Next one in a series of small settlements on our way was Yalgo. A town, or a village – I never knew where they drew the line to tell one from the other – it was a place where we got off the paved road and followed a dirt one instead, all along some kind of water surface. Whether it was some unusually lazy and pretty wide river or a particularly elongated lake, I had no way of knowing. My knowledge of local geography didn’t extend that far. The thing is, we stopped for at least fifteen minutes at a busy spot right by the water and it may or may not have been the centre of Yalgo.
As usual, it seemed that whoever could walk descended on our bus and there was this ubiquitous crowd about the bus door where passengers were exposed to some of the most energetic peddling of food and drinks along the road.
I pushed through the crowd of food sellers, and made my way towards the water. Some idyllic scenes of cattle knee deep in it against the backdrop of the setting sun were some of the postcard motives for my pictures. While the motliest of crowds tightly surrounded the bus and held it for a while in its grip, I roamed the stretch along the water’s edge.
With sun quite low on the horizon and the end of the day not too far ahead, it wasn’t even that hot any more. Of all the stops we’d made along the way to Dori, this must have been both the most colourful and pleasant one.
I could be wrong thinking that from the spot where we stopped I could see more or less everything that Yalgo could show off, but that was my impression. So when fifteen minutes later I was back on my seat in the bus, when everyone else was aboard and when there was nothing more for local food vendors to sell, I felt – maybe mistakenly – that I could safely say I had seen Yalgo.
