Adventure!

Last weekend my roommate Hilary, a friend Sondre and I went on an adventure that was unlike anything I've ever experienced before.

We set off at 7am on Saturday morning. Destination: N'digbe- a remote village in the mountains north of Lome. Mission: Paragliding off the mountains. It was a rainy/misty morning when we left the ship, which made for a perfect traveling temperature. The heat and humidity is often a lot to handle here.

We set off in a taxi to the "bus station" where we proceeded to barter with the "bus station attendant" for a fair price of 3000 CFA or $6.00/person for the 4 hour ride to N'digbe. You can pretty much barter on prices for anything here.

THEN, we got inside the "bus" which was basically a narrow 8-person van with 14 people smushed inside. This was bound to be the least comfortable road trip of my life.. yes, I think it was. I was practically sitting on the lap of a random Togolese man the entire way... oh man. But I am proud to say- I survived this part of the journey.

When we were nearing N'digbe, after a long, sweaty, smelly ride with many stops to buy plantains and water off the side of the road, we met a guy named Raw, who spoke a very small amount of English. He ended up inviting us to stay overnight at his place in a different village if we couldn't figure out a place to stay, but we turned down the offer, as we were on a mission to paraglide... An African inviting you over within the first minutes of conversation is not an odd thing though. In the states, if a random guy in a bus invited me to stay at his house overnight, I would be weirded out, but here it's really normal. The Togolese are extremely hospitable and this sort of thing has happened to me on several occasions here.

Anyways, Raw decided to take his day off and help us find the place that we were supposed to stay at in N'digbe anyways. We were a little skeptical of his motives, but he ended being a nice guy and got us safely to the Inn.

Raw

So.. we found N'digbe! It took forever though. We were definitely on African time.

N'digbe basically has two small streets that cross. In the middle of it is a well, there are goats and chickens running around everywhere, no electricity, no plumbing, etc.

Random Texaco in the middle of the smallest most remote village.. this seemed out of context

The town's church

We stayed at this small Inn owned by a woman named Paulene. Hilary and I shared a room.

We road zimmijons (motor bikes) around the area...

Saturday night, we had a giant African feast by candlelight in town. We had met up with some other friends from Mercy Ships and with the people that were running the paragliding- this French couple who come to N'digbe every year for 4 months at a time to teach and take people paragliding. The meal was fantastic and I ate a really common Africa dish called "fufu" (pronounced foo foo) which is a mashed-up type of root and yam, made in to a mushy ball and you dip it in some sort of broth/meat sauce. Sounds gross, and a lot of westernized people hate it, but I kind of liked it.. I mean, it is called "fufu".

A plate of fufu accompanied with peanut soup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fufu

Annnd we woke up on Sunday morning, waited around for a couple hours to be picked up from the inn by the french couple (they were running on African time). They finally came and took us to go paragliding!!

This is Sondre getting ready to take off..

I'm pretty sure this is me

In the air!

I think this is me too

Annnd, there was this clan of ridiculously cute children in the village who followed Hilary and I around chanting "Yovo! Yovo! Yovo!", which is the West African way of saying white person. And then they came and pinched our hands and sat on our laps.

Love,

Caitlin