Catching up with my blogging – Christmas and New Year!

Sorry all that I haven’t written a blog for a while. Jon was here for 3 weeks and we were very busy trying to fit in all kinds of fun things in Dakar and elsewhere. I’ll keep this short and photo-based to summarise what we got up to over Christmas.

Delayed slightly by the crazy weather in Belgium, Jon got here late on the 22nd. We spent the first few days in Yoff, where I live: we went surfing when I got home from work, tried some of the local restaurants and bars, visited the local tailor to make some clothes for Christmas presents and I fitted in some work along the way too!

On Christmas Eve, I went into the office for the morning and then left early to pick up our rental car for the weekend. We had a 4 day weekend with Friday being Christmas Day and Monday an Islamic festival and so had decided to go down to Palmerin on the Atlantic coast not that far from the Gambian border. Palmerin is an area which has really suffered from deforestation and desertification and so there are a lot of NGOs now working there to replant mangroves and to protect the wildlife. We stayed on a small island in the national park which is owned by a French couple who moved there around 10 years ago. They have built 4 log cabins (but smaller ones than Jon’s so that doesn’t count as more productive!) and we decided to get a last minute reservation to stay there from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day.

I found out at the very last minute that we needed to arrive by 4pm in order to get the pirogue (small boat) over to the island with the other guests that were arriving from Dakar. As it turned out I had ordered the rental car for 3pm and so called to ask them to bring it forward to midday so that we could make the 4-hr trip down in time. When they told me that they couldn’t I was forced to cancel the car and to phone the other couple heading down to our hotel to beg a lift. Suffice to say that meeting up with them involved many misunderstandings, a few very French huffs and puffs and many tears on my part as it all got very stressful. It turns out that not only is my house not in Yoff Virage (as according to the French people, such an area doesnt exist) but there are actually several roundabouts in a 2km radius with a Brioche D’or boulangerie, a large Orange advertisement and a 4×4 car waiting outside. I still insist that their ’roundabout’ was a cross-roads, but anyway….

The pirogue to get to the island

When we finally did get there the place was beautiful – really quiet and calm with kayaks for us to use to explore the surroundings of the island. There were loads of birds and a few monkeys and so we had a very relaxing Christmas Day and Boxing Day chilling out with our books and making the odd canoe trip and going for a few chilly swims. It was weird to have a warm, sunny Christmas Day without Christmas dinner (we did have foie gras, yummy prawns and mashed potato though!) or cold weather. Jon had brought some champers and even a couple of Christmas puddings (sticky toffee for me!) to make it more Christmassy for me and so we waited to be reunited with the oven in Yoff before we could eat those. Given that all of the guests were French we also had a fair amount of good wine (one of the guests worked in wine distribution ) and became the ‘typical’ English people who never turned down a top-up!

On Boxing Day we moved to another (cheaper) guest house on the sea. It was also really calm here so we spent a day on the beach (after a mammoth hour run on the sand that, after a while without exercise pretty much nearly killed me) lying in hammocks. It was such a pretty place and we were some of the only people there so it was a great place to relax and do absolutely nothing! On each of the evenings, the guest house’s owner suggested that we go out with him and his family to special events in the area. On the first evening, Islamic New years Eve, we shared a traditional couscous (not knowing that our amazing food was still to come) and spent the evenings at the local village’s New year dance. The following day, he took us (by donkey cart and then car) to a New Year’s Day wrestling match in a village called Yayeme almost an hour away for us to experience the local festivities.

Wrestling is a huge sport in Senegal. Since the relative demise of the football team (having not qualified for the African cup or the World cup), attention has been drawn elsewhere and you see countless young boys wrestling each other on the beach. The event itself is a huge spectacle with loud drumming, lots of superstitious match preparations, a restless crowd and most of all, a lot of dancing! As the matches were going on, the other wrestlers would dance for the crowd, for the drummers or at each other as if psyching themselves up for their next match. This wrestling match was the traditional form with no hitting allowed and so it wasn’t too violent to watch. A bit more like judo but on sand instead of mats. On New Year’s Day (as in Jan 1st this time) we went to the big match in Dakar at the main stadium and saw the much bloodier version that time. Wrestling is now such a big sport that large sponsorship deals are involved and there are a lot of young people aspiring to take after one of their wrestling heroes. A student studying in the same building as my office told us that there has been an almost David Beckham-esque character called Tyson who has completely reformed the sport and opened up the sponsorship and advertising market in Senegal. The match in Dakar was televised from the city’s largest stadium the Stade Demba Diop. We were advised to get the more expensive tickets and were quite pleased to have agreed when we saw the spectators across from us being thrown from the stands at the end of one match. The actual wrestle itself is often over in a few minutes but huge screens at the end of each side of the stadium made sure that we saw a huge close-up of the most vicious blows several times at the end of each match just in case we’d managed to miss it the first time!

