The rest of this tour was more transportation than touring. We spent one night in Niamey, the capital of Niger on the Niger River. Niamey seemed to have many more modern large buildings than Bamako or Ouagadougou, built in Niger's uranium heyday. The following night was spent in Tahoua, a small town about halfway to Agadez. The drive there had some interesting sights along the way.

We invited Kone and Mohamed to dinner in Niamey, if they would pick a place. Don't eat, we said, we'll go where you say to go — like the previous night in Ouagadougou. So they showed up and we went out and had riz sauce that couldn't be beat from a lady from Senegal; and Mohamed crawled off in the middle to sleep in his truck, which he also had done before in Ouagadougou; and after it was all paid for with $10 including tip for 4 persons. You may have heard your mother say words on the order of, Finish your food, children are starving in Africa. Well, they are; but Mali turns out to be one of the cultures where you don't finish your food at a meal, because if you do, it insults your host that he didn't feed you enough. Kone assures us that leftover food in Mali gets distributed, it doesn't go into a locked dumpster and get doused with bleach to appease the gods of the Free Market, as it does in Advanced societies. It turned out that Mohamed was staying at his mother's house tonight, which we only found out cause he wanted to drop Kone off first and then us. I don't like for Mohamed to be so Japanese. Our little bit of generosity was taking away his time with his mother. Needless to say I would never have asked him out if I had known or if he had said. I must remember: we are work to these guys, not friends; our camaraderie is part of their doing their job and if we genuinely want to be nice instead of egotistical, we let them put down their tools early and go home. Inviting them out is like overtime.

There is a small herd of giraffes in western Niger, just east of Niamey. Our guidebook thought that there were about 40 animals in the herd, and we were craning our necks as we drove hoping to get a glimpse, fearing it was too late in the morning and that they had already found shelter. But we were exceptionally lucky to see six of them cross the road directly in front of us, presumably to get to the other side.

We followed them off-road for a little while to get pictures including termite mounds.

One of my favorite meals of the trip involved various barbecued parts of sheep bought on the street in Dogondoutchi, and eaten with some bread and tea under a tree.

Niger-style granaries.

Goats (or more likely sheep) going to market.

The only place in America with a similar landscape to Mali and Burkina Faso and southern Niger is West Texas, right down to the longhorn cattle, which they call "zebu". If you ever have a chance, rent the movie "Workingman's Death" when it comes out on video, which has a fascinating chapter on life spent working in a Nigerian slaughterhouse. Some zebus are extras in it.

This town was right next to the border with Nigeria. Apparently a ship from China had brought thousands of plastic funnels, which were suddenly for sale everywhere. The emergence of China as a manufacturing god has had more of an effect on the Africans than it has on the Americans. Americans had consumer goods before, although at prices that we could only afford to pay when we had jobs in the factories that made them. Now they are cheap enough that we can still have them even though the wages of Americans has been dropping for 30 years. In Africa, the Chinese merchandise is the first that they've ever had. This tree may soon be replaced by a Costco wire display shelf.

Kone deals with some begging children by buying a couple baguettes, tearing them into pieces, and handing them out.

A few times on the trip we had some beignets (doughnut holes, essentially) with hot sauce. Yum.

On to Agadez