Well, guess what? We’re still in Tonka. Yup, we never left. The guy who was selling us the tickets was a total shady bastard. First he says 7 500 CFA per person, even though he accidentally slipped that its 3 500 CFA for anyone who’s black. Then he agrees to 5 000 CFA. I mean we can all accept being worked over a little, that’s fine, we do have money, they don’t. So we’ve agreed to 5 000 CFA on his smaller Pinnasse and we go wait for it to leave. After 2 hours waiting though as the other passengers are starting to load he comes over and says the proprietor of the boat is demanding 25 000 CFA total. Im mean what the hell!!! He had no reason for keeping that information from us until the last minute except to put us in a fluster about it. Besides the fact that we’d already agreed to pay 1 and a half the price of everyone else on the boat. Eventually we caved in to 20 000 CFA total. Fine we figure, this guys a total dick, but at least we’ll get out of Tonka. But then after agreeing to this inflated price he says that he wants us to go to this other village up river in a car where we can be picked up the next morning!!! What the fuck is he thinking?! The whole frigging point of taking his smaller, slower pinnasse rather than waiting for the bigger boat today was that we’d leave without having to hang around all night! The thing that pissed me off the most though was that he kept trying to pass off the blame to someone else. I mean if you’re screwing someone over and they know it, why deny it and keep pretending to be such a nice guy. What kind of a Muslim is he? I’m sorry but religion is really important in this part of the world; I don’t understand how people can be such assholes to one another and still think they’re pious. And seriously, what the hell would’ve happened if we had gone up to Kirsamba (that other village). We would’ve been stranded in some totally isolated fishing port with what? A promise that they’d stop and get us the next day?! No way!

So we left and we went back to the boat we’d come up on. It’s still in port for some time and the big boat coming in today is part of the same company. The crew had already told us that if we wanted to stay onboard with them and take the next boat the next day that’d be alright. So that’s just what we did. We slept on the deck, and I’d have to say that this was actually the coldest night I’ve had here so far. Somehow we suffered through it, the super cold time really only comes from 4-6am, and now we’re awaiting the arrival of the next boat. Its supposed to arrive around noon and I know we’ll have to argue the price again... hopefully though we won’t have to deal with the same jerk we did yesterday.