"Where you going?" the woman asked, standing in the middle of the street. "You go to Busua?"

"We don't know where we're going. What's Busua?"

 "Very beautiful there. My home. I take you there. Follow me."

No arguments there. The four of us climbed into the back seat of a small Toyota (there were three others in front) and bounced down the dirt road to Busua, a small fishing village on Ghana's Cape Coast. Toward the end of the ride, Addi wasn't talking anymore. Charlie wondered whether he was still conscious, since everyone had been piled on top of him. When we got out in Busua, Addi explained that he hadn't quite passed out, but that the weight of everyone's bodies along with the impact of driving through some large sinkholes in the road had forced all the air from his lungs. Busua then, not a moment too soon. A balloon hat twister with collapsed lungs is no one's idea of a party---that is if he actually was what he claimed to be. Although he had told me three-quarters of his backpack was full of balloons, I hadn't yet seen one.

The woman led us to her friend Elizabeth's guesthouse, a cement block structure and some steel-roofed huts around a central court. The sanctuary of the Musama Disco Christo Church, of which Elizabeth was an elder, formed the remaining side of the compound. The local children who attempted to carry, and ended up dragging Charlie and Addi's massive bags seemed confused that neither one of them was particularly interested in seeing Fort Metal Cross, one of the sixteen old slave-trading forts that dot the Cape Coast of Ghana, and the primary reason tourists come to Busua at all. Addi would merely say, "maybe later," as he and Charlie continued to poke around, muttering lighting and backdrop logistics to each other.

After dark in our small hut, Addi pulled out some balloons and began twisting practice shapes for what he knew would be his African debut the next day.
 "You weren't kidding," I remarked as I drew down the holey mosquito net and began the evening ritual. After a few satisfying kills I sat down and asked him how he'd picked up his craft.

As he lay on his back, knees bent, with a yellow balloon twisting into knots over his face, the kerosene lamp on the floor cast giant balloon shadows on the ceiling, turning the hut into a mad scientist's laboratory. He described the three months in his bedroom at home, crying over a lost love, mindlessly twisting balloons to keep his hands occupied---above his waist. And here he was, probably in the same position he'd held for those three months learning to twist balloons into sculpture because his grief would allow nothing else.

Measuring more balloons, he explained he'd been thinking about a new hat design during the excruciating, six-hour, minibus ride in order to take his mind off the pain the makeshift wooden seat had given him. More pain, more balloon hats. This one was turning into a woven web of four colors as he lay on the cot, squeaking and popping the twists, complaining about the intense humidity's effects on balloon performance. Laughing children could now be heard whispering outside the window.

A hard rain came the next day, and not surprisingly "Balloon Hat" (a new synonym for Charlie and Addi) decided to postpone any performance. It happened to be Palm Sunday and there were far more than the usual worshippers in attendance at the Musama Disco Christo Church just ten feet away from the damp hut. Throughout the Christian/Animist hybrid rituals of a three-hour service, village children wearing balloon hats would wander in and out of the shelter, their hands feeling up and down the contours of elaborate new headdresses Addi had made for them. Obviously, he hadn't been able to help himself entirely.

I'd first encountered these two serious young men in the currency exchange line at the airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where Addi just happened to be standing behind me. I had come to Africa on frequent flyer miles as part of an egoistic attempt to call myself well-traveled by meeting Africans and listening to their music firsthand. Wondering whether anyone else's trip could possibly have been as pathetically half-baked, I asked Addi what had brought him to the region, expecting to hear that he'd come for a vaccination project with some Western aid group. Northern Ghana was in the midst of an unusually harsh meningitis epidemic and the only other non-Africans on the flight had indeed been Doctors without Borders. Instead, to my surprise, he hesitated with a sidelong glance as if to prepare himself for the usual response, and explained that he had come to Africa to make balloon hats. When I asked him if USAID or the Peace Corps had sanctioned such an absurd idea, he explained that he and his partner, a photographer documenting the experience, were financing the project out of their own pockets. By this time Charlie had arrived with their bags as my night's worth of money was being counted out under the change window. After a few pleasantries, I wished both of them luck with an eye-rolling smirk and disappeared into a chaotic airport crowd expecting never to see them again.

