Near travel-tastrophe

This morning, as I was getting ready to leave the house to go to the travel agent and buy my ticket from the Gambia back to Ghana (on Dec 18), I realized that I didn't have my trusty Lonely Planet West Africa guidebook. I sorted and searched all my things several times, scoured the downstairs of the house, involved the whole family... and finally gave up. It was nowhere to be found, even though all agreed that I had been reading it in the living room last night and hadn't left the house since.

Disaster! There is simply no way I can make it, alone on public transportation, through 3 of the poorest countries on earth, where they barely speak a language that I also barely speak, without a good guidebook. And despite having already been to several of the best bookstores in Ghana (listed, ironically, in the guidebook), I hadn't seen hide nor hair of a travel section anywhere.

I decided to go to the travel agent anyway (and hope that he could tell me where to get a guidebook), and luckily Kalila's mother Faiza discovered that the book had somehow made it into her car last night before she went home. Good thing, because the travel agent had never heard of Lonely Planet and didn't even know what a travel guidebook was. His suggestion was to buy a map of Accra...

Now that I've been through that experience once, I'm going to guard that book with my life.

PS - In a quasi-related experience, I had to visit 6 ATMs before I found one that worked in order to withdraw enough cash to pay the travel agent for the ticket. No one here uses or accepts credit cards, and I gather functional ATMs are only going to get fewer and farther between as I head north. Guess I'll be carrying a lot of cash...