rio wélé

Yesterday Simon, Javi and I went to find the river. We first tried a place where they had been before, sort of in the construction site for a tunnel for the new hydro-electric plant. We got the cooler and set out walking in sandals over the charred remains of corrugated metal and garbage and then down through the swampy banks of the river which was now so high that we couldn’t walk up to the imagined spot. We also noticed a pipe dumping waste from the construction site and decided to go upriver.

Up the road a bit we noticed a Chinese con-pound and were turning around when the car got stuck in the mud. See photo. After some surveying and a lot of cursing, we started digging. Javi is a pretty typical Spanish guy in a lot of ways and started bossing me around right away. Now I don’t have to spell out how much I don’t like this, right? It’s that getting-rubbed-the-wrong-way-by-the-parts-of-yourself-you-recognize-in-others thing. When there are only 3 people involved, 2 chefs is 2 many. So I acquiesced. At least until my Spanish is better.

Then a pick-up filled with Guineanos passed and we waved them over. More surveying, head shaking and explaining in Fang and Spanish what was happening. Babies cried in the car and a couple of women got out to laugh at us. More digging and sweating. Enter a gang of trucks from the con-pound. There was some shouting in Chinese, Fang and Spanish while I watched with my pants pulled up, orange dirt caked on my knees and up to my elbows. They decided to get a cable and pull us out. A BIG truck arrived, the kind that carries lots of people in the back under a metal ribcage with a canopy over the top. Et voilá.

My special skill of knowing how to say thank you in about 27 languages came in handy here.

We parked on solid ground and skidded down a steep dirt slope into the jungle. After a 10-minute descent through thick and damp green, we arrived at rio Wélé. Orange-brown and wide, it rushed over what looked like a small hobbit landscape in the dry season. I checked for alligators and decided the flow was too swift for them. I stripped down and lay myself out on a semi-submerged rock on the bank and was delighted to have the murky water rush over me. The sun was shining. I could have stayed like that all day.

 

Eventually we had our picnic of fried rice with canned meat and jarred veggies, sardines, juice and paté on white bread (none of that for me). It started to rain and we waited it out for a few minutes and then decided to go back home.

 

Simon made french fries for dinner and we had a long talk with Rosa about the success of projects here and the people’s commonly held beliefs and customs. But that is for another post.