There were times on the way from Ouagadougou when I felt like a hitchhiker. Kone stopped talking about then, having run off the end of his string table. It occurred to me, as a natural egotistical reaction to my imagined Shame at having kept Mohamed away from his Mother, that what may really be happening is a couple of jokers seeing a chance to make the boss $600 a day for a road trip to see buddies at the cost only of having two tourists in the back for half the way. Kone had said, in Tahoua, that they intended to drive us to Agadez, then turn around and go back to Tchin-Tabaradene, which is the town that Mohamed was born in, and where his eleven surviving siblings live in a Tuareg tent. Then he said that they were planning to take us on a tour of Agadez, which would go against their driving 400 km back the same day. This may have been their last tour of this season. The table talk was that April is an unusually late time of year to be touring. But eclipses don't care about that kind of talk.
I asked about all that driving, and they said that (for all the U.S. State Department warnings about not driving in Africa at night) they much preferred driving at night, which they weren't allowed to do with customers. But it's cooler, the truck runs better, the guards are more bored, and I suppose being Tuareg and all Mohamed wasn't going to find trouble with the natives.
