My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. - Elizabeth Gilbert

12 January 2020, Buba to Bissau, 78km (plus boat across estuary)
Gorila Rooms 12,000XOF (R293)

The advice not to assume, humourously stated as “assume makes and ASS out of U and ME”, has always tickled my fancy. Many years ago, my friend Nigel Brown told me he thought the “worst vice is ad-vice”. Today, however, I should have taken the advice not to assume … it almost made an ass of us.
When I began plotting our Africa trip some years ago, I read of a ferry linking Enxude and Bissau, and planned always to take this route to the capital. On the day we cycled to Buba, we confirmed with the police at an intersection that there was indeed a ferry running between Enxude and Bissau, and confirmed again yesterday with our Buba host. When I say “confirmed”, bear in mind a limited shared vocabulary… Following my confirmations, I BELIEVED there was a ferry between Enxude and Bissau, which there in fact is. The thing I had been unable to confirm, even via the internet, was ferry running times. This did not worry us unduly as we ASSUMED there was a town of sorts at Enxude, with liquids and food and perhaps even accommodation to be had, which there is not.
We hoped to arrive in the capital today, wishing for a mid-afternoon ferry going our way and longing for pizza. We arrived at Enxude to find four or five tin huts only, occupied by one extended family - Domingos, his sister, one or two other young men and a couple of kids. No food and, more importantly, no liquids, unless you count the brown water we were handed in a beer mug, poured from a 25-litre plastic container. Such a shock.
Drawing in the sand, Domingos explained that the once-a-day ferry from Bissau leaves the city at 08:00 each morning, and returns there from Enxude at 10:00. Had we been better prepared, we could have camped near the huts, but we had no fluids left and no fuel for our stove, and it was hot and dusty with Bissau beckoning just 15km across the estuary. So when Domingos proposed we hire him to ferry us over in his boat, we negotiated a price and agreed he could do so. He charged us 40,000 west African francs for the hour-long trip, an amount that was reasonable for the service offered, but took us way over our total daily budget of a little over half that. When I resigned from the Free Market Foundation end-December 2018, I was given a generous cash gift, which I promised to use when in need of comfort / comforting. I put some toward a facial and massage in Namibia on my 62nd birthday, and decided that we really, really needed a bed and a pizza in Bissau today. Having thus skilfully shifted the financial burden from our budget to my gift, we boarded a blue pirogue carved from a single sizeable trunk, and with Domingos and his young assistant, all of us wearing orange life jackets, chugged our way across the Geba river*. Before departing, Domingos said he needed to speak to his sister, tapping his chest twice with his bunched fingers in a gesture denoting “breasts”, thus “woman”.
Our trip across the estuary was odd, the afternoon sun burning away the horizon, so that the water and the sky looked the same and we motored into a light-bright world without end. Once disembarked in Bissau, we cycled the short distance to Gorila (sic) Rooms, checked into a large and comfortable room, showered, and walked to O Bistro for pizza. Happiness is…
We travelled a dirt road from Buba to Enxude, often too sandy for comfort, somewhere along the route slip-sliding Charl from his bike for his scheduled monthly fall! Travelled through small villages and towns, generating collective near-hysteria on occasion among children yelling “branco” (white), and desperate to touch our skin. Most kids want to greet and touch and be photographed and view their images. Some scream and run and fall in terror. Three small kids ran from me to behind the huts of their homestead, clearly in search of adult succour. I brought my bike to a halt, hoping to change their perception, and soon the adults of the family came over to me carrying the distraught kids on their hips. I spent time talking to them in a soft voice, and eventually all three stopped crying and shook my hand, though none relaxed sufficiently to smile.
We saw seven small vultures in an urban garden, and kingfishers in the wetlands.
*”The Geba is a river of West Africa that rises in the northern most area of Guinea in the Fouta Djallon highlands, passes through southern Senegal, and reaches the Atlantic Ocean in Guinea-Bissau. It is about 550 kilometres (340 mi) in total length… After passing by Geba town and Bambadinca, the river broadens into a wide estuary below Xime (where it is joined by the Corubal River), with a total width of about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) at Bissau. The estuary widens further as the river flows into the Atlantic, forming the Bissagos Islands archipelago… It has long been an important trade route connecting into the interior; it is accessible to 2,000-ton ships some 140 kilometres (87 mi) in, and shallow-draft vessels even further.” (Wikipedia)

For today's route see below photos
For overview route, click on ROUTE tab above…