation. For a while he is sitting, then at one point he gets up to walk into the hut to grab something. This is when I notice that he has a serious limp. With every step his right leg swing and bows under his weight in a way that is so awkward I find myself gritting my teeth. I’ve seen people with cerebral palsy, and this looks different. I don’t ask, but it appears to me like he broke his leg at some point, probably quite gruesomely, and in the absence of surgical care, this is how it healed.

The man, I realize, is probably in significant pain almost every hour of the day. And there is probably not much he can do about it, besides smoke cigarettes and chew kola nuts. The fact is that many, many people around here live with physical conditions that are nearly debilitating but are for them simply a part of daily life. I need to keep this in mind when treated with lassitude or seeming indifference, I have no idea what people are dealing with.

I continue to relax with Tounko for a couple hours in the afternoon, and eventually we make our way to her family's compound. Tounko’s aunt sits in the antechamber of the family house and spins cotton thread from recently harvested cotton balls. I take a long video of her working and learn all the related Jaxanké terms. Dar Salaam does not grow any cotton, but for many villages, such as Kerouané it is an important cash crop.

In the evening, Tounko and I walk to the women’s garden. I have become something of a connoisseur of women’s gardens. Seeing the energy of Jaxanké women in motion never gets old for me. There is also, it must be said, not always much else going on in a little village during the dry season. Men will sit around for hours drinking tea and shooting the shit. I like to see where the action is. And there is plenty of action in the Kerouané women’s garden. In fact-- and again, I have seen a lot of women’s gardens at this point--it may be the most impressive one yet. They have a couple of advantages here. An NGO of some kind came in and installed a solid chain link fence around 4 hectares of almost perfectly flat land right next to the river. It is, I realize, embarrassingly late, the same waterway that flows south through Toubacouta, next to Doungee , and by this garden. Except at this point in its course I am comfortable calling it a river. There is plenty of water. It’s not quite flowing, but there are large pools. I still hear from every woman I talk to that it is lower than they’ve ever seen, but the fact is that water is not an issue here.

The only issue, for what I can tell, is monkeys. Tounko looks at a couple of her plots wistfully, and mutters “sulolu,” which means 'monkeys.' And indeed, it looks as though a couple of monkeys had a wrestling match on her onions and tomatoes. Nothing is eaten, but things are roughed up and matted.

We wander around and say hi to people. The soil is dark, and weeds pressure seems minimal. There are abundant bananas growing. This is the abundance I’d imagined in the Fouta Jallon.

It’s a bit of a hike between the village and the garden and on the way back up Tounko and I talk about trees. I am blown away by her knowledge of the trees in the forest here. Not only does she know the name of every individual species, down to rather nondescript shrubs, but she also knows the edible and medicinal uses of all of them, including an interesting stories about a particular species and associated genies*. About half the species here also occur in Kédougou, and the other half are new to me.

Back in the village it is a quiet night. I realize I haven’t been shown anywhere to sleep yet. My bike is just in the back room of the village chief’s hut. I gently inquire about where I am going to sleep, and Tounko tells me to go talk to the chief. I go to his place, and he says oh yea, follow this kid, and barks some instructions at a kid, who I then follow down the hill towards a small, round hut, kind of standing alone. The kid opens the door and we step inside. There is a bed inside. Looks freshly made up. “Nobody sleeps here?” I ask. “No,” he says, “it’s a guest hut.” Amazing. This is a village of about 400 people and they have a guest hut. It’s a nice space, and I am neighbors with some Mintés. Dinner is great, then I read and get some sleep.

• Walking back up to the village, Tounko pointed out this weird plant to me. It’s something I saw a lot of closer to the coast, but it’s not very common here. She explained that one must never cut this plant down, for if you do, the children of your village will fall ill, because you’ve pissed off the associated genie. The only way to appease this genie is for a woman to then take a prized item of clothing, and tear it into shreds, strip by strip, at the base of one of these trees (doesn’t have to be the exact same one that was cut, the genie will get the message). Belief in genies is very common here. The English term “genie” is derived from the Arabic “djinn,” which is the term they use in Jaxanké. Whether this belief is Islamic or pre-Islamic, I haven’t been able to fully parse, but I believe it’s at least partially a relic pre-Islamic beliefs.