Bikes, Bananas, and Goats - Oh My!

Last Friday, riding my bicycle, I drafted off a goat.  Yes, a goat.

It was only a few seconds, but I had a chance to study the black fuzz on its head, the resigned look in its eyes.

Drafting, for the reader not biking-inclined, is riding behind a fellow cyclist so close you enter their slipstream, or "draft."  This makes pedaling much easier as you are sucked along behind the leader.  Tucking yourself behind another biker in this way is like taking a quick snooze, resting up for hard riding ahead.

The goat was tied down to the back rack of a black, single-speed bicycle.  Together with a brown-fuzzy-headed twin, it nestled in a large, round, woven basket, moving down the road at approximately 15 miles per hour.

I'm guessing that goat had never gone so fast before in it's life.  The draft it created was restful, though smelly.

I was coming down the mountain from Bugarama, a town about 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Bujumbura city.  After leaving my house in the foothills on the edge of the city, I had climbed on a good, paved road for exactly three hours to reach my destination.

For most of those hours, I marveled less at the mountain scenery and more at the pedal-driven transport industry everywhere in evidence.  Undaunted by the mountainous terrain, young men careened down the steep road on loaded bicycles, taking products from the hills to markets in town.

A sample of goods speeding down: large bunches of bananas, huge sacks of homemade charcoal, crates of empty beer bottles, clumps of live chickens hanging from handlebars, an occasional wooden door strapped upright on the rear rack, and of course those goats.

Video: Racin' the bananas downhill to market.

While bicycles going down were fully loaded, those going up were mostly empty, and mostly being pushed instead of pedaled - not surprising given the steepness of the hill and the local cycle's lack of gears.

The lucky bikers, however, or perhaps simply those who were comfortable defying death, sped easily uphill by grabbing rides on the back of passing trucks.

Apparently, the road to Bugarama is like an amusement park for bicyclists.  Or, perhaps the Burundian version of mountain biking, extreme style!

Bugarama itself, when I got there, was socked in with clouds and full of street vendors selling fistfuls of kumquats - like little yellow cherry tomatoes - in clear plastic bags.  I got a bag, just for kicks, then bought three wooden monkeys from the row of carved-crafts shops at the edge of town.  The wooden drums and walking sticks tempted me, too, but I decided to wait on those till I have a real vehicle in which to stow them.  No Burundi-style extreme(ly loaded) mountain biking for me!

By the time it was my turn to descend, a light rain had begun to fall.  The moisture kept the bicycle transport guys from braving the road, so I didn't get to race any of them down, trying to match their 40-mile-per-hour speeds on the corners.

But I did get to draft that goat.

Video: Bunches of bananas careen downhill while climbing bikers get a fast ride up the steep road.

My Soggy Soul Bursts Forth

Today it rained.  And hard.

It's been a dry month, two months, three months.

Is that right?  Yes, it hasn't really rained since I got here, and that was three months ago.  I've watched the hills become half-brown.

But today, water for my soul, a downpour, lightning, my hair on end, the thunder, my mind alight, body sliding into ease and slurping up the moisture.  I feel like I can grow again.

Now the grass will grow, too.  I've really got to hire that gardener.

Since this was the first rain in my new (for me) Burundian house, I ran around like a madman looking out windows to see where all that water was going after it drenched onto my roof, my patio, my hillside backyard.  No one has gutters and downspouts here, you must understand, so it's all waterfalls of rain cascading off of roofs, splattering onto concrete, churning away in dirt or cement channels.

And thankfully: no big pools of water, no roof seepage, no sudden stream splashing in beneath the back door.  Whew.

Sat on the porch, then, to feel the windy spray; gave a small shiver of delight.

With a freshly soggy soul - praise for downpour-ous thunderstorms! - I've been thinking about the blessings of Burundi.  A small (and by no means comprehensive) list:

Bite-size USB sticks from U-Com that get me, most of the time (well, half of the time), internet anywhere I have cell phone reception.

Motorcycle taxis that whisk me around town for cents, hair blowing in the wind.

Local cheese from Boucherie Charcuterie Nouvelle, Bujumbura's meats-and-lots-more food-ery.

Strawberries piled for sale on little round rattan mats outside Dmitri's, pineapples from the central market, avocados from street-side vendors, mangos getting ripe on the tree in my backyard.