Two days later there they were, though, boarding the same small bus (known as a tro-tro in Ghana) with the same vague idea of ocean in mind. I was crushed in next to an officious Ashanti gentleman in a suit and spectacles. He had spoken at length about his job for a government development agency and his mandate to find a solution to the problem of street children in the cities of southern Ghana. Two hours into the trip he stopped talking and started vomiting into a Notre Dame T-shirt on top of the briefcase on his lap. My leg was getting the overflow. I glanced back at Charlie and Addi bouncing miserably in the back seat. The look on Charlie's face told me he was feeling no less pain than I. A town like Busua couldn't have been a better place to end such a ride.

Though as is the case almost anywhere Westerners go to try and escape everyone else of their kind, we soon found we were not the only white folks around. One walk to the village well revealed two Scotsmen sitting perched on the stoop outside some random hut, tripping heavily on spacecakes they'd bought from the local Rasta drummaker. It looked as if the Scotsmen had set up their new Ghanaian peg drums outside with the intention of practicing the pa-logo or first rhythm of coastal Ghanaian drumming, but instead had forgotten who they were, much less why they had come to the village in the first place. The one thing they probably hadn't forgotten, indeed the only thing that seems impossible to forget in any altered state of mind, is that they were in Africa. They had just returned from the Dogon region of Mali with tales of robbery and harassment, and needed decompression on the coast before returning home. "We're glad we went and got through it, but we would never go back."

Though the Scotsmen's stories centered on their difficulties in finding an honest guide in all of Mali, they also mentioned their planned visit to Timbuktu, that proverbial most-inaccessible place on earth, had been thwarted by all manner of obstacle---from thieves in Bandiagara, to warnings of Tuareg unrest in the region, to lack of any certain overland route---and they had decided that for them it probably would remain the most inaccessible place on earth.

Listening with open mouths to the Scotsmen's hallucinatory memories, Balloon Hat seemed to revel in the sheer happenstance of it all, and right then under the full moon a tangible goal for their African Balloon Hat Experience began to rise out of the very thick air.

Timbuktu. Balloon Hat had heard of it before, but where exactly was it? To discover that it was here in West Africa and perhaps only a thousand kilometers north gave rise to the quixotic challenge Balloon Hat seems to need from every journey. An overland dash from a sixteenth-century slave-trading fort to the edge of the Sahara where exotic hats from the West could be traded for photos of people rarely seen outside the region; that would be the easy part. The hard part, all agreed, would be to make it back to the coast by the next full moon in order to board the nonrefundable flight out to another part of the world.

The Scotsmen returned to their hallucinations with serious doubts about the success of such an endeavor. Nonetheless, they smiled at the idea and wished Balloon Hat luck with eye-twitching smirks.
 

The Journey

The Buipe Queen cruises the lake at around ten knots with a deck full of empty crates, stopping occasionally to take on cargo and passengers. During most of the daylight hours no one can move. As is the case every day in this region, during the high-sun hours people don't talk. Lying around in empty crates on deck, half-asleep, they rest heads on elbows, staring sideways into space, knowing they're trapped in a hundred-twenty-degree floating oven. Even the galley maid who is supposed to be on shift cannot help but pass out over her counter. If anybody wants to eat, they have to be satisfied only thinking about it. But then as simultaneously as any African town seems to awaken itself, people stir a bit all at once---maybe think about moving for some bit of sustenance---and the late afternoon comes alive with conversation and a new shift of work for the crew.

It was here among swarms of lake flies too numerous to swat that I asked Charlie how he happened to find himself sleeping on tables and cement floors halfway across the world for the dubious privilege of shooting photos of people in balloon hats. His answer was simple. To see the look on a child's face, to discover people's universal need to laugh, to find the connection to humankind strengthened by the smallest gift of color, had become more than addictive. It had become his only purpose.