I returned to work on the 29th and had a full 3 days of work before the New Year bank holiday and long weekend. As well as the wrestling, we visited Ile de Goree, Iles de la Madeleines, the Keur Moussa monastery, a turtle sanctuary and had a new year’s eve party at the appartment. Ile de Goree is a small island off the coast of Dakar that used to be used as a slave trading post. The city has worked hard to preserve some of the houses where the slaves used to live before leaving the island to give an idea of the harsh conditions that many of the slaves would have tolerated before boarding the ships. I am sure that i’ll head back there to see more of the exhibitions they have established before I head home in April.

The rest I will no doubt mention in future posts but that’s all I will write for this time. Enjoy the photos and Happy New Year to everyone!

The Real Senegal Experience?

Since I arrived I have spent a fair amount of time feeling in conflict about my chosen way of life whilst I am here. Since arriving on the 3^rdDecember, I have been living with a Senegalese family who have a beautiful home close to SEM’s office. The family home has two separate buildings set around an inner-courtyard half way between the airport and the centre of Yoff village. I was interested to have a homestay experience at least while I settled into the country and my SEM colleagues kindly placed me with the Lo family where I have been paying a very reasonable £6 per night for full-board lodging. An additional attraction of the host family was that it would allow me to get to know the local people and in particular, the women!

Having already had the ‘pleasure’ of meeting more than a few overly-zealous Senegalese men on the beaches, in town or whilst using the internet cafes, (as described in my previous post) I’d unfortunately found out that a minute’s conversation tends to turn into a marriage proposal, a date invitation or even a request to be taken back to England to “simplify” the visa application process. These conversations can be extremely awkward, especially because people here are so friendly and I automatically want to be polite and to speak to people who speak to me. But there have been times when the man concerned will start walking with you and hang around for so long that you have to start being rude and really quite abrupt just so that he doesn’t follow you all the way home. So, whilst there would be many opportunities to make friends with Senegalese men, you get the feeling that sometimes it is not really friendship that they are after (made especially apparent by those men who do suddenly disappear when I say I am married).

It is not the same with the women. If you do see them outside of the home, they are far less likely to be hanging around chatting to strangers. This is not only a question of local etiquette, but a question of having time to spare. Suffice to say that women here work very hard, whether cooking, cleaning the home and raising the many children or juggling those household tasks with a full-time job as well. Many women of my age here already have several children to raise or otherwise plenty of younger siblings to tend to. It is no surprise that there is very little time or indeed desire to engage in conversation with a toubab! (white person)

And hence the supposed advantage of living en famille – a chance to get to know young women living here in Dakar. And it has been great to meet them. The daughters, of which there are 3, are all aged between 20 and 30 and each have a job or are studying in Dakar. Coming from a large, but seemingly well-off middle class family, they are ‘Westernised’ clothes addicts who like shopping, use the internet, call their sister in Canada on Skype and spend evenings in watching overly dramatic, dubbed soap operas (interestingly, from India, Argentina and Mexico!) with their parents. When it comes to having guests in the house, they are used to it. Along with their incense business, it is a way for the family to generate a little extra income on the side and the separate guesthouse means they can do this without being too disturbed by the visitors.

I have been staying in the separate guesthouse separated from the family by a fair few locked doors (to which we unfortunately have no key). Each day, guests are expected to return to the house for lunch (by 2pm latest) and dinner (8pm latest) to eat with whichever family members are home. Mealtimes are generally quiet or at least dominated by Wolof as this is the language with which all of the family members and the cook are most comfortable. As an English-speaker working all day in French, I can totally sympathise with them wanting to speak their native language when they get home from a busy day!

In that way, it has not been the typical homestay. At least, that is, if the ‘typical’ homestay experience is one in which you spend time chatting with the family, finding out interesting things about the traditions and lifestyle and comparing them with your own. Here, guests and family keep themselves to themselves and we have been told to come and go as we please. I have greatly appreciated this freedom (having not lived at home for 10 years!) and it has worked well apart from two isolated occasions 1) when I found myself locked into the guest house building without keys and had to call for help or 2) when I found myself locked out of the building and had to scale the walls, because the keys to the house had been taken inside by the family member and then not left outside for us to use. However, on its downside, such freedom when in a new place for the first time can also bring with it a feeling of isolation and, at times loneliness!

