Eight hours to a rope: crossing Guinea-Bissau to the Guinea border

We were up hours before sunrise and driving out of the capital in the dark,
because the day had a whole country in it.

Bissau to the eastern border is not a long way on a map. It took about eight
hours with only short stops, and the reason is the surface. There is asphalt
for much of it, and the asphalt has potholes deep enough that traffic has
given up on it – cars drive on the dirt beside the road instead, which is
smoother, and you spend the day drifting on and off a highway that
technically exists.

The country changes as you go. Near the capital the houses are brick and
cement. Further out they become mud and straw, round and thatched, standing
in swept red clay behind fences of woven sticks. The cars thin out and are
replaced by donkeys. It happens gradually enough that you only notice once it
has already happened.

What does not thin out is commerce. Every village of any size has lines and
lines of tiny shops along the road, all apparently selling the same things to
each other, and all busy. We crossed Bafatá, the country's second city, and
there was nothing much to see there either beyond another market to drive
through. That was the real surprise of Guinea-Bissau for me – not emptiness,
but how many people were out.

Then the border, and the border is a rope. An actual rope across the road, at
a post that sees so few cars the officers were visibly unsure how to process
us.

They were surer about the other thing. We had all been taking pictures and
filming on and off for two days. Exactly one of us got caught doing it here,
and his phone was confiscated until a sufficiently generous tip appeared.
Nobody ever asked to see the photograph deleted.