He said he'd first noticed people's reactions to Addi's hats on a Halloween night in New York the previous year. After a group of four of them had failed to come up with any costumes for a friend's party, Addi, who was then only a vague acquaintance, offered to make hats for all of them and fulfill the costume requirement without too much work. The moment they stepped onto the street, though, Charlie was amazed at the awe-struck responses to the hats. He had walked these streets his whole life without so much as drawing a glance, and here were total strangers smiling, laughing, eager to converse. The next morning, hungover at the breakfast table, he wondered aloud to Addi whether taking the hats to people all over the world might be a cool thing to do. He hadn't quite realized how seriously Addi had taken him until a couple weeks later when Addi called and told him he'd cleared his schedule and was ready to begin the project.

Now here he was, in the middle of the hot season in West Africa, lying on top of a table with flies stuck to his face, wondering when the cool part of the idea would occur to him again.

Thirty-two hours after the Buipe Queen's departure, Balloon Hat and I debarked from the freighter on Lake Volta's northern shore, where there still remained another twenty-four hours of almost continuous travel by dump truck, minibus, and small, beaten sedan before reaching Bolgatonga, the capital of Ghana's Upper East Region. In Bolga, we could rest for a day or two and figure out the shortest way across the border to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, and from there into Mali, and with luck, Timbuktu.
 

Mad Dogs and Balloonhatmen

In a rented yellow Toyota, Solomon brought us five clicks on a dirt road southwest of town where we parked underneath a lone Baobab tree, looking beyond a few goats to a settlement of painted adobe huts well away from the road. The inhabitants could not have known what awaited them. Nor could Solomon for that matter.

Laboring with bags of cameras and balloons over dusty, cracked earth in the heat of another hundred-ten-degree day, Charlie noticed Addi had forgotten to bring his hat. He walked up next to him and asked how he was feeling.

"Nauseous. Dizzy. I might pass out." Addi had been vomiting and feverish since the previous evening's arrival in Bolga. And though none of us could utter the word, some strain of malaria seemed a likely scenario in our paranoid white people's minds. Of course it turned out to be his anti-malarial medicine, but that would take another few weeks to understand.

"Can you make any hats?" To that Addi gave a look of hopelessness, knowing he could do nothing else now that he had come this far.

He lasted for a respectable five or six hats before turning to a bizarre shade of off-white, and back in the car he explained that he had basically gone on autopilot---blow and twist, blow and twist---and at the moment didn't know whether he would even be able to get out of the car at the next stop. But during the short drive to the next settlement, as Charlie mentioned the approach of near-perfect, late afternoon light---the golden time---Addi knew he would have to drag himself out of the car again and somehow manage to keep going until the sun was gone.

At the next settlement Charlie entered a frenzy of shooting unlike any before it. The sun was low, truly gold, enhanced by the reddish dust of the earth in the region. The sky was perfect too---a brilliant blue with giant cumulus clouds adding depth to the scene---a landscape completely different from that of the jungles of coastal Ghana. The Balloon Hat had reached the edge of the Sahel, the great buffer zone between the ever-expanding Sahara Desert to the north and the rainforests of equatorial Africa to the south. And Charlie was, without question, trancing to the light's effects. He continued shooting long after Addi had stumbled back to the car, waiting in the back seat to die.

On the way back to Bolga as Addi hung his head out the window, our driver swerved to avoid a stray dog in the middle of the road. Solomon seemed strangely disappointed in this. A moment later he casually mentioned that both the Dagete and Grune people of Northern Ghana like to eat dogmeat. According to Solomon, they not only like the taste of it, but they also believe a man will die at home rather than during his travels if he eats the sacred flesh of a dog raised for this specific  purpose. As Addi seemed to be getting sicker by the hour, it was unanimously decided that a dose of dog from the new market in Bolgatonga might be the only way to get him back to the States intact.

The new market is a place where men buy and sell goat kids and black and white checkered guinea fowl, or sit under corrugated steel-roofed shelters drinking pito, a sour, fermented millet wine, out of large calabash bowls as they recline and listen to the spare sounds of lute and shaker.