But before you all get too teary-eyed thinking and sympathetic for me being all lonely and sad over here on my own, you needn’t! As of today, I live with two Europeans in an apartment near the beach. I will be living with two people of my age who have been working here for a while – Gunnar, a German engineer working in rural electricity programmes for Senegalese villages and Annie a French-Swiss girl born to English parents, who has worked in a crèche here for 6 months. They have both got many friends, both expats and locals, who joined us for our housewarming party last weekend and I think it’s going to be a great place to live.

But herein lies the conflict and I do feel a bit guilty about having moved. At this apartment, we have wifi, mosquito nets, hot water and sometimes functioning air con. I will be living in a very toubab area of Yoff, close to the beach and the airport and surrounded by fancy villas and 4x4s. I always thought I’d try to fully integrate into Senegalese life by living how people here live but with this decision, I have proved myself wrong! By taking up the room in this apartment in Yoff Virage, I have essentially chosen to take up a luxurious expat lifestyle albeit for a fraction of the amount I spend on my mortgage each month in London. Guilty as charged!

A main reason for moving out, which I think is valid, was for my own happiness and well-being. I know that sounds overly dramatic but I think I under-estimated the emotional strain of being away from family and friends and working in a totally new and sometimes emotionally draining environment.  Having my own space and time to do as I please, whether that is cooking, going for a swim or just relaxing with friends is something I think I will really appreciate when I am not out in the field visiting borrowers.  And it is something that I wasn’t really able to do when living with the family.

And I do intend to continue to make efforts to understand Senegalese culture even if I am not staying in a Senegalese family’s home whilst in Dakar. I have started taking private Wolof classes before work in the mornings with the aim that by the time I leave I will be able to hold a simple conversation with people in their own language. This will also help for the borrower visits that I will be carrying out, during which I will be staying with host families in the ecovillages. I also met last weekend with a university professor who has invited me to have lunch with her family on Saturdays on the condition that we read English articles about Microfinance and Human geography (her area of study) together and I help her with her English language skills and grammar. She has promised that we can then practice my Wolof and that she will introduce me to her sister who is my age and who will, apparently, be more than happy to take me shopping in town (all the while making me practice Wolof of course) on Saturday afternoons.

So I’m going to stop feeling guilty and enjoy the pseudo-Senegalese lifestyle while I am here. If anyone wants to visit, you now know that I have plenty of room for you to stay!

Settling into Senegal – Nanga def?!

Mangi fi rekk….

As you might expect, it felt like the bus run came to a very abrupt end when I sat in Accra airport last Wednesday night waiting for my flight to Dakar. All of a sudden, it was the end of the holiday, the end to English speaking on a daily basis (or so I thought – read on!) and goodbye to the familiar faces of both Jon and my lovely travelling companions. But it also meant the beginning of what I actually came here for – my Kiva Fellowship, real-life microfinance experience and, of course, 4 months living overseas in a warm climate and maybe, just maybe, somewhere near a beach!?!

I had reserved a dorm bed in a youth hostel in anticipation of my 3am arrival into Dakar’s Leopold Sedar Seghor airport, having not been able to make contact with my colleagues by the time we arrived in Elmina. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered! As I made it to the departure lounge in Accra and found myself an internet connection, I found out that, in fact, arrangements (albeit last minute ones) had been made and a friend of my future colleague was due to meet me at the airport and take me to a host family.

So when I arrived at the airport I was initially disappointed to see that there was nobody there holding a sign saying “Welcome Nicki Goh”. In fact, there was nobody there answering to the contact name that I had been given at all! So that wasn’t ideal…especially as I realised that Senegal also belongs to that league of friendly countries where, the moment you look lost you may as well have a huge neon sign over your head saying “Open invite for you to come and help me/ sell me stuff!” Sure enough within a minute or so, several men had come up to me to see if they could sell me a SIM card, phone my expected host, call me a taxi, watch my bags or even show me how to work the trolley: all for an expected ‘cadeau’ to say thank-you when I would finally find my way.

It was at this point that I was so glad that I hadn’t just stepped off the plane straight from the UK. That I had had those 6 weeks’ holiday to get used to the chaos and bustle of West Africa so that this didn’t seem intimidating or overwhelming. And so that I had reached the stage where I had convinced myself that the email had after all said 3am which, in African time meant that he still had a good half hour before he could actually be deemed to be late!

