A walk through three worlds

 One afternoon I decided to see where the road east of my house led... 

I am still amazed by how quickly the landscape changes in Guinea.  And I'm amazed by its abundance.  Sure, this flatland can't grow much more than grass-- there's bedrock just an inch or so under the soil-- but it's still a lush growth compared to Niger, where it seemed like everything got grazed to within an inch of its life, or at least to within an inch of the ground. 

And at the edge of every rocky savana like this one, you can still see a line of green marking a streambed: come closer, and suddenly you're in the tropics.  The air is moist, the boulders slick with moss, and if you close your eyes and just listen to the water running over rocks and the birds singing, you could imagine yourself in a green forest without end. 

I've wandered through a few of those grand forests here, but this road led me back out of the valley bottom and into a third landscape:

I climbed up the hillside and over an ingenious step-over gate in a fence of thorn branches, and into a farmer's field.  This is where they've been threshing fonio, a tiny grass that produces hundreds of tiny seeds on each stem.  Once threshed and hulled, they're cooked up into a wonderfully tasty couscous-- high in protein, too.  Notice the power lines in the background-- no more wild forests or untenanted plains, we're already back in civilization.