Over in the dogmeat shelter six men sat in a row at a wooden table, whiling away the afternoon, eating chunks of dog sprinkled with hot red pepper freshly crushed in a nearby mortar and pestle. Solomon suggested buying a thousand cedi's, or about sixty cent's worth of meat and choice organ slices to make enough for everyone back at the hotel. There can be no doubt as to the animal it has come from either. The butcher leaves the leg and rear paw on the boiled meat, and unmistakable jawbones lay strewn on the ground beneath the table seeming to say "You've tried the rest, now try the best."

A thousand cedi's worth turned out to be over a pound of flesh. It seemed much of it would be wasted.

Back at the hotel the meat was spread out on a night table, and inspection began. As I was reading a particularly interesting piece of liver, Solomon's fingers grabbed it and popped it in his mouth. It became apparent then that if Addi didn't rise up from his deathbed soon for a piece to chew on, Solomon would eat the entire pound, compulsively, like snack food, leaving nothing for the cure. Eventually, with some prodding, Addi forced a couple pieces down and fell back hard on the bed.

Five days into the journey here, we could only worry that if the illness didn't suddenly improve, his life would possibly be in danger, making the goal of Timbuktu unattainable. Fortunate then that Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, happened to be the closest city with any substantial medical facility and also happened to be on the way to Timbuktu. Addi basically had no other choice but to press on and make the dusty four-hour ride by broken dirt road through a desolate border zone, putting us that much closer to the goal, whether the dogmeat ultimately succeeded or failed to do its job.
 

A Colonial Façade

According to "Frenchboy," in Ouaga prostitutes cost 5,000 CFA, or around ten dollars, for an entire night. This is, of course, best price, and must be bargained for. His own companion for the evening was a tall, urbane and jaded-looking, high-cheekboned woman in an exceptionally fine red evening dress. She looked strangely fitting at a table among the T-shirts and unshaven faces of male aid workers.

After I had decided to retire for the night I remembered having about seventy French francs in coin left from a stopover in Paris. Since Frenchboy was returning to Paris for a week the following day, I decided to give him the money. When I returned to the bar to offer it to him, he protested loudly and began to cry. I stressed that I would not be going back through Paris anytime soon and that he should have some fun before returning to Liberia. His emotional outpouring over a gift of what amounted to no more than twenty dollars perhaps stemmed from the heavy stress of a life witnessing human atrocities almost daily, dotted with sporadic urban pleasures like the hotel in Ouaga. In a fit of inspiration his eyes brightened and he asked me my plans for the evening. When I told him nothing much and that I was ready for bed, he offered his woman to me. "It will be my pleasure. We will drink and dance in the after-hours clubs." I thanked him no, finished my pastis, and retreated to the room where Balloon Hat was snoring loudly, and the air smelled of ninety percent DEET.

Wading through this busy city to find the shortest way into Mali, the Balloon Hat found numerous obstacles, the only direct road being a sand track through the long border zone, rendering any organized bus travel impossible. A high clearance, four-wheel drive vehicle was needed because no one could vouch for the existence of a continuous road, much less it's traveling condition. There were now entire days devoted to figuring out where to find such a vehicle and how to afford it, and if it even remained possible to reach Timbuktu or any of the other ancient trading towns along the delta in an ever-shrinking window of time.

Sitting on the stoop of our hut almost a week after arrival, just when all energies had given way to isolated frustration---Charlie immersed in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Addi studying the vascular parts of a rabbit from a stew he had decided not to eat---a random connection suddenly panned out. A colleague of a friend of a cousin of a man who had been amused by the balloon hats during a small market performance found it in his heart to secure our passage into Mali on a Mission Order with the Ouagadougou-based Association of African Solidarite. The mission's purpose: to travel unhindered by politics, promoting AIDS awareness in the villages of the Niger River Delta of Mali. Apparently the balloon hats had reminded the Association's president enough of the potential festivity of condom use that he agreed to provide a jacked-up sedan of otherwise questionable mechanical condition for a trip through the Delta region and into the remote villages on the way.