And so I had my first experience of what I have come to know as the Senegalese teranga (meaning hospitality). These people can TALK! Here, it is generally thought to be extremely rude to start talking to somebody without first going through the formalities of greeting them, shaking their hand and asking them how their day is going. Which I suppose is actually absolutely right! At least it seems like a nicer way to go than sitting on a Tube looking at the floor and trying to avoid eye contact! But it takes some getting used to and I have been caught out and reminded by someone I asked the time from and a taxi driver so far so I must remember my manners!

It is also quite normal to be walking along the road and to be approached by a complete stranger with an outstretched hand wanting to know where the toubab is from, what she is doing here and whether she likes the wonderful country of Senegal. If I was ever worried about missing my travelling companions and being lonely, that feeling has now been replaced by one of wondering whether I will ever grab an hour to myself outside of the family home – even whilst having a quiet drink on the beach with my book I was joined by two different people who wanted to discuss the merits or otherwise of working for NGOs. And for the most part it is friendly chit-chat, which then develops into a sales pitch of some kind, or sometimes even a marriage proposal, but it is harmless and a few choice Wolof words can encourage people to leave you alone and try someone else! Plus wearing a ring (albeit a cheap silver one from Buenos Aires) on the left hand can help too! Congratulations to me who became a married woman a few times this week!

Living with the host family has been mostly focused around meal times. Each day at 2pm and and 8pm I return to the house to sit on the floor around a big bowl of food which we all share together. The family is fairly wealthy and has a nice home just 10 mins from the office. Three out of 4 daughters still live there (the oldest has moved to Canada) and at least one of the sons too. For this first week, I have been staying in the family’s out-house with two American girls who have spent their University semester studying Sustainable Development here. Meals invariably consist of rice (fine by me!) and fish (less of a fan!) with lots of little bones that you have to subtly pile up on the mat by your side. We think the remains of the Eid Al-Adha which is called Tabaski here may now be over (phew – it was a fortnight ago) – I’m pretty sure we had the last of it in the rice with intestines meal last week.

Work has started this week and is going well. It has taken a while to get going as my colleagues have been pretty busy with a director from the States here as well. I have planned to do my first trip into the field next week in the very South of Senegal in the region of Casamance. I’ve been assured its an absolutely beautiful place with amazing lush scenery and I will be going with my colleague, Bouba who is from the region, to meet Kiva borrowers. I will be coming back a few days earlier than him to avoid getting back on Christmas morning and then will have Jon arriving the following day . My other colleagues include an English guy and an Italian who are working on a special project to bring solar energy to the villagers we work with at SEM – a project I thought i was meant to be looking into until I turned up and realised that they were here! There is also Ngone with whom I will surely visit some villages in the Northern part of Senegal come January.

Until then, suffice to say that I am settling in fine and trying to keep myself busy and out of trouble! Wolof classes started yesterday (i am taking private lessons) and I hope to impress Jon with fluent Nanga def‘s in a fortnight’s time…hmmm maybe not!

An all-too-brief summary of Ghana

Ghana is worth so much more than a brief summary, but I am now in Senegal and have other important things to occupy my time so its going to have to do…Some highlights, lowlights etc for you…

In a nutshell:
Day 32: Kintampo

Highlight: joining the crowds of teenagers using the waterfall rocks as if they were a slide at a water park on the public holiday of Tabaski
Lowlight: being jumped on by one of aforementioned teenagers on the way down (which Jon found amusing!), attempting to hold conversations with very drunk Ghanaian girls!, Jossy’s discovery of the ‘perfectly fine’ toilet in the full light of day the next morning

Day 33: Boambeng-Fiema Monkey sanctuary

Highlight: feeding a family of mona monkeys bananas, deep frying mars bars and making banana pancakes
Lowlight: listening to a song of birthday boy Matt’s request over and over again and being forced to do a robot dance along to it

Days 34 and 35: Kumasi – 2nd city of Ghana

Highlight: turning a local football match into a shopping spree (food and other) with a few wonderful purchases of red/white visers with “Fabulous…the best” emblazoned on them!, sharing a yummy bottle of S. African red at Sanbra and then a full pineapple for breakfast for the equivalent of 40 pence
Lowlight: Matt getting malaria on his first day of being 36…ouch!, a work-clothes shopping outing with the least helpful shop assistant of all time (she actually didn’t let me even look at the clothes!)

Day 36: Elmina – our final destination


Highlight: sleeping in beautiful cabins with an outside, open air bathroom at the Stumble Inn, Elmina; our goodbye feast with drumming and amazing dance performance, seeing the new kindergarten school that Sabre have been building
Lowlight: a double dosage of tuna after so many blissful weeks avoiding it (although that’s just me….it was yummy for all the tuna lovers!!!)