A made-to-order desk I put together using a hand-made door laid on top of four tall hand-made stools; it's been over six months, you understand, since this writer has had a desk on which to spread out his papers and prop up his feet (imagine big smile here).

Standardized electrical outlets.

A foot-and-a-half tall, blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary that sits on the corner of aforesaid desk (at the business/craft fair where I bought it, my friend was holding the statue for me, and a guy came up to her and said, "I see you have a Mary, would you like to buy a Jesus as well?").

The scent of palm oil and roasting peanuts on the mountainside air.

Passionfruit juice, locally made and packed into little brown bottles of sweet goodness.

Inviting stretches of beach beside the now blue, now green, now gray and wind-whipped lake.

The view of said lake from my newly-outfitted home 'office.'

And, of course, orange dirt roads running through green hills, just waiting for me to pedal them whenever I wish.

Oh, right, they'll be naught but mud-paths now...  Hmm, perhaps time to forsake the desk and get my now-soggy soul dirty, too.

Passing Strange

Awhile ago I rode my bike south along Lake Tanganyika.  Except for a short distance at the north end of town, there is no water-side promenade.  Instead, I wound through city neighborhoods, often sensing rather than seeing the lake.

Eventually the high-walled compounds of the city gave way to a maze of under-construction houses - proof that Bujumbura is expanding - and then to gardens and grassland.  And a view of the lake.

Though I am getting used to being in Burundi, on this ride I still found a multitude of strange things to make me think, "Wow, I'm in a new place."

There was the heady scent of palm oil, the smell of orange dust, of burning garbage, sniffs of the lake.

There were teenage vendors walking the street with their wares - sneakers, hair dye, belts, dandy-style hats - draped over arms and shoulders.  There was a line of twenty men digging a roadside ditch by hand.  There was the River Kanyosha with naked boys swimming in it, with workers laboring to extract sand and gravel from its sluggish course.

Even the other bicycles - perhaps especially the bicycles - presented their strange sights.  One carried, on its rear rack, a man (not really unusual) and a dog (definitely unusual).  Another had ten live chickens hanging from its handlebars.  A third supported stalks of bamboo twelve feet high.  Others bore huge bunches of bananas or two butchered pigs or a wooden rack from which hung round loaves of bread for sale.

Then there were, of course, the periodic shouts of "Mzungu!" - or, sometimes, just "White!" - from people I passed, marveling to see the shorts-wearing pale-skin ride by carrying that weird helmet on his head.  Who's the strange and new sight now?

But, on this ride, the strangest sight of all made me feel, somehow, less strange.

I saw a man pedaling a three-wheeled bicycle.  He wore a white motorcycle helmet, the clear visor pulled down over his face.  Between his two back wheels he carried a pile of luggage in teal and purple duffel bags.  Before him flew the flag of Burundi and behind the American stars and stripes.  Water bottles proliferated around him.  A blue fanny pack cinched up his blue sweatpants.  And, taped to the handlebars, staring perpetually into his eyes, a Santa Claus doll.

I confess, I gaped as I rode past.  Then I went back to talk.  Unfortunately we spoke no similar language.  But it was clear: he's just a guy touring the country on his decked-out tricycle.

If we had been able to talk, I would have bought him lunch, asked him a thousand questions, soaked in his story.  But as it was, I was holding him up on a busy and narrow roadside.  I snapped a few photos and let him go.

Bon voyage, fellow biker (well, tri-cycler).  And thanks for being a more outlandish sight than me.

The Gifts We Bring

I did laundry, recently, in the bathtub.  In my temporary house in Bujumbura, there was no working washing machine.  As the uncertainties of my still-newly-Burundian life were piling up, along with the laundry, I had to do something decisive and practical: so I washed clothes.

I had never done laundry in a bathtub before.  But it wasn't too bad.  It's just like using an automatic washer back in the States, really.  Only, you have to turn the faucet off and on to control the water inflow.  Well, you also have to agitate the clothes yourself.  And, actually, you have to wring them out with your hands, too, since there's no spin cycle.

Ok, so it's nothing like an automatic washer.

I daydream about the US sometimes, the things I'm missing: shopping malls, movie houses, grocery shelves that aren't half-empty, an over-abundance of modern appliances, crowds that speak my language.

But it's not so bad here, really.  There's a lake and a beach.  There's good restaurants to go to for a night out.  My house has a high wall, a big yard, flowering frangipani trees, and a guard to open the gate for me.  The water and the electricity supply have been pretty good.

