Caves and Flat Tires

The roads in Fria are terribly potholed and you spent most of the time idling around in second or, if your lucky, third gear, but once you get pass the big aluminum factory the two lane road is perfectly smooth all the way to Conakry and you can cruise along at a pretty decent pace (70-80km/hr). The drive to Tormelin is very pretty with the gently rolling hills around Fria covered with a mixture of trees and very tall grass that is just beginning to turn brown as the dry season starts. The caves were supposed to be about 6km from the mosque in Tormelin so we stopped there and asked for directions. They pointed us to a small but amazingly smooth two lane gravel road that led through an area that was still very lush (we even saw a small monkey running through a tree which is very rare since they are hunted heavily). After a ways we asked for directions again from a lady carrying a load of firewood on her head and she told us that they were back in the village we had just passed through. A guy on a bike offered to show us the way so we followed him back to the village. Leaving the motorcycle on the side of the road, he and another man from the village led us along a small path. Since we weren't next to a hill or anything I was kind of wondering if we were at the right place, but after taking another turn into the bushes we found the caves. They aren't typical caves but were rather a labyrinth of passageways and rock pillars supporting a layer of rock above. It had the feeling of ancient, overgrown stone ruins in the jungle. There was a small stream in one area and some small passageways that looked like they might lead somewhere but we stayed around the periphery. There were a lot of bats flying around and hanging from the ceiling that looked similar to the Pallid bats we have in the States. After wandering through three separate "caves" we headed back to the village. I was thankful for our guides as both Daniela and I had become completely disoriented wandering around and would have had a hard time figuring the way back to the village. After thanking them and giving them a few hundred franc apiece we headed back toward Tormelin.

We found a small road leading up a steep hill that we were going to follow to get a good view of the area but looking down at the back tire which had been feeling a little funny I saw that it was half flat! Abandoning any idea of further exploration, we took off for Tormelin as fast as the gravelly road would safely allow. Arriving there, we found that the tire was about the same as it had been so, hoping for the best, we headed toward Fria, hoping to get there before the tire went completely flat. We didn't make it. About ten kilometers from Tormelin near the top of a long grade I could tell there was no more pressure in the tire. We were still twenty kilometers from Fria and we started walking, idling the motorcycle. After about a kilometer we arrived at a village and told a group of people waiting for a taxi what was wrong. They took us across the road and someone appeared with a toolbox full of makeshift tools and pump a without a valve to attached it to the tire (they used a pebble and a piece of fabric to depress the valve on the tire) and tried to pump up the tire but it wouldn't hold air so they started taking it off. After getting the tube out and pumping it up they found a hole and put a piece to grass in it to mark it when the pressure went out. Then they brought out a tube of glue, stopped work and the bargaining began. At first told me that the glue cost nine thousand franc and that it was going to cost seven thousand to fix the hole. I countered that it costs less than a thousand francs to get a tire fixed in Fria and that, besides, they would use only a little bit of glue to fix the tire anyways. After a very heated discussion I got them down to fifteen hundred franc (about thirty cents) and decided that that was good enough especially considering how much it would cost to take the motorcycle back in a taxi. They went back to work and soon had the hole patched. Upon pumping it up again, however, they found another hole so I had to agree an additional fifteen hundred to get that one fixed too. After putting it back together and pumping the tire back up, we thanked them and promised to come back on Monday with the money (neither of us had any with us). We made it back to Fria very dirty but without any more problems (although the tire went flat again as soon as we got back). Everything considered, it was a very pleasant and not terribly atypical outing.
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