Kindia

I had meant to spend a single night in Kindia and then push on toward the highlands, but the bush taxi that was supposed to carry me onward developed a problem with its clutch that the driver described to me at length and with feeling, and so I stayed three days instead. This turned out to be one of those accidents of travel that you later pretend you planned. Kindia sits at the western edge of the Fouta Djallon, where the lowland heat finally begins to give way to something cooler, and the town has the energy of a place where two very different parts of a country meet and do business with each other.

The market and the mangoes

The market in Kindia is enormous and I got lost in it within about four minutes. Lia, who has a better sense of direction than I do and is far less easily distracted by piles of dried fish, found a woman selling fabric and disappeared into a negotiation that lasted most of an hour. I bought mangoes. Kindia is famous for its mangoes, and in season the roads in are lined with people selling them by the bucket, and I ate so many in three days that I developed a faint rash around my mouth, which I have since learned is a known hazard and not, as I feared at the time, the onset of something tropical and serious.

The town itself is not beautiful in any conventional sense. It is a working place, dusty in the dry season and muddy in the wet, with a long main street of shops and workshops and a constant flow of trucks heading to and from the coast. But the surrounding hills are extraordinary, and the light in the late afternoon, when the dust catches the low sun and the whole town turns gold, is the kind of thing that makes you forgive a place a great deal.

The Bridal Veil and the Pasteur station

The reason most travellers come to Kindia is the Voile de la Mariée, another of Guinea’s bridal-veil waterfalls — the country has a weakness for the name — which drops off a sandstone shelf perhaps an hour’s drive from town. We hired a motorbike and a guide named Mamadou who drove with one hand and gestured at the scenery with the other in a way I found alarming until I gave up worrying about it. The falls were thinner than I expected, it being late in the dry season, but the pool beneath was deep and cold and we swam while Mamadou watched from a rock with the patient expression of a man who has watched a great many foreigners swim.

There is also, oddly, a famous primate research station near Kindia — the old Pasteur Institute facility, established in the colonial era to study and breed chimpanzees, with a long and somewhat troubling history that the people there will tell you about with surprising frankness. I went out of curiosity and came away thoughtful. It is not a zoo and not really set up for visitors, but a few francs and a polite request will usually get you a walk around with one of the keepers.

In the evenings we ate at a roadside place where the owner grilled brochettes over a half-barrel and argued about football with everyone who passed. The food was simple and the arguments were not, and I understood almost none of the football and all of the feeling behind it.

When to go: November to March is dry and the roads are passable. The waterfalls are at their best in October, just after the rains, but the wet season itself can strand you in town — which, as I discovered, is not the worst thing that can happen.