Day 37: Leaving from Accra
Highlight: Dinner with Jon’s cousins and their adorable kids whilst doing Ghanaian drumming and dancing; hot shower thanks to aforementioned hosts!
Lowlight: spending as much time negotiating Accra rush hour traffic as covering the 150km to get to Accra in the first place; spending most of the 150km with white knuckles and watching ‘interesting’ overtaking and over-overtaking techniques!

Days 30 and 31 – Mole National Park

The roads in Northern Ghana leave a lot to be desired. The trip to the town of Wa took us around 4 hours despite being little over 100km. However, the noises of the village coming to life at around 5:30am this morning ensure that we were up and about early and leaving the village on the dot of 7:30am waving our goodbyes and thanking the community for their kind hospitality.

Wa is a dusty small town in the North West of Ghana. We used it primarily for a chance to change money, get lunch and even use the internet, of which we managed 2 out of 3 successfully and struggled with probably the slowest internet yet for half an hour before giving up and finding lunch. Lunch was a real treat (sorry, I realise I talk about food a lot in this post) mostly because it was so surprisingly good. We found a lady on a less-busy street with a huge bowl of rice and asked her to give us a bag of whatever she had. Luckily there was a younger guy there waiting to buy food and he was able to suggest what we should have. It turned out that in her various pots of pans, she had ingredients including rice, black-eyed peas, noodles, cabbage, spicy beef and tomato/chilli oil, all of which she lumped in a bag asking us for a cedi (less than 50p) each. Delicious!

Around 6pm we made it to Mole National Park – the entrance of which is 80km up a dirt track with its fair share of potholes and other bumps. We headed straight for the bar only to bump into Jon’s second cousin, Rachel and her family, who have been living in Accra for a few months and were on a few days holiday in Mole while Rachel’s sister is over to visit. Rachel works for DFID in Education and Health Programs and Jon had been in contact with her to potentially arrange a meet-up in Accra next week. But to both their surprise, we all ended up at the same motel in the park anyway. What are the chances?!

On Thursday morning (Happy Thanksgiving, Kristy) we woke with the sun to take a 7am safari walk with our guide Christopher. The safaris at Mole are ridiculously good value with each person paying 3 cedis (less than £1.50) for each hour walking around with a guide. The park has a good range of animal and bird species and in that first walk we saw warthogs, baboons, green monkeys, pata monkeys, various antelopes and even an elephant. Elephant sightings are quite rare these days, especially at this time in the year which is mating season, but Christopher tracked one down using footprints and clearings through trees within the allocated 2 hours. It was actually quite amusing how we found it because we were all trekking through some thick forest and found a rather recent looking elephant poo! We were all busy saying to each other how ‘fresh’ and ‘recent’ it looked when we looked up to see the old fella standing no more than 10m away in front of us!

Thoroughly contented with our morning safari, we headed back to the motel for a swim, a read and a bite to eat and then some of us went out for more – this time in a Land Rover. No elephants this time, but a lot of ‘boks’, warthogs and some bird sightings as well as a really beautiful sunset over a large watering hole. Once we got back we found out that those who had stayed behind (half the group) had seen an elephant from the pool and had also managed to be thieved by a baboon who had made off with our Thanksgiving pineapple dessert! Following that and an unsuccessful trip for vegetables in the nearest town by Matt we decided to have our Thanksgiving dinner at the hotel instead and ordered some roasted guinea fowl with rice and potatoes. Not a bad way to celebrate Thanksgiving given that we are in a National Park in Western Africa.

Day 29 – Crossing into Ghana

Tuesday was spent with a long day of driving into Ghana. It took us a while to leave Bobo because we needed to make various trips into town before leaving – some to use the internet, others to buy more food supplies – and then we needed to find a garage who had the necessary equipment to top up our oil and lube the axle. We found a well-manned Shell garage and while they went to work, we went to find a café so that Jon could have his first ‘proper’ coffee since starting the trip.

The café was full of men having omelettes for breakfast or sitting in small groups sipping coffee. Throughout the trip, the people we have come into contact with in places like these – cafes, bars and restaurants – as well as in positions working with tourists as guides, campsite owners etc have predominantly been men. The women are out working, manning the street stalls, looking after children and tending the home. The men, unless they work in the tourism industry seem to spend a lot more time relaxing with friends, chatting over a coffee or something stronger. This goes the same for the children – most of whom we meet are boys who are presumably ‘allowed’ to have this contact with tourists and to try their best to bring home empty bottles (which they re-use or sell), money or leftover food. I can only presume that the young girls are either protected from such exposure to strangers or are busy at home looking after younger siblings and helping their mother to juggle work and home-making.

