More very difficult roads in the morning. I stop in the town of Koubia in the afternoon to charge my phone and eat some food. Since I didn’t have my phone I couldn’t take pictures, but there was a bustling market, where I bought attieke and extra tomatoes and bananas to adorn it, and two large mangos, all of which I devoured at a cafe.

I’m making progress, but it’s definitely a bit slower than I was anticipating so far.

After Koubia, the road got fairly good. This is extremely bizarre because this road is barely demarcated on any maps, yet it is wider and better graded than many official Guinean highways I’ve been on until this point.

It also gets wildly beautiful, with dense gallery forest on both sides of the road. I descend almost 1000ft in just a few miles, down to a tributary of The Gambia River, and find an awesome campsite.

For a long way during this huge descent I keep passing women and kids walking downhill from Koubia. They’d come for the market day in town. Which means they’d walked up this enormous hill first thing in the morning. Even more than 600 ft downhill I keep coming across these walkers. It is amazing how far people walk to do things here. Walking is the exclusive means of travel for many people in this part of the world.