Automobile Transportation

Lest anyone back home complain about potholes, I will tell you now that the 'major' roads in Senegal make the ones back in RI look as if they're paved with gold. Luckily we were rolling in the Landcruiser, or else the road - which resembled the dark side of the moon - would have put a stop to our day-long journey.

As luck would have it, the car had problems anyway. Avoiding a fallen tree brought us off-road and eventually stuck axle-deep in mud (or, if you will, a plague-ridden swamp). Luckily a local village lent its entire male population to push us out (and, given the late hour, a place for me to stay the night). Of course, the only reason we got stuck in the first place was that it was too dark to see the area: had one of the passengers, who had had some refreshments the night before, woken up on time, we would have arrived two hours earlier at the swampy impasse, and perhaps would have avoided the four-hour stay in the morass.

Oh yeah - the best joke ever told in a Landcruiser is as follows: 'If it keeps raining like this, they're going to have to call this a SEAcruiser.' The joke becomes exponentially funny if told repeatedly to each passenger in the car.