Togothon, day 2 part I
Trip Start
Aug 04, 2009
1
35
57
Trip End
Dec 13, 2009
Gati, Togo
Friday, October 2, 2009
So we started our walk. We decided the night before that it might be a better idea (based on how we were feeling) to split this day’s distance into 2 days: thus we would only walk about 20k instead of the expected 40 or so (Friday was intended to be our longest day of the trip originally). Kayleigh, Matt, and Leslie all seemed to feel pretty bad still in the morning: all of them had blisters on their feet and were aching pretty bad. I had some pain in my right knee, but overall didn’t feel too rough- especially after being out of bed for about 10 minutes. But overall we decided it’d be a better idea to cut today short- especially because we didn’t have a hotel to stay in anyway and we could stop wherever we wanted for the night.
The sun was up by 6am, but it didn’t get hot until 7:30 or 8 am usually—and even though I was sweating at that point, I didn’t really start to mind the heat until 9:30. So, when it got to be 9:30 and none of us had had both breakfast and water that morning we got kind of freaked out about it. We hadn’t passed any towns or huts since Tsevie essentially. The landscapes were pretty amazing, though. The countryside of Togo is a very vibrant green and we were in the maritime region technically I think so you could see out pretty far. This was the one day when we went up significantly sized hills, as well I think. It is also the day that we started taking more pictures (so you will be able to see them once I upload them).
Around 9:30 we finally approached a couple mud houses with palm leaf roofs. We didn’t know where we were at the time but we all knew that wherever we were, we needed to find water. So we walked up to a house where we saw a woman laying just inside the doorway. We walked up and said the same old thing "nous cherchons de l’eau: comme 'pure water.’ Est-ce que tu connais ou nous pouvons le trouver?" I think she must not have spoken french, probably only Ewe because she called a man from across the street to come talk to us. He actually knew a bit of English so we spoke to him in a mix of both broken French and broken English. After he found out what we wanted, he said something to the first woman and she walked behind her house. She came back moments later with a big pink plastic mug of clear water. She handed it to Matt. I was waiting to see if he’d drink it and resolved that if he did then I was going to, too. Afterall, one thing I have learned from being here is that you should never refuse what has been given to you by a host. So, Matt took a sip, then me, Leslie, and Kayleigh. We passed the mug around again a couple times until it was empty. After some small talk and explaining our story, we pulled out the map and had this man show us directions/give us distances to the next town and next available stop for pure water sachets.. He pointed to Gati on the map. “c’est ici”/ that’s here. We were in Gati drinking water from lord knows where—water that was probably one of the biggest lifesavers of our entire trip, just handed to us from a really nice stranger. Again, one of the last things you are supposed to do in a foreign country—but the water looked and tasted clean and none of us seem to have gotten sick up to this point so I think it was a good decision to stop. The man told us the next town was Tchakpa Dedekpoe…so that’s where we headed. Tchakpa was the closest town to our new intended distance of 25k, so we thought that perhaps we would find a church and ask to stay the night there once we reached it.
