[Contined from the last post when I had just returned from a spring break as far away from civilization as possible]

All I know was that last night my Turkish-style squat toilet never looked so clean, the half hour freezing cold shower I took ranks high among Emma’s annals of bathing, my concave foam mattress may as well have been a featherbed….Yoff just may as well be Cambridge, MA right now.

That said, what I experienced last night was not unfettered elation or relief. Well, maybe a smidge of relief that our long long thirty-plus hour northwestward journey was over and my feet would not morph into those of an elephant. But much as I talked about the many showers I would take and hours I would sleep and the gallons of water I would imbibe….my heart was heavy and I can say with some assurance that it was not due to a monstrous blood clot brought on by the many suffocating hours spent in transit.

I had my own wild spring break 2005 love affair. It was really more of a fling. Admittedly, my clarity of thought and perception may have been altered as I was perpetually intoxicated—my speech and vision blurred by extreme dry heat (temperatures daily surpassing 105 Fahrenheit), my nose twitching with every inhalation of red dust. But some six or so days ago, when our mini bus bumped along the bush roads, rounding a bend and revealing great jagged hills and a relatively verdant landscape punctuated by leafy mango trees and clusters of thatch roofed huts, I felt the telltale tingles of attraction.

Having been raised, in part, on my dad’s farm in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, I have deep, visceral love of mountains. Senegal is beautiful in it’s own way. But the vast majority of the country’s desertscape is quite flat. Midwest kind of flat. So one can imagine that after two months of such flatness, glimpsing even the slightest rise in terrain was euphoria.

Where to begin in my telling of this journey? Find out when I post the rest tomorrow.