West as Far as the Eye can See - the Blue Atlantic turns Soft Gold in the West African Harmattan18/4/2017
   freshwater 'pimbi' fish (family Mormyridae) from Congo River, Africa; TIPTOPduTOP 2017  "Ce sont les échecs les mieux surmontés qui donnent le droit de réussir."
- Jean Mermoz, pionnier de l'aviation -  “If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility.” Antoine de Saint Exupèry - pilot, author
Selling hard-boiled eggs to make money might seem a bit boring and un-challenging to the average young fellow looking for a first job. But who said sitting on a chair at a shop counter was part of it? What if the job required being hours on the prowl for customers, carrying dozens of eggs at a time - on your head? And it's eggs - in complete opposition to the sage warning to never put all your eggs into one basket! But that's OK, it's not a safe little basket, but a pyramid-style stack balanced on your skull! Good luck! Don't forget the yummy hot sauce! And remember: you can't sell broken eggs, so every wrong step, unexpected sneeze or a trip risks a cut in your sales and a vanishing profit margin! Can't be done? Think again and enjoy below how the young pros do it right here on TipTopduTop!  Eggs-on-the-go! A few years of practice regularly porting things on one's head builds excellent posture and a surprisingly steady base for an unlikely towering pyramid of hard-boiled eggs, ready-to-eat, sold by striding sidewalk street hawkers everyday. A close inspection discovers all the necessary supplies neatly organized and tucked into the stack - clear plastic bags, spoons and a jar of red hot sauce to spice up the cooked eggs. It's a full service mobile station - the hawker peels the egg, daubs on it a dollop of hot sauce and neatly bags it up for the client to be eaten there or taken home to be eaten later.  Enjoy more photos at: Travail at J'vois nice Africa!
 The sky's the limit atop a lorry loaded with plaintains. Headed for the city markets, with hours more to ride, these fellows will be off-loading the cargo tonight before calling it a day. TIPTOPduTOP ©2016 “Green meant water, green patches meant farmers and farmers meant agriculture. Agriculture meant food to eat and food to sell, which meant towns and transport. They had reached civilization.” from: Iron Mixed with Sand Salt without Memory  A four-door sedan headed for the city is expertly stacked high with bags of charcoal, bundles of sticks for cooking fires and bundles of cassava leaves. at TIPTOPduTOP ©2016  Not a pick-up, but a four-door sedan with paying passengers inside and a seemingly impossible stack-up of bundles of firewood and more people - but it's rolling inexorably towards waiting city markets. TOPTOPduTOP ©2016  A truck loaded with charcoal and wood still has plenty of available space on all sides to hang baskets of ripe tomatoes and bags of charcoal for cook stoves to city markets. TIPTOPduTOP ©2016  "Do have a mind of your own. This is not just a spiritual matter only, but one which concerns ordinary manliness. I would do many things to please my friends, but to go to hell to please them is more than I would venture."
Charles Spurgeon  Leafless in the dry season, adorned with bird's nests, a baobab towers over traffic in West Africa. It's practically impossible to convey with photos the immensity of these amazing and iconic West African trees - here shown one of several baobab species, Adansonia digitata. Everything from this towering tree is usable, fruits, leaves, the sap and the bark - everything except the wood! That's so useless it won't even burn properly - not even fit for a camp fire!  A small size Adansonia digitata baobab makes for big adventure for the young, bold climber. Small?!? Wild and crazy is the norm for the trunks of the Adansonia digitata baobab, seeming more a science-fiction creature than a tree at first glance, its dry pulp fruit more like freeze-dried space rations than a naturally-grown fresh fruit. As it grows slowly over the decades, the ever-expanding tree will hollow out inside, allowing for an interior airflow. Some interior hollows in the largest and oldest baobabs are spacious enough to shelter a group of people inside. But there's something more for the informed explorer to notice! Many baobab trunks have horizontal ridges. This is not a natural formation, but made by the hands of people. Not a true bark, but with attributes more like a skin, the outer covering can be cut away from the tree, pulled down and off, then separated into long strips and used for baskets, even woven hats and other useful clothing. What would be called girdling of a tree, which would kill any other tree with a true bark, doesn't bother the baobab - the outer covering simply heals over, leaving a set of scars. Click on the photos in the gallery below to display the larger views: For the adventurous cook looking to learn more: how baobabs are used in cuisine is explained colorfully and clearly at J'vois nice Africa! Once there, scroll down the page to find the baobab gallery displaying how baobab juice is made from the fruit, plus baobab dry powders - leaf and sap - are used for traditional West African millet couscous recipes.
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