The Mad Dog of the Middle East & The Shapeshifting Bar Maiden

The Libyan flags looked out the box new but the giant posters of Muammar al-Gaddafi showed the colonel looking just as I remember him on the news 25 years ago. We were headed north destined we thought for the mountains of Badou. The military police blocking the roads and manning the crowds weren't so sure. And at our third road block when a cop smacked our cab driver he bid us adieu and headed back south without us. We strapped on our packs and started walking the parade route where the crowds cheered us and the soldiers ignored us. Before long a dude approached us offering the front seats on a bus to badou for pennies as soon as traffic started moving again. We mingled in the beerless town until the band struck up and Reagan's Mad Dog of the Middle East came by in his presidential motorcade. The thirty second anticlimax ended with us on the bush taxi and back on the road north to Badou. It was a long slow ride and we passed the time singing dancing and entertaining the young Tuareg lady behind us. We were all but home free when some dude hogties six goats and loads them on to the bus. The ones inside are OK but the ones tied to the roof are screaming like nothing I've ever heard before. They sound very human. We then proceeded to stop at every single town until Badou and each time another woman hopped on the bus with multiple live chickens stuffed in bags. Needless to say the last twenty miles seemed like hundreds.


When we arrived in Badou the town was far bigger than we had anticipated and we had no idea where our friend lived. We found a bar sat outside and refueled with Awooyo and the most delicious boiled eggs I've ever had. The proprietor of the bar was the friendliest little elderly lady who plugged Kevin's phone in for him and actually let him use hers when he had battery juice but no signal. We couldn't have gotten in touch with Carolyn without her help. We expressed our gratitude with plans to return as we headed down the road to the filling station to meet Carolyn. Carolyn took us to her friend Papa V's bar for peanuts and Awooyo. Papa V asked me if I had an iPod he could plug into his system. I did and Vampire Weekend joined the spirits in the mountain air.

The next morning we got moving early; Coca cola and spaghetti and hot sauce with a spoon out of a black plastic bag for breakfast. We hiked to the falls at the top of the mountain with giant flesh eating black ants drawing minimal blood leaving their disembodied heads wriggling in the rubber of my flip-flops.













After hiking back down the mountain the mountain we couldn't think of a better treat than Awooyos and boiled eggs from our gracious hostess of the night before. When we got to the bar we went inside for the first time to escape the late afternoon heat. The woman in charge this afternoon looked a bit like our friend from the night before but roughly thirty-five years younger. When she returned with our order Kevin asked her in Ewe "Where is your mom...or your grandmother?..She really helped us out last night." The young woman gave Kevin a look of confusion and amusement.

She replied "That was me. I am your friend from last night." She left to continue shelling eggs. Kevin and I looked at one another in bewilderment. I surveyed the bar for the first time. We had only been out front the night before. The beer and eggs had come out of a French Red Cross cooler. There were stretchers hanging on all the walls. Booze was locked in a giant old medicine cabinet. Carolyn observed that it was no ordinary table our beers and eggs were resting on but a rustic operating table.