And, now that I have a permanent house, I could easily hire someone to do my laundry for me.  No more bathtub washing.

After the hand-wringing, I hung the clothes out on a line strung between a lime tree and a window's security bars.  The next day, taking the dry clothes back inside, I glanced briefly at one of my wife's socks.  To my surprise, I saw two dry, dart-like seed pods embedded in the weave.  Obviously, my hand-agitating of the laundry hadn't been vigorous enough.

Absent-mindedly pulling them out, I recognized the pods as some that we had picked up during a long hike in California's Santa Barbara mountains eight weeks earlier.  Idly throwing the seeds on the leaf-strewn ground, I pondered the journey they had made, traveling thousands of miles with us from the California mountains to Burundi's lake-side hills.

I wondered if they would do what they were made to do and grow a California plant on Burundian soil.

I thought, too, about how, in the Santa Barbara mountains, we had been camping with only, what is for us in the US, the basics - no electricity, no running water, without comfortable beds - essentially depriving ourselves for fun.  And we took that long walk for fun, too.  Here in Burundi, many live the camping lifestyle, but all the time and not by choice.  They don't take long walks for fun, but because they have to get somewhere.

After years of war, Burundi needs help from outside to right itself.  But does it always need the gifts we bring?

Some things, like those seeds, sneak in with us unintended.  I'm waiting to see whether they produce a wildflower or a thorn.

From South of France, My Tour de France

I had fun, in the last few weeks, following the Tour de France, the world's most popular bicycle race.

For the first part of the Tour I was living in a hotel and had the full privileges of the electronic world.  Every afternoon I would turn on the TV, open an internet ticker, and follow the live Boulder Report blog.

Burundi is, more or less, due south of France, and so I got to watch the race, for the first time, in its original time zone.  No need to wake at 6 a.m. for a bleary-eyed pedal over to the house of a friend who had cable.

I also got to watch in French, the language in which God intended Le Tour to be appreciated.  Of course, I understood squat.  J'etudie francais these days, I study French, since Burundi is solidly Francophone.  But the TV commentary was way beyond me.  I refreshed the live blog often to get the scoop in English.

For the crucial last week of the race, however, I was living in a temporary house: no TV, no internet.  I missed the Tour, and I didn't miss it.  There's good and bad to having most of your afternoon taken up watching a bunch of men in skin-tight shorts bob back and forth on bicycles so well-engineered you can lift them with a finger.

It got a little ironic, too, following the Tour from Burundi.  First of all, there were no black Africans in the race, never have been (though at least one guy is trying to change that).  It's a very white, Western sport.  For diversity, a couple of Japanese and Colombians rode this year.

Second, these men are riding bicycles that cost more than the average Burundian will make in half a lifetime.  Here, even buying one of the typical single-speed bikes - about all that's available in Burundi - is unaffordable for many.  Here, most people walk.

In Burundi, bikes are for work, not for racing.  They're built heavy and solid, so you can do things like install an extra seat over the back wheel.  Then your bicycle becomes a taxi.  You can make a little change, enough for some lunch.

Photo: a bicycle taxi driver in Bujumbura.

I confess I was thinking of the Tour de France, however, when on a recent ride I found myself suddenly surrounded by three of these bicycle taxis.  The drivers were all chatting with each other, grinning, pumping their pedals hard to get in front of me.

The passengers, women in colorfully patterned wraps, smiled from the back seats.  "Jambo," they hollered in Swahili, hello.  Riding sidesaddle, they swayed easily back and forth as the men pedaled.

I popped up into my big gear ring to keep up with these six companions.  We made a perfect Burundian peleton, I thought.

Then, another rider joined us.  Leaning lightly forward, he crossed his arms casually atop his handlebars, as if he were sitting on a sofa drinking tea.  He cruised to the front of our convivial pack.  Then he attacked!

He opened up a gap.  Thankfully, since I'd been watching the Tour all week, I knew what to do.  I got on his back wheel.

We'd be a breakaway, I thought, hammering hard all day for glory, hoping the women riding sidesaddle back in the pack wouldn't make their pedaling men feel too bad about being left behind and whip them up to catch us just before the finish line.

But no, I was the only one racing for glory; soon I was riding by myself.  While I dreamt of fame, my breakaway companion just wanted to get to the next town.

