A new week. A new country

Looking back at the day we finally left Bamako and The Sleeping Camel already seems a lifetime away. There was such excitement to be back on the road again. Monday morning, while Mark had gone off to the Nigerian embassy to fetch our passports with visas, everyone helped to wash all our crockery and cutlery, pots and pans and anything else that had been standing outside for these past weeks, in Dettol – the smell making your stomach turn – packed up tents, sorted out lockers on the truck, walked to the little Syrian supermarket for the last packet of biscuits, the last bag of water. At around midday we brought out the left overs from the pig roast of the night before for lunch, some nibbled a bit, others ordered their last Mali Sandwich from the kitchen, drank their last Flag beer from the bar. Then Mark arrvived back with the passports clutched high above his head! Jubilation!

“Let's go!” he said, and suddenly there was a mad rush to say our goodbyes to the staff of the Sleeping Camel, to Erik and Frits – with promises that we will meet again along the road somewhere, to the motley group that had arrived the previous day with Mat, and then, as we were about to board the truck, Mark started the engine, and ---- ku-tuck ku-tuck -- flat battery! – and that had us all go sit down again – and wait... But, waiting for five weeks for our visas, another ten minutes was not going to faze us and all too soon Mark shouted for us to get in, we're going – and off we went, waving and leaning out for a last look of our home in Mali.

Our first night's bushcamp was set up with such excitement and energy – everyone happy to be back in the routine of getting the tents down from the roof of the truck, finding a good spot and pitching tents, digging a hole for the fire, chopping wood, getting the kettle boiling, chopping vegetables – sitting around and talking about how good it was to be back on the road again.

Crossing into Burkina Faso went without too much palava. The officials sat under a grass roof outside their little building, making the most of the slight breeze. Friendly, welcoming, every bit as lovely as we had been told the people of Burkina would be. No sooner had we arrived with our passports, than a long bench was brought out from the back of the building and placed under the tree for us to sit on. Not quite big enough for all of us, a second, then a third bench was brought out. Across the road from the 'immigration office' was a picture out of a Steven Soderbergh film: A small shack with a counter in the front wall. Underneath the counter a painted stem of a flower, the flower itself climbing up the right hand side of the wall. There was a seat of some kind in front of the counter where the 'shopkeeper' sat, a young woman in a wide-skirted dress, her legs crossed, her hands resting on her lap. The impression was that she was seated on this suspended flower stem, waiting for someone to come to her shop – perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps never...

Next stop Bobo Dioulasso – Bobo for short. There we stopped for the cook group to get provisions at the market and all of us wandered through the huge market in the centre of town. Wide streets lined with lush green trees, more cars, it seemed, we had seen in the whole of Mali. This market was also very different from what we have experienced before. Instead of grass-roofed lean-to's, this was a brick and mortar built market with archways, paved floor, steps leading up to under-roof areas where concrete plinths served as tables. But whereas all the markets up to now seemed to have had an ordered layout to them, this one was chaos. Instead of the vegetables being in one area, the clothing on one area, the wood carving, the shoes, the secondhand car parts, the butchers, the coiffeurs and wigs, the fabrics, the fetishes, the salt, the fresh dairy – each in its own area, this market was just a higgledy piggedly jumble of everything anywhere. The gaudy plastic hair accessories stall could be right next to where the goats are

slaughtered; choosing a fabric you might have to step over a pile of 'grass cutters' – I think the equivalent of our cane rats – big fat round flattened rodents splayed out on a tray, looking like a good harvest of road kill, and then move out of the way of a woman choosing the biggest dried fruit bat from a basket tucked almost directly under the fabrics display, these giant bats' black leathery wings and small human-like fingers giving a Goth feel to the scene; the bread loaves are hardly noticeable tucked between the brightly coloured plastic buckets and bowls on the one side and the yet-to-be-scrubbed offal on the other. But the people are friendly and smiling and welcoming and keen to stop you and ask where you are from and where you are going. I mention that we were going to stay one week in Burkina but because of the troubles we have to keep moving straight through.

“Ah – but the troubles are only in Ouagadougou and they are not really serious troubles. It is too hot so everyone gets hot and bothered. The price of rice is too high. The price of everything is too high. So this is the season of troubles. But only up there. We let them do the fighting for us. Here it is too hot to fight”. Were it that simple...

