Burkina Faso
After leaving Koro fairly early we headed out to the border where we met the most realistic African so far. It happened to be the border official on the Mali side of the border. He quickly went through our papers but spent a little more time scrutinizing Erik’s passports particularly when he thought he found an expired visa. He yelled “Brown, come here”, I was happy to point out that he was looking at a Mauritanian visa and not the Malian one he was after. He was also very confused over the name in Ellen’s passport and yellow fever card being different. Since we were making very good progress we thought we would sit down and have a drink at the shop next to the border officials. The border official came and sat down with us and starting talking to me in French, the first words he muttered were: “you know what the problem with Africa is? All the people here think that money falls from the sky and they don’t have to work for it, Allah will provide for them what they do not have.” Having met many locals so far it seems that this statement was not far off the truth for most of the countries we have been to. They are generally a lazy bunch and would prefer to lie under a tree all day than do any work. You can’t really blame them for this attitude it’s so damn hot that even the shortest of walks breaks into such a sweat that you feel like you have run a marathon. This generally happens about 20 times a day in the heat. This is what led to our very short visit of Burkina Faso. After leaving the border official we quickly passed through the Burkina authorities with no hassles and drove to Ouagadougou, definitely a cool name.
The heat didn’t disappear and we stayed south of town at the Ok-Inn, camping was free as long as you ate in the restaurant. Good deal. That night was my worst. I couldn’t fall asleep and at about midnight I got up cursing and abusing the mosquitoes that were happily biting me most of the night. I grabbed the mozzie spray and a bottle of citronella oil, poured half of it on the small openings of the tent where mozzies could get in and used the spray to cover my entire body. Now happily protected from the little buggers I thought I would be able to sleep. Nope I was wrong, the humidity was so high that once I started to doze off I was quickly awoken by my sweat soaked pillow, that felt like it had been chucked into a swimming pool and then handed to me to be used for its intended purpose.
Once up the next morning we headed off to the Ghanaian embassy to get the visa. We got a multiple entry 6 month visa for 36000 CFA per person; it had to be activated within 6 months, not a problem since we were hoping to cross the border the next day. Unluckily we were only able to pick it up the following day after 2:00PM. That meant we would have to suffer an extra night of the high temperature and humidity before getting to the Ghanaian coast. We decided to walk into town from the embassy and were followed for quite a while by a strange character who wouldn’t say a thing to us and spent way too much time staring at Louise’s handbag. If he had grabbed it he would have been highly disappointed as there were no valuables in it whatsoever. I eventually got fed up and asked a couple of local African art sellers to find out why he was following us as we ducked into their art compound which included a restaurant where we got some breakfast. The local art dealers came to us a few minutes later and told us he was “a bandit” and was going to try and steal something from us.
We drove to the embassy to pick up the visa the next day, after making a quick stop at a supermarket so Ellen could get her fix on Europeanises, then we headed out of town and bush camped just before the Ghanaian border in a national park. Just after we had all climbed into our tents a loud explosion went off and it seems Erik and I had the same thought that it could be poachers or something like that. No one got out of the tents all night long but we heard voices and other noises coming from the road for a long while. It turned out to be a broken down truck that had blown something, it was still there in the morning. A quick drive took us the last few KMs to the border where we were met by the usual friendly officials thus ending our very short 3 night stay in Burkina Faso.
Due to our quick visit we have very few photos of Burkina, none that really warrant the effort of putting them online.