Pita

I bought six oranges from a child outside Pita at eight in the morning and ate all six before reaching the town’s market, which tells you something about the oranges and something about how long I had been on that road. They were small, still slightly green on the outside, and so densely sweet and acidic at once that eating them felt like an event rather than a snack. The child had a wooden crate of them balanced on his head and was negotiating with three different buyers simultaneously. He was maybe eleven years old and significantly better at commerce than most adults I know.

Pita is a market town, which is its whole personality. The town exists because of the weekly market — every Monday, traders and herders and farmers converge from the plateau villages within a half-day’s walk, and the wide central area fills with cattle, produce, cloth, metal tools, and the particular compressed energy of a place where everyone has come to do business. It is not picturesque in the way that highland Dalaba is picturesque. It is functional, loud, smelling of cattle and charcoal and frying dough, and completely itself.

The cattle market runs separately from the produce market, in a dusty enclosure at the edge of town where the animals are assessed and argued over with the kind of seriousness that livestock deserves. Peul herders come down from the plateau in their wide robes, and the negotiations have a formal quality to them — there is a specific vocabulary, specific gestures, and an agreement is reached through a handshake that seems to settle things more completely than any document. I stood at the edge of this for an hour and felt like I was watching something that has looked this way for centuries, which I think is probably accurate.

Outside the market proper, Pita’s commercial district does what small Guinean towns do — tea stalls with sweet attaya served in tiny glasses, phone credit sellers, a row of motorcycle repair stalls where a teenager in oil-stained clothes was rebuilding a carburetor from memory. I drank three rounds of tea in a succession that took the better part of an hour, sitting on a low bench with a man named Mamadou who sold cloth and spent our conversation explaining the geometries of Peul embroidery in more technical detail than I could follow, but with such evident pleasure that I was happy to listen.

The road from Pita to the Kinkon Falls passes through some of the Fouta Djallon’s most striking landscape — the plateau breaks apart here into a series of gorges, and the road cuts along their edges with a confidence that the guardrails, where they exist, do not entirely justify. But the view at certain moments, looking down into the deep green of a valley with a river you can barely see at the bottom, is the kind of view that makes you understand why people talk about this country the way they do — quietly, as if the story belongs to them personally.

When to go: Market day is Monday, and visiting Pita on a Monday is a qualitatively different experience than any other day. November through February for the dry season and passable roads. The town is a logical base for visiting Kinkon Falls.