Once the vehicle had been tended to, we got on the road and made the 5 or so hour journey to the Ghanaian border – our last crossing as a group. Ghana is an English-speaking country surrounded by a sea of French-speaking ones – Cote D’Ivoire to the West, Togo to the East and Burkina Faso to the North. For all in the group, this came as a relief – firstly to the French-speakers amongst us who no longer had to do the tasks that supposedly required foreign-language communication and secondly to all the others who can now understand what is going on and benefit from the added sense of interaction with the communities that we are passing through.

Once over the border, we came into contact with one such community almost straight away. With the sun starting to set and us in need of a place to sleep for the night, Matt pulled up at a village bar and asked the village elder whether it would be ok for us to set up camp in their village. Slightly taken aback and amused, the elder soon said that of course it would be fine if that was what we wanted to do and we ‘parked’ (with a vehicle this side it can sometimes look more like ‘abandoning’) and started to set up camp. As with other communities that we have stopped near , there was a great deal of curiosity surrounding this group of tourists, but many of the community approached us to welcome us to their village and to make sure that we were ok. This continued all night as more and more people heard about our presence and felt the need to come and introduce themselves. We made our usual ‘rough camping’ popcorn, much to the children’s delight and indeed to the adults who, after a few bowls had been depleted, pushed the kids out of the way to enjoy a whole bowl themselves. Then after dinner, we settled down to what is becoming a customary movie night whenever we stay outside of a town, and some of the villagers joined us to watch it. One little girl was extremely determined to stay awake to watch, but managed to fall asleep sat on the hard stony ground in such an uncomfortable-looking pose that I wanted to move her to a bed several times.

Tomorrow we aim to get to Mole National Park where we hope to stay a couple of nights.

Day 28 – Bamfora Part 2

Km count: 85 (back to Bobo)
Mopeds jinxed by Jon in a single day: 3

The next day we were up surprisingly early despite the late night out and we headed 11km into town to try to find some bike/moped rental places. As we soon saw, we were spoilt for choice. The town seemed to be some kind of 2-wheeled transport heaven with every other shop housing battered looking mopeds, scooters and even pushbikes. We found a reliable looking shop and soon paired up to choose mopeds and velo-moteurs to make the 6km journey to the local tourist attraction – a lake called the Lac Teriguela which is home to around 20 hippos who pop up to say hello mostly during these few months at the beginning of the dry season when they have enough water to remain submerged but not enough to remain unseen.

After all of 500m, Jon and my moped unfortunately broke down. Seeing the trouble Jon was having restarting it, various mechanics from the stalls next to the road came to our rescue and each started their own diagnosis of the problem. Deciding they had figured it out, they offered to clean the fuse for us, but we politely turned them down thinking it may be best to return the bike to the original rental place and to ask them to offer us another, more reliable moped. Sure enough, on our way back, a mechanic from the shop next door to our rental place recognised us (“you’re from the group of 6 girls, 4 men and a truck, right? Here come this way…”)

Once back, we were promptly given a new bike and should have heard the warning signs when he immediately said, “let’s just check the air in those tyres, though I’m sure they are fine” and then led us to another shop down the road so that they might find a tyre pump! Anyway, happy that the engine now started, we made our way back onto the road to the Teriguela lake and attempted to miss any major potholes en route. At one point, our gears, which apparently followed no normal logic had a problem at the bottom of the hill meaning that our progress slowed to less than walking speed and was quite some amusement to a whole group of school children who were been spoken to by their teacher at the side of the road.

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Anyway, shortly we caught up with the group who had sent Tom back to see what on earth we were up to and made our way along the last track to the lake. Once there, we paid our entrance fee and for a boat trip and parked our bikes on the shore. We were soon told that we actually needed to move them all of 2m backwards for them to be in the ‘official’ car park (a movement that allowed for us to find a slip of paper reading “moto 150F” (or, Moped 150F (20p)) when we returned. We were lucky enough to see around 4 hippos on our outing and the girls also received a very elegant-looking (?) crown and a necklace made of water-lillies and fashioned very expertly by our competent piroguiers.