The Miracle of the Disappearing Wine

It was a miracle.  One minute a half-bottle of fine Spanish 'Rioja' wine nestled nicely in the back pocket of my backpack.  The next minute it was gone.

Or maybe not a miracle, but a trick of some market magician keen to earn a few Burundian francs.  He would leap suddenly in front of me, grin, and pull the missing bottle from an empty hat.

I had just stopped at the Beronia grocery shop, where, along with two packets of good, green Spanish olives, I impulse-bought the wine.  Zipping my purchases into the back pocket of my pack, I slung it on my back and marched into the teeming streets of downtown Bujumbura.  Next stop: buy some bed sheets at the marche central.

The central market is the epicenter of Bujumbura.  Under a high pavilion roof, merchants stake out a cramped space, build a rough wooden 'stall,' and set up shop.  Wander there and you can find most of the basics of life to buy, but few of the frills.

It's a fun place for a foreigner to roam, but you've got to have your wits about you.  "Watch out for pickpockets," friends had warned.  As I pushed through mid-day crowds toward the bedding area, I kept mental tabs on my wallet.

But I forgot about my bag.

Suddenly, something felt strange behind me.  I yanked the backpack off my back.  Yes, of course, the zippered pocket had been opened, the fine 'Rioja' taken.  No miracle, no magician.

I berated myself: why would I dangle steal-able items tantalizingly in an outside pocket, zippered or not?  I grew up in the 'hood, I'm supposed to have more street smarts than that.  Dumb muzungu.  Daft whiteboy.

Which is basically what two men at some hardware stalls said to me when I stopped, found my bag open, and looked up to see them eyeing me concernedly.  I pantomimed the wine bottle being lifted from my bag.

"Well, it's the market, you gotta be careful," they seemed to say in French, though they may have said, "The moon is going to be full tonight; can I sell you some nails?" for all the French I know.

I continued on with my errands.  What else could I do?

After bargaining successfully for bed sheets, I also bought a half-bottle of Drosty, a popular South African wine, as a consolation from the shock of theft.  Determined not to have all my street-smarts desert me that day, I looked closely to be sure that the seal on the bottle hadn't been tampered with.  "Not all the products in the marche are 'real,'" my friends had also warned me.

That night, at dinner, I pulled out the bottle of Drosty.  "In the interests of full disclosure," I said to my drinking companion, "I bought this bottle of wine in the central market."  She looked dubious.  "But the top looks properly sealed," I volunteered.

I cracked opened the screw cap.  I sniffed the bouquet.  "It smells like real wine," I said.

I poured two glasses, then took a sip.  "It tastes like real wine," I said.

A minor miracle.

And, for the second time that day, a bottle of wine disappeared.

It's Harder to Dance than You Think

Lately, I've been trying to moonwalk.  As is most of the rest of the world, apparently, after Michael Jackson's sudden death shocked his music and moves back to center Earth stage.

There's even a fan site featuring video of everything from humans to cats to stuffed bears trying out the signature shimmy.  I see the flashing video clips and think: "That's easy; I can do that."

Growing up an Amish-Mennonite, I had no radio, no TV, couldn't listen to music with a beat, sang hymns acapella in church.  Because of this, I wasn't really aware of popular culture until the mid-90's, around the time I turned 21.

But I wasn't the typical Amish-Mennonite child: my parents' mission move from their grassy, faith-filled community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (the heart of Amish horse-and-buggy country) put me scraping my knees on the sidewalks in a Washington DC 'hood.

From there, even I couldn't avoid the super-stardom of Michael Jackson.  Playmates and schoolmates talked incessantly about him.  I remember some hoopla about a glove.  And of course they all tried to make their feet moonwalk.

I didn't.  You see, in the black neighborhood of Kenilworth, white men couldn't, it was said, do two things: jump, and dance.  And not only was I white, I was the son of a preacher-man who thought shaking one's booty was rather more like sin than like fun.  My booty, and my feet, stayed still.

As I got older, however, and my cultural world widened, I also started to move my hips a bit.  Just a little, to and fro, just now and then.  It felt good to loose the body.  Though I mostly danced when I was alone.  Like my semester in Oxford, England, where I didn't feel at home until I had cut loose, just me and the music in my head, on an empty street at 2 in the morning.