Along with the car came a twenty-year-old driver named Noufou who seemed to owe some kind of favor to the Association. The trip would be rough-going, and it was apparent from the outset that Noufou would much rather have been sitting on a street corner in Ouaga than driving his first trip ever out of his country. In fact, Noufou turned out not to have any of the proper papers for such a job, and the Balloon Hat, far from being protected by the Mission Order from bribes and other border snafus, was continually hit up for various sums of money because of Noufou's lack of credentials. Even at the first checkpoint just outside Ouaga, our man with the badge decided to levy a fine for all vehicles carrying hazardous materials like gas and oil on the district's roadways. It was either pay him right then or be detained by romantic kerosene lamplight for hours or even days. So much for international cooperation. In Africa, the white man travels with a large dollar sign pasted to his forehead.

Frontiers without Games

As Noufou attempted to use a broken jack to raise the car, Addi decided to tie his apron around his waist and blow up a few hats---take his mind off the quickly worsening problem of a break down in the middle of nowhere rather than panic his way through an afternoon. Charlie had no such luxury as good portrait photos require much more of a kind connection to the subject in the viewfinder. Where Addi can disarm the potential enemy with the magic in his hand, Charlie must engage and win a person over through a sensitive and conciliatory demeanor designed to dissolve the metal barrier of the camera.

Noufou, cursing the broken jack and unaware of the rising tensions for money, asked fifteen villagers to lift the car so he could change the tire. White Shirt happened to be busy at the moment arguing angrily with Charlie over the price of a photo. The other villagers had become entranced by Addi's balloon-twisting and could not understand the hard feelings being generated by such an amusing situation. But White Shirt was relentless, bent on convincing the group not to be entertained by such opportunists stealing images of Africans. White Shirt's hostility toward the Balloon Hat had fast come to the point where a "Plan B - quick escape" needed consideration. Charlie, simply by holding a camera, had become the embodiment of patronizing Western arrogance, and was being surrounded by ever more villagers as White Shirt continued his diatribe in the local language. At that moment, Noufou was just finishing with the tire and  suddenly began to understand the urgency of the situation. He jumped behind the wheel and summoned the Balloon Hat to get in quickly.

Strange to have an entire village fascinated by the absurd arrival of a beige Toyota being pushed by men with balloons, only to have the ad-hoc leader of the group take it for what it could only be in any cynic's mind: a financial opportunity. Of course this is just what the Balloon Hat is banking on by traveling around the world on its shoestring budget---the eventual book deal and its potentially lucrative merchandising tie-ins. If only we could have sipped these pure and sweet ironies of the road like water, there would have been no need for the expensive Swiss filter, and no cause for all the parasites we received anyway.
 

What Façade?

"But why?" he asked, as Addi bounded out of the still-moving car and ran across the red dust a hundred yards with the denim apron of balloons in his hand. Charlie followed fast. Noufou sat at the wheel shaking his head with disdain.

"Those men are bearded men. It is not good. They do not want an intrusion. Dangerous. They use their knives to chase your friends away."

Addi was already in the middle of the first hat for the oldest in the group, a small man dressed in the rich blue tunic of the Sahel, when Noufou decided it was safe enough to get out of the car himself. The shepherd was staring at the balloons with a half-smile, happy to break up his day of herding with such a strange entertainment. Now and then he and the others would glance ahead to their flock receding in the distance, careful not to lose them from sight but far too intrigued with these strange fools in the middle of nowhere to leave the scene. No words were spoken between the two parties. None were needed. A connection had been made and the Balloon Hat could not offer enough thanks to the shepherds for turning this miserable day to ecstasy. With thanks by way of handshakes, the shepherds took their leave, holding hands to hats as they ran to catch up to the flock, now almost a half mile down the ridge.

The thick grey wall in the sky was coming closer as the car climbed up the switchbacks over the ridge. At the top was an encampment of no more than five or six stone huts. This time Noufou stopped the car without asking, and everybody piled out without discussion.