We drove another hour or two and when it became apparent that we were not going to get over the border into Ghana and were going ot have a spend a night in Burkina, I think everyone was secretly pleased – to not at least spend one night in this beautiful country would have been a great pity. Mark found a perfect spot – as he usually does – amongst thick clumps of trees and at the foot of a small rocky hill. There were ominous black clouds on the horizon and we quickly rigged up the tarps on the side of the truck for shelter before anything else. However, as is so often the case, the clouds blew over and the rain stayed away, but at least the wind had cooled the air a bit and the night was much more comfortable after the searingly hot day.

Early the next morning I was woken with the sound of swarming bees and immeditately started looking to see where they were. It turned out that they were in a trees close by where the hard round light green balls on the tree – slightly smaller than golf balls, had blossomed into perfectly round yellow flowers – quite spectacular! – and these were what the bees were after. I walked a little further and found a wide footpath winding its way through the dense trees and around the rocky outcrop. This was just a little too tempting for me not to follow. And the reward was worth the boldness! After a good ten minutes walk, the forest opened up and a large wide open plain with green, green grass and herds of cattle and goats and sheep lay before me – a pastoral picture of idyllic tranquility and calm. A little further around the hill was a small village of probably about ten huts where there was some commotion going on. No sooner had I stopped, wondering what was happening there, when a man on a motorbike started leaving the village and made his way towards me where I stood. There was something large slung across the front of his motorbike, and as he came closer, I saw that it was an entire sheep – a large, live sheep – obviously fetched to be taken to a pavement 'restaurant' where it will be slaughtered, grilled over an open fire and sold in chopped up pieces wrapped in brown paper to the likes of us – and anyone else who feels like a juicy meal of meat – delicious!

Needless to say, this little 'Alice-in-wonderland-walk' merited a big red button – a magical moment in Burkina Faso.

All too soon we were back on the road and across the border into Ghana. At the border there were four uniformed military officials working at two large desks in the immigration office and each one had to go through each entry form and each passport with a fine toothcomb – each one checking on the previous ones check until the passport and form finally reached the most senior official who checked the previous three's checks and then stamped the passport – one stamp on the visa and one stamp on another page. On a third table was a big television set on which the afternoon's soap opera was being screened – sound turned up volte voce, so loud the window panes shuddered each time one of the characters shouted his or her lines melodramatically for maximum effect – and that was just about every line in the soap. All of us were hanging on the walls of the office awaiting our passport's scrutiny and stamps and almost hoped ours would be at the bottom of the pile, not wanting to miss the end of this scene in the soap or the beginning of the next scene. The acting was SO bad that you could not help but be transfixed to the screen, mouth hanging open, head shaking – was it really possible for anyone anywhere to make such a poor film? Well, the answer is: In Ghana, apparently so!

Our first stop in Ghana was Wa. Yes – as simple as that – the town is called Wa. Here we all had an opportunity to find a bank that would change money for us. (In Mali and Burkina we used CEFA and in Ghana we use Cedes) There are not that many ATM's around in this part of the world and often, if there are ATM's they only accept certain credit cards, so finding money is often a hot and long procedure – walking from one bank to another, from one end of the hot dusty town to the other. In between you look at the shops and what is different in this town to the previous one. You usually, before too long, start looking for a place to buy a cold drink – any cold drink. You also end up looking for a toilet (and so far Wa takes the medal for having the most foul of foulest toilets in Africa).Once you have (finally) found a bank and an ATM that accepts your specific credit card, you then look for a place where you can buy a new SIM card for your cell phone. This is the easy bit. There are MTN, Vodaphone and GLO outlets at five metre intervals. Almost every built structure in every town and village and city is painted either in bright golden yellow (MTN), cherry red (Vodaphone) or fluorescent lime green (GLO).

A SIM card is generally quite cheap – here in Ghana it cost me CEDE1.50 for a SIM card (about one Euro)(The CEFA is about 6.50 to euro. The Cede 1.8 to the euro) and interestingly this was the first time my details had to be registered when I bought the card. But the transaction took no more than ten minutes and happened at a table under a bright yellow MTN umbrella on the corner of the road. To add the cherry on top, the neighbouring umbrella provided shade for the man with the coolbox which contained icecreams! What a pleasurable surprise! An icecream in this heat must surely be the ultimate bit of heavenliness!

TBC...