After an omelette and spaghetti lunch by the lake, we returned to our bikes (and paid the parking tickets), re-mounted and realised that our replacement bike had already got a flat tyre. Luckily, there were two spaces on other bikes – one with Tom and one with Kristy – and so we decided we’d all head back to the shop, leaving the bike with a flat in the bike park at the lake for its owner to come back for later. So, I set off with Tom and Jon clung on to the back of Kristy’s (I still think he looks to big to be a comfortable passenger!) and we started back at a reasonable speed. However, just 1.5km or so along the road, Tom and I followed Kristy and Jon through a significant hole in the road which caused such a bump that their key flew out of the ignition and the bike ground to a gradual halt. After spending 10 mins looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack, we gave up looking and decided that Jon and I would push Kirsty’s bike back while she and Tom continued to town to notify the owner of the second of his bikes that had become un-useable on the return leg. I’m sure that the fact that they were both used by Jon (in addition to the broken down one that had been replaced) is purely coincidence…

After all that, we arrived back from our little excursion a bit later than planned so only managed to make it back as far as Bobo for the evening. It is the first time we have retraced our steps so far and was weird to go back to a place we had already stayed at – it almost felt like home!

Tomorrow, on to the Ghana border for a week in an English-speaking country before leaving for Senegal!

Day 27 – Bamfora, Burkina Faso

Kms count: 85
Bowlfuls of fried plantain eaten as a snack: 8

Today, we head slightly of-route from Bobo to make a short trip South West to some waterfalls called the cascades de Kerefuela, near a town called Bamfora. We arrived at about 12pm after a 2hr drive from Bobo, a journey which was about as quick for the first 60km as for the last 20km because it had been 5 years since Tom was last here and it was a first time visit for Matt. We had brought with us a nice picnic lunch with us – which in itself had provided quite a lot of amusement because on the trip back from the supermarket, Jon had gone to put the groceries in the boot only to find a pig in there taking up the whole boot. It was funny until we realised that the poor thing was tied up, making sad and pathetic squealing noises, probably knowing its fate for that day.

Anyway, sandwiches in hand we made the short but steep climb to the top of the waterfalls and settled in for a couple of hours of swimming, sunbathing, reading and relaxing. Well, most of us. Jon was like a five year old having found a playground and shortly took it upon himself to work off his lunch by climbing and jumping his way down to the very bottom of the waterfall darting in and out of our line of vision from the top and chancing it with the various snakes and spiders lurking amongst the rocks.

After a couple of hours rest, we headed down and, as is a usual occurrence in most places that we visit, we met Matt’s new friends. Having stayed to guard the truck, Matt had made yet new acquaintances who had already told him the best places for us to stay, eat and listen to music for that Sunday night.

Sure enough, the campsite was a nice one, with round mud hut bedrooms, a bar serving cold drinks and an open area for us to cook in. Most importantly, though, it had a complete petanque set with enough balls for 5 pairs to battle it out around the entire campsite undisturbed by any other tourists. After a long game (won by Rachel and Jon) we sat down to replenish our energy supplies with 8 fried plantain and a beef and potato stew.

At 8pm ish, Matt’s new friends came to pick us up to take us to the local bar which had also been recommended as a good local restaurant. For this reason, some of us had restrained from eating too much back at the campsite and were soon bitterly disappointed to find out not only that the Lonely Planet’s recommended oven baked pork was no longer on the menu, but that the chicken alternative that we were served definitely smelled like it was rotting. I am pleased to say the sweet potato fries I went for, were extremely tasty.

The music was a local type of drumming called djembe which was accompanied by xylophone and maracas and each of the group singing along. For a Sunday, the bar was pretty busy and we enjoyed the music for a few hours before we realised that we had out-stayed the rest of the patrons and decided it might be best to leave. Opting for the second of the two taxis, Matt, Jon and I made it only half way home before being taken to another bar where there was still a large crowd. We stopped off for an hour or so more dancing and a rather more ‘local’ experience albeit in a much dirtier bar that definitely wouldn’t have made it into the LP’s recommended nightlife section.

Day 26 – Men down!

Day 26 – Men down

Kms count: 355
Birthplace of Victoire (a.k.a Victoria)
Men down: 4/4

Saturday morning brought with it some casualties and we found ourselves starting the day with driver-Matt having been sick in the night, Tom following suit all morning and Andy concerned about his first dodgy stomach of the trip. With the common denominator being several obscenely large pieces of beef that all the boys, including as yet unfazed Jon, consumed yesterday we seemed to have the cause pinpointed and it made for an uncomfortable 355km journey for the boys. Jon showed the tell-tale and very worrying signs of being ill when he passed up the lamb at lunchtime (a very rare event) and felt ‘uneasy’ all afternoon.

