When a fruit tree refuses to bear fruit it is common practice to speak with it sternly and then give it a few cuts with a machete, the next year it will surely bear fruit. We've been spending time under lush canopies, filling our lungs with small town air and letting the sun bake us as pink as the dusty streets. Spent the pay few days in Kpalime, a little town in Togo north. Yesterday we started our hike up Mt Agou and wound, or more like scrambled, our way up steep mountain paths to a tiny village whose houses were build of bricks made of the surrounding earth, red red red. The goats and kids, the human ones I mean, were curious about us. They'd just been let out of school and were descending the rocky steps just as we were coming up.
We had lunch just above the village; sardines and eggs and bread and the BBC world service on macros radio. Souleyman showed us the avocado tree and it famous Dior and we had a tiny one of those to eat too. We reaches the weak of the mountain and we could have seen all the wu to forever of it jd not been for the mist and fog that made the sun a hazy disk suspended in the sky. After reaching the summit we made our way down, first on moto and then in a taxi. Ive taken a rel liking to riding motorcycles, o must admit. In the afternoon, which is really more like the evening in African time (that's the time zone here: every hour is like two hours with the world moving in a sort of accelerated slow motion...), we took another taxi to a local nature reserve. The road was quite bad and our taxi driver was quite brave. I sat in the back part of our shaky shakey hatchback breathing in diesel. We ran out of gas twice, which was no big deal as the driver had some jugs of fuel stashes in the back. We've been mastering the quiet art of squeezing 7 into a cab. Today Souleyman and I were in the back and it was so dusty by the end of the ride that was able to use his finger to draw a perfect circle in the dirt that had settled on his shin. We reached our destination and after a short hike through banana trees and hanging vines we reached a most beautiful waterfall that flowers Delma rocket crevice and dropped into a pool flames by sheer walls of mossy rock. We swam on the pool and let the water fall on our tired selves like a shiatsu massage. I'll post some pictures for you when we get back.
We went dancing in the evening at Alokpa ( it was alkopa one, not Alokpa two: there are two in kpalime). Souleyman'a friends, the ones from his dance troupe, were there and we stomped md shook and had too much fun until exactly midnight when the power went off ( as it had every night for the past three nights). We said our goodbyes and made our way through the dark, thick night on motos, and delivered ourselves into the sweet arms of sleep, with dramlqnd just beyond the horizon.
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