There are moments on this sort of trip when you ponder on what your friends say and wonder what the hell you are doing here. We all had that ponder yesterday - after designing the itinerary,we seem to be on some sort of reccy for the guy who sent us here. Ali was upset about the state of the place we stayed last night (I got no sleep but they do scrummy omelettes) and after the amount of soldiers, police, UN forces and camps etc we were expecting to be ambushed at any stage. All that vanished when we went back to Yoh this morning.

Yoh is a little village that we visited yesterday as they have a traditional blacksmiths forge. These are in every village and are common in villages in Burkina as well, where the men use bellows made out of goats skin buried in the ground. Anyway, we arrived this morning to see their harvest dance thinking we were in for another Paul Daniels. It started off with the women singing and a lady dancing and then suddenly from the back of the village we spotted what we had come all this way for - the stilt man! This guy dresses up in costume and mask and gets up onto stilts which were about 4 feet high. He strutted his stuff for a while and then started twirling around on one stilt. It was amazing.

Which reminds me, those who would rather stick pins in their eyes than look at my photo's, aren't off the hook just because I am posting a few here.

Everything vanished after that, no police, UN, soldiers, ****** drives. All became warm and fuzzy again as is usual in my world. Slightly came back after ordering goat stew and ending up with tripe and intestines. God that SMELLS.

We moved on to a village in a jungle clearing to visit more vine bridges. This is exactly the kind of village you can imagine being completely decimalised by Ebola. Not decimalised, I can't think of the right word. As we are right on the Liberian border, it's amazing they have kept it out.
The day has ended with more damson vodka which is very nice indeed. I started off diluting it with sprite but it is just like ribena and goes down very well.