We were up extra early this morning as we had to cook breakfast for the group. The sunrise was beautiful and we watched it rise behind a spiky tree with no leaves. We used the leftover rice from the night before and made rice pudding. We then packed up the camp, and were off at 8:30 AM, continuing our driving towards the border. We were enjoying what we expected to be the last of the nice road for a while - the road was good tarmac all the way to the border with Mali.
At 11:30 AM we arrived at Tambacounda, the last major town before the border. We walked around the market as the next cook group did their shopping. It was not a very good market - we could not find very much there and we were wondering what the cook group was going to come up with. We also went to the post office to try to go buy some of the stamps to collect. But we were told that they were pretty much out of stamps (they had only the smallest denomination and we could see everyone putting 10 to 20 stamps all over their envelopes) and they asked us to come back next Wednesday (today was Friday) when they would have more stamps.
We left town at 12:25 after a fruitless search for bread - must have been all sold out. After driving on for 20 minutes, we pulled off the road for lunch. The cook group boiled up some soup, and we had it with crackers. We continued on our way at 1:45 PM, and we stopped for the night at 3:45 PM. It was a bit of an early stop, but it was a good spot and we were 20 km from the border and we did not want to cross when it got too late in case there were any problems. We were therefore able to enjoy a very nice relaxing, afternoon. But there was a bit of a struggle to get the small amount of shade that the truck offered, and everyone would have to shuffle their seats a bit as the sun moved across the sky. We enjoyed some nice, cold beers.
After dinner, we took it easy around the fire watching the night sky. There were some light, high altitude clouds, and the moon would shimmer behind them and would appear and disappear as the clouds quickly blew across the sky. We retired to our tent at 10 PM and continued to watch the moon and the stars as we fell asleep.