Here in Burundi, I had a very different 2 a.m. chance to dance.  A nightclub next to my hotel was blasting live music late into the night.  Though I had gone to bed around 10, I was still awake at 2, and the music just kept pounding.  I went to see what in heck was going on over there.

With my limited French, I asked how long this music would continue.  "We will be dancing till dawn!" a spritely manager said.  Uh-oh.

I managed to communicate that, in the hotel next door, I couldn't sleep.  He looked at me.  "Well come and dance, then!" he said.

I had to laugh.

I didn't dance, though.  Sometimes, the timing just isn't right.  And, like in Kenilworth, I'm still a white man in a land that's strange to me.

I've been learning lately how, just because I've jumped to a new place and a new culture before, it doesn't mean the next jump is easier.

When I finally tried the moonwalk, soon after Jackson's demise, my feet felt awkward, alien.

It's harder to dance than you think.

Bike Shops, Bonding, Brakes, and Burundi

In 2002 I bought a bicycle.  We bonded.  I pedaled it across the US.  In DC it was my car.  In Pakistan it carried me safely through Taliban-country hills.

In 2009 I left the bike behind in Talib-land.  Heartbreaking, perhaps, but for the best.  My cousin Glen tried for comfort: "The thrill of owning a new bike, I find, quickly replaces nostalgia for the old one," he (sort of) said.

And so it is.

I bought my new bicycle at Valencia Cyclery in San Francisco's Mission District.  It's a Specialized Rockhopper, dark gray, with sporty front shocks and new-fangled disc brakes.

While the bike indeed pleased me, all shiny and spiffy, the disc brakes worried.  I knew nothing about their inner workings.  And, I was taking my purchase to Burundi, home of no bike shop to which I would trust my brand new ride.

What if the rotor got mangled in transit? I wondered.  What if the caliper housing broke open on a Burundian rock?  I'd be stuck in a strange and hilly land, brake-less.  The world would turn, and I'd have no way to stop myself while careening through it.

The brakes, happily, survived airline handling.  The rear derailleur (that gear-shifty thingy by the back wheel) didn't.  Some unkind luggage lout piled too much weight on top of my boxed-up baby, and the derailleur bent.

The need to buy an Allen wrench to unbend this part occasioned my first real wrestle with cross-cultural communication in Bujumbura.  For how am I, speaking only English, to tell my need to shop attendants speaking French, Kirundi, and Swahili, but no English?  Options: 1) "Um, um, um..."; 2) increasingly vague hand gestures; 3) doodling incomprehensible shapes on a scrap receipt...

We figured it out, eventually.  Then with helpful email advice from the folks at Valencia Cyclery, I made the crooked straight.

The Cyclery folks were helpful in general, actually, facilitating my purchase during a quick visit to their city in between Pakistan and Burundi.  I'd buy a bike from them any day.

On the day that I did, I had to work quick - I was flying out tomorrow.  So after a little bike-and-owner bonding in some nearby mud, I spread my tools out on a gritty Mission District sidewalk and fit my new cycle back into its shipping box.

"I'm taking this bike to Burundi!" I wanted to yell to random passersby as I worked.  Yes, the thrill of the new was quickly replacing nostalgia for the old.

What I didn't realize was that, once in Bujumbura, sometimes I'd want nothing more than to feel again those gritty American sidewalks beneath my feet.

But I love the orange dirt here, I really do, and I go out now and then to tear it up on my new Specialized.  The disc brakes are great, the bent gear-shifty-thingy shifts its gears as if it never had to be straightened, and when I'm on the bike, I feel a little more at home with every pedal stroke.

Brightening the Corner Where They Were

I've read two books recently that shed light on oft-untravelled parts of the globe.  One is fiction that feels like autobiography, and the other is autobiography that's crazy enough to be fiction.

I had the good fortune to chat with Nicholas Schmidle a couple times while we both lived in Pakistan.  His tales of adventure as an independent writer and inquiring American there made me shake my head in disbelief.

Now he's put his stories in a brand new book - To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan - and it's a ride.

Nostalgic for the scent of tear gas (because he knew then he was close to the action)?  Check.  Interviewing a policeman while protester's rocks (and bullets) pinged around in rioting urban slums?  Check.  Making friends with a jihadi who raised an armed rebellion in Pakistan's capital?  Yup, did that too.

