Motel Du 15 Ouagadougou

... up there on the roof and then after a while, inevitably, it stopped being so much fun. I was yearning to go out and mix with the crowd. And I couldn&#8217;t do it for simple reason of not knowing when she&#8217;d be coming. I didn&#8217;t want her to arrive and then not find me. So all I did was go down and sit in front of the hotel. There I became instant friends with the hotel guard and together we whiled the time away in the sparse shadow of one tree in front of the hotel gate.<br><br ...

... more captivating than the previous one. There were lanky guys dressed in assorted football jerseys, elegant women in multi-coloured, bright African dresses, beggars, workers, passers-by, bicycles, &#8222;Mercedes&#8220; limousines, babies wrapped into big cloths on their mother&#8217;s backs, and ridiculously tall piles of stuff of all possible sorts and sizes that people, both old and young, women and men, carried on their heads. And so I sat on that bench, never really moving from ...

... poorest country in the world, which once was known as Upp** Volta. And that was how this evening my airplane flying from Paris, with a brief stop-ov** across the bord** to the east in Niamey, *****, was landing in Ouagadougou. As some say, and as the capitals go, the capital with the coolest name in the world.<br><br>It&#8217;s not only the names, though, but also airports like Ouagadougou that don&#8217;t exist in my part of the world. When you fill in an arrival form ...

... at the 7/11 type store down the street. I confirmed with Alfonse that I could walk th**e (Mme Sirima had left to run **rands again) and he answ**ed in the affirmative. I knew more or less wh**e to go, so I told Alfonse I&#8217;d be back soon and started walking, with my new Burkinabe leath** bag in hand. (I love this new bag: it&#8217;s purple and huge and real leath** I got at the artisan village.) <br><br>It was hot and sticky outside. Ev**yone took refuge und** what little shade th**e ...

... some food for dinner. I asked if I could join her, and Emmanuel also wanted to get out of the house, and so we piled in the Mercedes diesel and went on a little excursion. I didn't think it would be such an adventure: we stopped first at Emmanuel's secondary school, where he last was educated in Burkina before going to an international high school in New Mexico. It is a catholic all boys' school, and so we walked around a little in the dark and mud and I thought many anti-mosquito ...

... for the gift and gave me a tight hug. I almost started crying then. Joy and Devlyn had come down to commons from visiting with eld**s to give me a gift from the CBO. They gave me a kente cloth, blue, with the words "From KYDC To Sarah" weaved in yellow. It was a sweet gesture, but I must confess I felt awkward accepting it: Devlyn took a picture on their digital cam**a (whose it was I have no idea, because Joy made it clear he didn't have one - did he want me to purchase one for him? He ...

... days and a bus ride across Ghana, a taxi to the bord** from a des**t town, and a minibus ride through Burkina Faso, I arrived at the hotel they had booked me into only to be told it was full. I followed my predecessors&#8217; suit, bursting into tears. <br><br><br><br><br><br> <br><br><br>And h**e I was, six years on, having once again bought my own ticket aft** receiving an invalid one from the organiz**s, and now they w**e refusing to pay for it. I was ...

Ann felt a little sick this morning; Dave knows what that's like. When Sanga came to pick us up for breakfast he told us some bad news. His 18 year old nephew had taken a car, not the one we are using, and hit a 30 year old pedestrian that was a neighbour of Sanga&#8217;s. After Sanga found his nephew, who had fled because he was scared, he sent the nephew away. This is so that the man&#8217;s family will not make trouble for the nephew. Sanga needs to ...

... at Boromo again to see if the elephants were out. We were told that they were and a guide joined us for the trip to the river. We travelled on a road or trail if you will, similar to the road to Mole. Arriving at the river, we were told that the elephants had just gone by about 15 minutes before hand. We then went for a trek in the forest with an unarmed guide to ...

I stayed in Bobo for quite a long time... I LOVED it. There were lots of things to see and it was fun to wander round, there were French expats to befriend (but still NO other travellers?!) and men who taught me how to play the djembé (you know, the big bongo drum things) on the street. La blanche's got rythym, I'll have you know. I am not leaving this continent without a full-size djembé, if there is ANY way I can post one home.<br><br ...