David was up for it, and a few were tentatively chosen; one of these was the recently reopened Parc National de Tai in Côte d'Ivoire. Heading west from the capital, we figured it'd be a quick trip to pop south from Duekoué the 90km (56mi) to Tai, see what we could, if anything, and then return up to Man to cross the border to Liberia. We had almost no information about it (LP's "bold and off-the-beaten-path" couldn't put together between them the required complete set of, ahem, nerves necessary to actually visit CI for their book on it), but it wasn't that far out of the way, we saw rave reviews on travel forums, and the plan involved a minimum of dreaded back-tracking.
Nighting at Duekoué Friday, we roused ourselves at the crack of dawn Saturday to catch the first transport to Tai at six. It was fortunate that we got there just at six, for by 6:20 the van was full and ready to go. It took another hour to strap down the market-day bags, have a couple fistfights among the herders, and find the driver, and then another half-hour immediately after at the police checkpoint, but considering Ivory Coast standards, that ain't bad.
Unfortunately, it was still Ivory Coast, and no trip longer than half an hour in Ivory Coast is complete without a rousing - literally - game of Musical Vans. Everyone run to get a seat! After hauling every single bag, chicken and passenger off two vans in the fly-speck town Zegne in order to entirely swap the contents of both, we were (fortunately) on our way again within a couple hours.
Unfortunate was the condition of the road - unpaved, and heavily pockmarked by the rainy season. Past experience taught me to be thrilled that we didn't get stuck in mud once, despite the light rain, and we arrived in Tai without the mud caked past my knees that I would have a day later. We were very happy to be there, and set off with a bounce in our step as we asked the way to the park administration.
It was unfortunate that the admin was staffed entirely by bureaucrats who saw no need to let a couple of tourists see the park. At all. It was reserved for scientists, they told us, and unless we had a fancy-sounding NGO to back us up, we could piss off.
I was broken-hearted. I just wanted to see the trees, to know whether it was true that in a rainforest you can't see the sky - or even the top layer. "Can't we even just... walk around the edges or something?" I begged. "Isn't there anything you can do?"
Of course there was, the oldest and best bureaucrat trick in the book - he told us to wait for his superviser, thus simultaneously passing the buck, wasting more time, and cruelly giving me false hope. The trifecta!, as my dad would say. So we waited, me politely perched on the lawn chair I had been offered, scouring my mind for some charm to win them over. David, long a bureaucrat-hater, had no optimism for the venture whatsoever, and to entertain himself during the wait he began to pester me. I crabbily told him to piss off and go bother the monkeys instead. (There was a troop of small but seriously wicked vervet monkeys raising heck at the other end of the muddy, tree-lined yard; after harassing two goats, scaring the ish out of a piglet, attacking a chicken, and otherwise scattering all available targets, they ran out of things to pouce on and were enjoying a wild game of tag.) Taking my suggestion to heart, David immediately went to go pester them, and for reasons I cannot understand began to throw small missiles at them from close range. This is how he was employed when the higher-up arrived behind him and began to watch. (The answer probably still would have been no.)
I was again broken-hearted, and began to think some pretty bitter thoughts about how maybe Côte d'Ivoire deserved to have a collapsed tourism industry, 'cos if that's how they treat tourists I can't say I'm frothing at the bit to recommend their country. This was a seriously unfortunate stroke, compounded by the fact that after waiting an hour and a half for Mr. Higher-No, we had missed the return transport.
In a weird way, though, this was also fortunate, for we had spent the past four days almost entirely sitting in buses, and what better an opportunity to take a walk? It was still only a bit after noon, and frankly, I still wanted that damn rainforest walk. The 95-km unpaved road to Duekoué was a single straight road, no branches, with a village roughly every 10km through dense forest, and we figured our chances for getting picked up as we walked by whoever was heading north were pretty good. Beats me why, but despite abundant evidence to the contrary, people still trust random white people in Africa.
Our chances were indeed good. So good, in fact, that we hadn't even gotten 100m before we met with the Mercedes-Benz of the region's congressman, as well as Tai's two mayors. They were going the wrong way but, mildly intrigued by the sight of two white people walking along a dirt road in the rainforest, stopped and invited us back to Tai for a drink. What the heck? we thought, and hopped on in.
