“First tarred road to the right, then straight ahead until the hippopotamus round-about... first exit... and to the left after two blocks, right after the pharmacy. End there you are!” A few hours in Bamako were enough to understand that the street names that our guide book provided would be of little use when talking to taxi drivers or the locals. To find our way through the city, we took on the local method and lingo, a little unusual, but a lot more effective!
While we were able to plant a seed of doubt in the the sellers' minds in the Moroccan souks - they often thought we were Spanish and German respectively, the Senegalese children were not easily fooled: as soon as we arrived in Dakar, we were called “Toubab” (“white”), a nickname that would follow us during our entire stay.
With its green boulevards and cafes with a distinctive Parisian feel (but with more service-minded waiters), Casablanca seemed to us like a haven of peace and a display of modernity when we arrive in Morocco. What a pity that our luggage decided to stay longer than we did in Dubai, where we had a connecting flight: dressed in the Indian clothes that we had worn during the trip, we almost missed the chaos in Delhi, where we could blend in more easily.
June 6th at Indira Gandhi International Airport – Only just arrived from Nepal, we were struck by a strange feeling. The Indian capital city now seemed familiar to us, but the taxi ride from the airport took us back in time to the day we first arrived on the Indian subcontinent. But this time, we only had a few days left before we were to leave this continent for another, Africa. Time was of the essence, and we had to take advantage of the magic India had to offer before it was too late.
At last installed in the surprisingly narrow armchairs on board Jet Airways’ Boeing, we had a glance at our fellow passengers. One fact became obvious: our Nepalese adventures had already started, on this flight from Delhi to Kathmandu. Never had we been surrounded by such a diverse and exotic crowd: among Indian and Nepalese families with colored saris, we could see a young Buddhist monk wearing the latest sneakers, a bear-footed sadhu draped in white cloth, a Chinese musician with his electric guitar, and an American girl with pretty blond hair coming from nowhere…
Delhi, midnight. Our taxi, having picked us up at the airport, dropped us in an empty alley in Pahar Ganj, the area where most budget hotels are located. The temperature outside was still 38 degrees, and we spent our first night in India in a window-less room. Fortunately we were tired enough from the flight, and had no trouble falling asleep!
During our first stay in Beijing, before heading south to Shanghai, we hardly had time to visit the city. So there we were again, early March, on the platform of the central station, determined to discover everything that this ancient imperial capital, that has seen prestigious dynasties and communist leaders follow one another, had to offer, and to let ourselves be captivated by the Great Wall, huge murderous snake of stone – thousands of perished workers rest in its bowels – that stretches out into the fog of the surrounding hills.
“Hello, hello…” most of the passers-by turned their head as we walked passed them on the sidewalk, pointing their fingers at us and trying to speak a few English words. We expected to fuel the Chinese curiosity in the street, but here the situation seemed a bit comical: we were just a stone’s throw away from the Shanghai Center, a business, hotel and shopping complex that has the biggest concentration of expatriates in the economic capital of the country! Our traveler’s clothes may have been more exotic to the inhabitants’ eyes than the suits on the foreign businessmen who bump into us on the sidewalk…
Our first train in Russia had not met our expectations: we had traveled on a modern day train, spacious and fitted with flat screen TVs, and it looked a bit too much like our French TGVs. We couldn’t wait to begin our trip on the transsiberian railway that would take us all the way to Beijing, where our next interviews would take place. The trip is seven days long, but we had decided to make two stops along the way, to be able to have a real shower from time to time, and to visit the cities of Ekaterinburg and Irkoutsk.
We had heard so many things about Russia during the month we spent traveling through Europe! Ecstatic comments about train journeys, lamentations about pricing –nothing is free in Russia, not even the sugar in your coffee– stories of great friendships in Siberia, drunken nights with vodka, warnings against police corruption… enough to leave us wondering what we would find once there. Everybody seemed to agree, though, that Saint Petersburg probably is the most European of Russian cities. So there we were, in Pushkin’s adoptive city, on December 28th, convinced that it would a good place to ease in to the complexity of the Slavic culture and customs. But life is full of surprises…
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