First, the bearded one---white cap, the elder. The grey wall was almost to the bottom of the ridge, rolling in at gale force. Not much time then, everyone could see---maybe time for one or two more hats. With a glance to the horizon, the elder chose the smallest boy, the only completely naked person in the group, to receive the last hat. The little boy was dazed at the sight and thought of what had just entered his life. And then for the test, the all-important photo, he covered his penis with shrewd modesty, only to be cajoled to uncover for the camera by the fifteen men around him. He complied slowly, as everyone else let out hearty laughs. And then the first gust arrived, setting us all on edge. It turned out not to be rain, but dust---the harmattan from the north come late for its season, and the storm was just beginning. Running for shelter and the car, both groups had only enough time then to wave. There was a truth in that moment though---a simple, wordless connection between two disparate peoples and the realization that all was suddenly and ultimately under nature's serious command.

For the next hour, driving through the 100-foot-deep canyon that is the roadbed to Somadougou, a Tuareg hitchhiker was squeezed into the back seat with the Balloon Hat. Charlie stared dumbfounded as the nomad lifted his long blue sleeve to reveal an identical wristwatch. Addi was also silent, having just experienced the entire reason for leaving the comfort of his room at home. Noufou, for the first time in his life, was gaping at the major rock formations surrounding him. He had forgotten he was driving, and---with only the Tuareg's urgent yell as warning---barely managed to swerve the car around a place where half the road had fallen away into the bottom of the canyon. Nervous laughter was all the gall anyone could give him, though. It was too close for anything else.

That night under the stars on the roof of Sofara's mosque, a crescent moon, the Pleiades, and Comet Hale-Bopp, arranged themselves in a triangle. The comet seemed to shift from red to blue and back to red again. The Balloon Hat felt life, and sleep was very sweet on old straw mattresses.
 

Ignorance is not Bliss

Strains of a short wave radio broadcast wafted up from the courtyard below where Allaye, our host, boiled down the afternoon tea over his small coal fire. Hearing the word "Timbuktu," Balloon Hat stumbled down the steps leading off the roof to catch the tail end of a report that three French travelers had been shot by Tuareg separatists on the track just outside the town. Noufou's initial fear of the shepherds at the escarpment came to mind. Would the Tuaregs act any differently toward Americans pulling balloons out of thin air? We sat silent, hot, and wondering until the next morning when it was decided that the decision could be put off even longer by embarking on a short backtrack to visit one or two of the unmapped villages we'd missed toward the end of the escarpment.

About 6 clicks back in on the red dirt track, the Toyota's already woefully-patched radiator began steaming badly. A lift of the hood revealed that the fan had also stopped working. We all stood around the engine gaping at the pile of junk that had actually brought us this far. Mechanical failure. Good thing too, because nobody here---not even Noufou---could be blamed for this one. The lingering question of the previous afternoon had ceased to matter. Balloon Hat would not reach the end of the earth. Any attempt to continue north into the desert at this point would have proven beyond mere artistic insanity full into the realm of stupidity.
 

Brown Acid

A few steps around the first bend in the road, there was a stone wall. Twenty steps later, a gaze through the slats of a closed wooden gate in the wall revealed a village full of small dried mud huts on piled stone foundations. The huts wound all the way up a steep, rocky hillside cut with narrow switchback paths. No people were visible.

"Is this it? Where is everybody?" Charlie asked.

"This looks like the place, probably the only place around anyway," Addi said, pulling out a pineapple he'd carried all the way from Ouaga. 

We sat down on the roadside and began cutting the pineapple into slices, discouraged and wondering how to make balloon hats for an empty village. Ten minutes later a lone figure became visible down the road, and slowly turned into a small man on a donkey returning to the village from some long errand. He stopped his ass in front of us and stared down silently. Charlie offered him some pineapple while Addi pulled out the balloons and started in on a hat. Within another two minutes, fifteen villagers had appeared out of nowhere to surround the Balloon Hat just as Addi was crowning the "Donkeyman." The man seemed to take this as some kind of sign and immediately ordered the gate opened for our entrance. No words were spoken and there were no smiles forthcoming, so it was impossible to tell exactly what his intentions might have been.

Addi went first, as the hat can precede any explanation, and was quickly swallowed up by a crowd of villagers ushering him up one of the mazelike paths. There were now swarms of people around Charlie also, curious to get a close-up look at a person with blond hair and blue eyes. The camera had suddenly turned back on him in the form of some fifty eyes, and he could only imagine what strangeness could be held behind the gate. With mounting concern he passed through, calling Addi's name while the crowd looked on, trying to decipher his urgent entreaties.

