As Hand and this man talked, I tried more connections on the web travel sites. Dakar to Zaire: no. Dakar to Kenya: yes but wildly expensive and through Paris. Dakar to Poland: no. Dakar to Mongolia: no. This was fucked up. Why wouldn't there be planes going from Senegal to Mongolia? I'd always assumed, vaguely, that the rest of the world was even better connected than the U.S., that passage between all countries outside of America was constant and easy – that all other nations were huddled together, trading information and commiserating, like smokers outside a building.

"When does the race hit Dakar?" Hand asked.

"Tomorrow maybe," said the tennis-man. "Some of the cars are here already – the ones knocked out of the race. There's one in the parking lot. You didn't see it?"

We had seen it, on the way back from our travel agency excursion, a small Japanese pickup heavily stickered and spotted with dried mud.

Dakar to Congo: no. Sudan: no. Liberia: no. Uganda: no.

"Where are you from?" Hand asked the tennis-man.

"Chile."

"Your English is very American," Hand said.

"I live in Fort Lauderdale," he said.

There were flights to Morocco. Morocco didn't require visas.

"Ah. And you're here waiting for your friend?" – Hand.

Now I kind of liked the guy. Chilean but living in Florida and now in Senegal waiting for a friend riding a bike from Paris – he was like us, I thought, flattering myself and Hand – we were all world-travelers who defied God and moved and beat time in planes and rented cars. I tried to make his looks imply someone obviously South American, tried to pretend I should have known. Dark straight hair, wet brown eyes, oval face, short neat hair, good teeth, tall -

"Yes. It's very exciting. Are you here for the race?" he asked.

"No, we're here basically -" I started, but didn't know how to explain it.

"We're here," Hand jumped in, "because it was windy in Greenland." The tennis man laughed loudly, then stopped.

"I don't get it."

"We were planning to go to Greenland," I said, "then the flight was canceled because of wind."

There was a long quiet moment.

"So are you staying till tomorrow, to see the rally?" he asked.

"I don't know," Hand said, turning to me. "Maybe. We're actually trying to get find a flight out of here tomorrow."

"To where?"

"We don't know."

"But why? Why leave?"

"I don't know. We're a little jittery. It's hard to explain."

"Are you criminals?" he asked. He was serious and hopeful.

We shrugged. He accepted this. We introduced ourselves. His name was Raymond. I said I was Will, and Hand said he was Sven. They talked for a while about their jobs, Hand explaining weather futures – "… industries affected by the weather, like energy, insurance, agriculture… could hedge their risk… one industry wants rain, the other doesn't, they share the risk…" – in a way I was hoping, all the way through, would depart from his usual explanation, but did not. Then they were on to soccer.

"Well," Raymond said, finally, "I have to go. But let's eat later. If you're at the hotel find me and we'll go and eat. I went to a fantastic Italian place last night and would go back."

He stood and shook our hands and -

"Will, Sven, good to meet you" -

He left.

We checked at the counter; our rental was still twenty minutes away. It was eleven and we hadn't done anything. Planes, visas, cars. Waiting for cars! This was all so tough to take. The slowness. The futility of the time in-between. Out there were the Senegalese and their sea and plains and peanuts – sorry, groundnuts -- and beyond them The Gambia, and the sun was already finding the uppermost point of its arc, and we were still in the hotel lobby. The waiting! Every drive to every airport in the world was ugly, lined with the backsides of the most despondent of homes, and every hotel lobby underlined our sloth and mortality. This, this unmitigated slowness of moving from place to place – I had no tools to address it, no words to express the anger it forged inside me. Yes I appreciated cars and planes, and their time-squanching capabilities, but then once in them, aboard them, time slowed again, time slowed doubly, given the context. Where was teleporting, for fuck's sake? Should we not have teleporting by now? They promised us teleporting decades ago! It made all the sense in the world. Teleporting. Why were we spending billions on unmanned missions to Mars when we could be betting the cash on teleporting, the one advancement that would finally break us all free of our slow movement from here to there, would zip our big fat slow fleshy bodies around as fast as our minds could will them – which was as fast as they should be going: the speed of thought. Fuck regular "movement. Fuck cars, rental cars, and wheels, and engineering, and great metal machines that were always too loud and used this ridiculous kind of fuel, so goddamned medieval -

"Let's at least run around outside," said Hand.

It was eleven A.M.! We'd done nothing!

"Good," I said.

The day was bright and gaudy and hot – the air like breathing through wool – so we took a path behind the hotel toward the water, twenty steps down from the hotel, past two boys walking up, carrying a lizard. Over a winding street, the path continued down. A guard at the right of the path, between street and downward stone stairs, stared at us and then closed his eyes to consent to our passage – because, we assumed, we were white. Below, an outdoor patio restaurant, next to a placid blue pool, around which lay dozens of Europeans, tanning while halving their paperbacks, in groups of two and three. We walked past, backpacks on, to the fence separating the deck from the shore of large rounded brown rocks below. There was no beach access. Over the fence and two hundred yards right, two Senegalese fishermen were bathing in the shallows by the shore, their beach crowded with small wooden fishing boats, painted recklessly in bold colors.

"I could do that," I said.

"Liar," Hand said.

"For a few years I could fish."

"I give you six months."

It was warm. We wanted to swim but we would have to find a beach. And we needed to move. We had a plan.

First, drive south along the coast to the Siné-Saloum Delta to see mangroves and crocodiles, then

Slip into The Gambia, visas be damned, then

Follow the River Gambja up to Georgetown, then

Swing back up, into southern Senegal and

Back in time for a late-evening flight to, ideally, Moscow. Easy.

When we got back to the hotel lobby the car was still missing. Hand asked the rental-car clerk, who he'd been joking with and was now our friend, how many wives he had.

"One," the clerk said.

"Only one?" said Hand.

"Soon, though, more. Soon, two." He held up a chubby finger for each wife. "Then three and four," he said, his grin growing with each wife-finger. They both laughed. I gave him a courtesy chuckle. I'd had no idea this was that kind of country.

We watched the lobby's clientele of white businessmen and wealthy Senegalese, watched the men who served them at the check-in desk, all in grey suits and with identical glasses. We'd been waiting an hour and a half. We wanted to be in a car and driving. To a beach, then swimming, then to a national park stocked with monkeys and crocodiles, then onward and back here by night to catch the flight out. Along the way, today, we planned the giving of about $2,000 to passersby.

Finally the car pulled up and as we got in two boys offered to wash our windows. We declined; they said they'd watch it when we parked it. We pointed out that we were leaving, not parking. They laughed. We all laughed.

"Do we give some to them?" Hand asked.

"Let's just move first," I said. "Out of the city first."