Life is beginning to settling into a routine so there are fewer new experiences to write about. However, once and a while I get out and do something interesting. Not too long ago, I took off an afternoon and went with Neil (one of the other missionaries) on his motorcycle down in the big river.
The road leading to it goes through the abandoned airport and down a windy, rocky road into a deep valley. Sometimes we were just on a narrow footpath getting whacked on the face by the grass. When we go to the river, I was amazed at how big it is. The first place we went it was nearly 300m across! It runs through a deep valley lushly covered on all sides by trees and grass. Everything is green. I wanted to go swimming but changed my mind when Neil told me that the bubbles all over the water were from the protein in human feces that had washed into the river from the extremely heavy rain the night before (it rained so hard that the sound from the tin roof actually hurt my ears). I decided that a brief swim wasn't worth coming down with dysentery or who knows what else! We were up on a rock bar that was at a bend in the river and there were several islands in the middle of the river that were completely covered with vegetation. Neil had brought along a collapsible fishing pole and caught the biggest fish he had ever caught in the river - a whopping eight inches!
Going up the dirt track a little farther, we stopped in a small palm tree forest. There were weaver birds building literally hundreds of nests in the trees and the result was a constant cacophony of noise. There was a little patch of rice that was almost ripe and I ate some of the grains which were sweet and slightly gritty. We also saw a little monitor lizard, perhaps two and half feet long, along side the road. The little narrow track we were following was completely lined with tall grass and trees. The grass here grows up to twelve feet tall, seldom less than six, and some has stems over an inch in diameter! Eventually the road went through a small village and dead ended at the ferry-crossing. The ferry is small dugout canoe, paddled by a really nice guy with a badly deformed leg, with a fee of 50 franc (one penny) per person, one-way. As with any form of public transportation here, taxi, bus or canoe, there is no schedule - you leave when all available seats are taken.
Returning to Fria, we followed a different route that took us up out of the valley on a big road, built and maintained by the aluminum company that leads to the pumping station on the river which supplies all of Fria. It merges with a huge road where the large dump trucks carry the aluminum ore to the factory. There were some places where the entire level of the land had been taken down thirty feet! There was one place where they had just been mining, going down about ten feet, which looked like they had taken a big asphalt grater and scraped off about a foot and a half with each pass.
Leaving the mine road, we took off on a small footpath that went down and across a big dam built by the factory that resulted in a big, silty, polluted red lake from the ore refining process. The little footbridge across the spillway was probably fifty feet above the cement spillway below and didn't have very sturdy side rails but we got across without any problems on the motorcycle. Finally, we came onto the rocky road that goes past the church property and into Fria. It was really nice to get out and explore the area around Fria and get a bigger perspective of the area.
Eddie
P.S. I wrote this about three weeks ago but haven't had time to send it out.