The MP's house was probably the nicest I'd been in since the touring the palace where Haile Selassie lived (before getting killed by Mengistu and buried under the palace privy). I immediately became aware of the sweat/dust/mud/bits of strange leaf adhering to my skin and clothes. David looked worse. The politicians were very diplomatic, however, pretending not to notice, and served us drinks, peanuts, and sweet French cookies called kitty tongues (no remarks please) as we discussed Africa, America, cultures, politics, the economic crisis, the distance from PA to TX, Michael Jackson, and the never-ending guerre. Then we watched a bit of news, during which I learned that it was July 4th. "Shoot," I told David, "Happy Independence Day!"
The mayors and MP duly wished our country a happy 233rd as well.
After drinks and snacks we were pressed to stay for dinner, and over fish stew, rice, manioc, and sweet pineapple we discussed the interplay between a culture and its cuisine. Then it really was time to go, and as we shook hands goodbye I thought of how oddly fortunate it was that we had just happened to meet them as we were leaving.
It was less fortunately now 3pm, and as David and I began our trek again we wondered whether the lateness of the day might not have critically damaged our chances of hitching a ride. Our hosts pressed us to buy tickets for the van leaving from Tai, but it was completely empty and we knew it wouldn't be going anywhere fast. "We'll pick it up en route," I explained to the perplexed mayors, "We could use the exercise."
Also, I still hadn't gotten my damn rainforest walk.
So we cheerfully set off again, on a red dirt road that was remarkably empty. Every now and then we saw some villagers carrying a bundle of wood on their heads, but I was far more interested in the thick bramble lining both sides of the road. The way I saw it, rainforest is rainforest, and just because the rainforest 1km north of a makebelieve park boundary isn't legally protected from a bit of local scavenging doesn't, in my view, make it any less rainforesty. At the first opportunity, I found a little hole in the leafy wall, and wiggled my way through to this:
[picture battle was decisively won by computer via a series of electric shocks repeatedly applied first to me and successively to a series of helpful strangers in the internet cafe. and yes, we all kept trying it. pavlov's dog could have beaten us in a battle of wits. ]It wasn't quite what I had had in mind when I envisioned a Rainforest Walk, but it was still ecologically-classified rainforest, and damned if I wasn't walking in it.
We walked a while. We hitched for a few km with a truck going to fetch two nuns; then a few more km with a friendly motorcyclist who became the hero of his village upon rolling in with two blancs aboard. For the first 20km, though, these were the only vehicles we saw, and as the clock hit four and the shadows grew longer we began to have doubts about our rainforest plan. South Park's "Rainforest Schmainforest" began to run through my head, kind of like how Fiona Apple's "Criminal" starts going through my head every time I'm being questioned by police/military/security forces. I've caught myself humming it at more than a few barriers and control points (but happily, despite an atmosphere often charged with squinty-eyed suspicion, no one else has). I was beginning to notice an ominous potential in the deserted road infinitely bordered by those heavy green walls concealing the sources of strange clucking and chirping noises, but all in all I was still pleased as a pig in sh!t to be walking through a rainforest.
Fortunately, after another couple moto-rides we were only 12km from Zegne, where we knew we had pretty good chances of joining a game of Musical Vans. Unfortunately, we were still 12km from Zegne, it was past 5pm, and we were on foot. We met up with another walker going our way; his wife was sick with malaria and had gone to the hospital in Zegne a week before.
Joining forces with the husband was fortunate, for mildly unsavory bands of idle boys began to make an appearance here and there at the edges of villages, in the long empty stretches between them.
At 9km away, it unfortunately began to rain. We got desperate and hired two more motorcyclists to take us for one soul apiece - only to be overtaken by the much-awaited bus from Tai less than two miles from Zegne. We flagged it down, and hopped in... and made it back to Duekoué that night around 10pm. In the usual Ivoirian paradigm, local transport managed to blow our conservatively increasing time estimates for a journey's duration completely out of this dimension... twice. Traveling about fifty miles? We can do it in five hours! ...Coming back? Make that seven!
Well, at least I got to see my rainforest.. and I didn't get killed by anything in it, either.
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