Unfettered by formal ties to news outlets, Nicholas wandered Pakistan at will, taking his freelance reporter's notebook into the unlikeliest of places.  His ability to speak Urdu (the national language) and willingness to travel in 'unsafe' areas gave him unparalleled access to Pakistan's life and politics.

The result?  A taut and penetrating look into an endlessly fascinating and deeply complicated country, with stories and insights you'll find nowhere else.

And it ain't fiction.

The next book, though, is: Whiteman, by Tony D'Souza.  Yet in its illumination of real-life experience, it reads like more than a novel.

The autobiographical feel is no accident.  About an aid worker (Jack) from the US who lives in a remote Ivory Coast village for three years, Whiteman is written by a former Peace Corps volunteer to, of course, Ivory Coast.

Since I live on the periphery of the international development culture myself, I've heard plenty of Peace Corps stories.  Yet, as so often, it was in this fictional setting that I began to really understand the plopped-in-a-village life that I've heard so much about.

But that's what good literatures does, right?  It gives us a way to imagine - and so comprehend - the lives of others.  And the book is pretty decent literature, I'd say; I wanted to read it all day, and did.

Structured as free-flowing chapters on Jack's integration into local life, Whiteman lays bare the realities of international 'development,' and not always in complimentary fashion.  There's corruption, misunderstandings and mismanagement, sex aplenty (that'll keep you reading), and of course a little redemption - but never too much.

In the end, D'Souza's character bribes his way past armed checkpoints to fly home as Ivory Coast devolves into civil war.  As for Nicholas Schmidle, he gets booted out of Pakistan (twice) for his push-the-limits reportage.

Unfortunately there's too much conflict in the world, and too much world to visit to comprehend it all.  But thankfully we have writers like D'Souza and Schmidle to help us travel, and understand, without having to brave the tear gas and the checkpoints ourselves.

Mucking About, Getting Out

Last Wednesday I was thinking about something I learned from a singing Swiss man in Pakistan (my previous 'strange place').  We were holed up in the 'warm hut' at Fairy Meadows, that stupendous retreat at the foot of Nanga Parbat, Earth's 8th highest peak.

Outside, snow and clouds lingered, so he sat and sang - as all Swiss mountain men must on bad-weather days.  He'd been living in Pakistan all of three weeks and was already in the high Karakoram for a weekend.  He taught me this: on moving to a new country go direct to adventure - don't muck about!

I'd been mucking about.  I grabbed my bike and went.

Bujumbura lives on a narrow strip between lake and mountains.  Its highest habitations dig into hillsides; its lowest kiss water.  I picked a paved road that, running south of town, cut diagonally toward the hills.  Soon the road turned up, and up, and up.

But I didn't mind - I like to climb.  With a lakeside panorama opening below and mountain highlands above, I had plenty to keep me entertained.

And then, of course, there were the kids.  They waited at every roadside village; soon the slap-slap of small feet running became a familiar sound beside me.

And everywhere cries of "Muzungu!" the local word for 'whiteboy.'

But what entertained, or rather astonished, me the most were the other bicyclists.  These were young men who earn their living biking sacks of charcoal from the forested heights to city markets.

They careened down the hill at twenty miles an hour and more, two heavy and oversized burlap bags piled crosswise on the rack over their back wheel.  Often, one plastic-flip-flopped foot dragged on the pavement, an extra brake.

Already, they're my heroes.

For awhile, one of them joined me as I climbed.  He pushed his one-speeder uncomplainingly up as I pedaled my fancy cycle, outfitted with 21 luxurious gears.  On the steep sections, he could walk his bike faster than me; other times he jogged to keep up.

Both of us were sweating in the mid-day heat and sun.  I was getting tired and ready to turn around.  I pulled one of my water bottles out to share with him.  He drank gratefully.

I had to think again of Pakistan, and a day hike I took in the Kashmir mountains.  Out too long on a path more difficult than expected, I descended from on high toward Muzaffarabad city, exhausted and with little water.  A woman tending goats saw my nearly-empty bottle and called out, "Panni, panni!" wanting water.  I knew I barely had enough for myself.  I kept walking.

This time, though, I learned what I should have learned then - sharing is refreshment enough.  Watching my fellow-biker drink, suddenly my feet - and I know this is sappy, but it's true - my tired feet were light again.

My companion soon stopped at a roadside shack, but I continued, newly invigorated, up the mountain for 30 minutes more.