Admittedly beer consumption may have had its role to play in the worse-for-wear state of all the boys. Yesterday, whilst some of us girls went for a relaxing swim and sipped some cold rose wine (how civilised), the boys tucked into a fair few beers before we went out for our dinner in town, The restaurant wasn’t particularly busy for a Friday night but there was a group of guys drumming and they put on an entertaining performance. Unfortunately, being the only tourists (actually, pretty much the only customers) meant that we were hassled unendingly by artisans trying to sell us their wares. Eventually we left the restaurant and had a reasonably early night having seen a small part of the centre of town.

Saturday’s kms took us to Burkina’s second town, Bobo-Diolasso, a place described as ‘charming and lovely’ by the Lonely Planet and also birthplace and home (for all of three months) to Victoria who now lives in Switzerland. Bobo is smaller than the capital city and known for its old town, large mosque and its shopping! We got in at 3pm and headed into town for a look around the shops.

The centre of Bobo is full of many similar shops all selling very similar souvenirs. I have personally been looking for a painting similar to one I saw in Namibia and have regretted not buying ever since! I even saw a similar one that a friend bought in Tanzania when I went to her house last year and reminded myself that it would look great in my lounge. Unfortunately I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for but still found some interesting cloth paintings that may have to be sneaked into Jon’s bag when he returns to the UK next week!

Jon decided to pass on the shopping in favour of having his first shave of the trip at a barbershop called “Seduction Coiffure”. He settled down in front of a man dressed in what can only be described as a ski jacket (NB: it hasn’t dropped below 30 degrees for days) and let him work his magic. Unfortunately the blade that was used for his beard had seen sharper days and was used with some dry foam and no water and so the process was less than comfortable. However, he got the full service with a full hair-cut (rather short in places)) and also a nose hair trim (performed using a large pair scissors) and even a quick shave of any chest hair on show. When it was apparent that the barber thought he’d completed the job (using a bottle of rum as aftershave), Jon pointed out that he still had a full handlebar moustache that he wasn’t intending on keeping and so asked that maybe the man could finish the job. By way of explanation he then saw a can of Brylcreem that the man was glancing at and saw a picture of a man with a very short clipped haircut and full handlebar moustache and presumes that maybe he was just given the standard ‘house cut’ of the Seduction Coiffure!

A group of us decided to treat ourselves to yet another meal out while Tom and Andy took to their beds and a few others rested at the campsite. By now, Jon had also been struck down by the lurgi and was keen for his bed and Matt was hoping for a problem-free night of good sleep before our drive to the waterfalls tomorrow.

Days 24 and 25 – The best name for a capital city in the world

Kms count:120 + 230
Vowels in the city’s name: 8
Suspected food poisoning: 1
Cinema night in the ‘bush camp’: 1

The distance from Bandiagara to the Burkina Faso border is not far but it is very bumpy! The 100 or so kilometres to the border ended up taking about 5 hours and then a 90 minute border control stop meant that we made it just over the border in time to set up camp for the night.

NB (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you don’t want further details of aforementioned food poisoning!)
About half way to the border we had stopped for some street food which I can only assume didn’t agree with me (thinking back, the fact that I saw and removed a bug of some kind that crawled out from underneath the chicken reassures me that this is the case) because on arrival at the border I started to feel particularly nauseous and had to refrain from leaving the border guards a little memento outside their passport check hut. Thinking I was just severely dehydrated I downed a few litres of water which thankfully helped me to expel the food from my stomach just before dinner was served – surely extremely appetising for the rest of the group, but great timing for me to refill my stomach with yet more rice (of the special fried variety) and the second tin of baked beans that we thought needed using up.

The camping spot was a great find – unbelieveably quiet (not a cow or a rooster or a donkey in sight – yippee!) and full of excellent bonfire wood. Our resident Australian, Matt (why are Australians always so good at making fires?!) set to making the fire on our arrival and we gathered round it for warmth and an after-dinner film viewing of a Michael McIntyre comedy episode. It was slightly surreal to be sat in the middle of nowhere crowded around a campfire and a Macbook, but it provided excellent entertainment and lots of laughs and definitely cheered me up after feeling so awful all afternoon.

Friday, we got up as it got light and got on the road to Ouagadougou. With just one stop for some roasted guinea fowl (at 10:30am for a mid-morning snack) we made it to the city at 2pm. First we made a quick stop at one of the best supermarkets we’ve seen for a while and treated ourselves to a few boxes of wine and replenished the sweet and biscuits jars in the truck. We then trotted over to the Hotel OK Inn (love the name) for a slap up meal, the deal being that if we spend £5 or so on a meal we can then camp in their grounds for free and even use their swimming pool. Excellent.

TBC…