Involving H2SO4 and Hearing Loss

The journey back from site yesterday went much smoother than usual. I woke up around 6:30 to a light drizzle. Not enjoying the prospect of riding 20k through the mud and rain I packed all my valuables in plastic bags and hoped for the best. As I departed the village all precipitation stopped - it was as if my exposed presence in the elements held back the clouds. Unfortunately the mud failed to yield. In a few places puddles (or small ponds) spanned the entire width of the road so I had to try my luck at sloshing through them. The key is to hit the muck at just the right speed. Too fast you get soaked with spray; too slow the bike gets bogged down. Having plenty of practice I wasn't too worried - perhaps I should have been. I hit the water just right, but didn't anticipate the steep slope which slid me sideways forcing the soggy. I put my foot down in a surprisingly deep section of the pond. Oh well.

As I arrived in Bougouni with one wet foot the rain started up again. I ducked into the house where I store my bike to escape the downpour and waited until it let up. After almost an hour I ventured out toward the bus station and some random guy was nice enough to stop and give me a ride. I showed up on time (is there such a thing in this country?) for the ten-o'clock bus, bought a ticket, walked on, and it left promptly! That never happens! Sitting in front of me was a real-life Charlie Brown. He managed to pick the seat under the roof vent that wouldn't close. It rained on and off as we rambled on to Bamako, and when it did, he got his own personal downpour. A bit worse than my soggy. I ended up making the trip in record time with miraculously few holdups or hassles. Quite a nice way to cap off a somewhat rough ten days in village...

About halfway through those ten days I rode into Bougouni to resupply. It was a beautiful morning for a bike ride, but other than that everything seemed to be going wrong. The wait at the bank was excruciating (at least it was open), my bike pump went missing (at least I didn't get a flat), my phone stopped sending texts (at least I could make calls), the list goes on, and its length was getting to me. I made it back to my mud hut, rather winded after riding 50k, and tried out the power inverter my mom sent so that I could use my laptop to do some writing. It doesn't work. I figure the contacts on the car battery are pretty corroded, so I could try cleaning those. I get out the metal file and go to work on the positive terminal, my face very close to it so that I could see in the dim light. The file goes back and forth, back and forth, removing bits of junk that could be interfering with the current flow I so desperately wanted. On one of those cleansing strokes the tip of the file touched the negative terminal. What resulted was an explosion so loud my neighbors thought a shotgun had gone off. Meanwhile, I was covered (face especially - good thing my glasses were on) in sulphuric acid and wasn't hearing much more than a distorted ringing. Hmmm. After dousing myself in water and waiting for the smoke to clear out much of the afternoon was spent cleaning up the mess. I ended up laughing about it a lot. It transformed my frustrated morning into a carefree (although a bit jumpy) day. Bummer to have to go without power until I get a new battery though.

On a side note, I saw something I thought very strange a few days before the big explosion. I was riding my bike up a rocky hillside and stopped to look at what I thought was a baby snake (a fairly common occurrence) cruising down the gravel slope. It was light tan in color, but didn't seem to be moving quite right. Snakes tend to stay in track while this thing seemed to be mimicking the desired motion with decreased efficiency - it was almost flopping like a fish out of water. It covered a meter or so pretty quickly and right before my eyes the thing quit trying to be a snake and turned into a millipede. Its color instantly changed to dark brown as it righted itself and employed hundreds of legs to continue on in a much slower, but more natural fashion. I shook my head and rode off wondering what weird wildlife (as there is no shortage here) I would come across next, whether in its natural environment or on my dinner plate.