"Oh no, I think they're beating him to death!" Charlie shouted, looking up the hill to a group of villagers violently thrashing something unseen on the ground with large wooden clubs.

Although it was most certainly a ritual we had seen in other villages in the region, at the moment, anything did seem feasible in the sudden chaos that had enveloped us. So we climbed fast up one of the paths to get a better look, and continued shouting after Addi.

With bemused expressions, the crowd ushered us ever further up the paths past old women in the shade preparing food and young men in the sun doing nothing, until we had reached the elders' hut on top of the cliff with half the village in tow. Addi appeared from another path followed by the rest of the village, and the two crowds merged here to from one giant mob of elated, spontaneous celebration. There was relative peace inside the elders' hut where seven bearded men lay on goatskin rugs and received us warmly with offers of tea and bread. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before twenty villagers had forced themselves into the room, beyond the bounds of village propriety, with a single urgent demand for balloon hats. The chief continued to be amused, but when the chaos had proved too much for the small space, he ordered everyone outside with his big stick and his highest voice.

The celebration rose to new heights on the cliff where Charlie began shooting a small boy in balloon hat performing a smallboy dance for what had now become the entire village. Seeing the immense joy Balloon Hat had brought to his people, and realizing by then that the only way to avoid a large-scale riot would be to take the heat off himself by pressing Balloon Hat's hand, the chief spoke up smiling and said, "Certainly you will sleep here with us, yes?"

The villagers cheered in agreement.

"Uh, we have to get back to our car in Somadougou before dark. Our driver is fixing it there." Addi said, shifting his eyes back and forth with what could only have been noted as...confusion. The chief of course could not understand a word he was saying, so he smiled some more as more balloons were pulled out in a futile attempt to control some of the chaos. At that moment Addi looked down at Charlie, content behind his camera, and around at the hundred people clamoring for his attentions. Charlie turned then for no known reason and shouted, "I think we accidentally took the brown acid today!" before just as quickly returning to the boy in his viewfinder.

"How do we get out? Too chaotic, " Addi stuttered into the din of the crowd. Charlie could not hear him.

Time stopped briefly then as Addi held a hand to his head, and it became abundantly clear that with Donkeyman's invitation to pass through the well-guarded gate of the village, Balloon Hat had indeed passed through a kind of shortcut portal to a another civilization, a place without Coca-Cola, a culture that had held fast to its original way by shunning the tourism that had invaded the rest of the region.

At that moment Timbuktu had ceased to matter. After all the heat, sickness, and dust of the road, the Balloon Hat Experience was melding, albeit chaotically, with some dumbass explorer's idyllic vision of Africa, and the goods had been delivered. Balloon Hat could only hope that the laughter and unity it had inspired here would be the only lasting effect of its visit after all the balloon hats had popped or deflated. But, having come back through many of the same towns on our way back to the coast and hearing tales from other travelers about the Balloon Hat, one does wonder whether the next white person who somehow happens upon this place or any of the other unmapped settlements off the track from Bandiagara to Somadougou will be presented with a wilted crown of balloons to make whole again, and what he will do in response. Rather like in the continuing aftermath of the colonial presences in West Africa, another one of the numerous aid groups appears to fill some perceived vacuum of need with a specific mission of its own, and instead finds itself being repeatedly asked for biscuits or soccer balls.

As even a Western-educated Ouagadougou professor asked us rhetorically: "What could be good about some European standing on the side of a road urging you to come have a needle put into your arm? We are born in Africa, we live our entire lives in Africa, and we will die here. What else matters?"

Back in Accra, Balloon Hat sat under shade on a street corner, unshaven and gaunt, eating fried plantains. A couple of white Europeans passed by walking tall in the midday sun, carrying brand new daypacks and water bottles on their hips. The Balloon Hat looked at itself, shaking heads and smiling. It might just as well have been looking in the mirror five weeks before.