TravelStream™ news feed for member slowchimes on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/slowchimes en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Sat, 23 Apr 2005 21:45:45 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1114306860/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1114306860/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1114306860/tpod.html Sat, 23 Apr 2005 21:45:45 -0400 West Africa

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Auckland, New Zealand

Well I've been back home now for some time, but since I haven't 'wrapped up' this travel log I've had a few emails from people not (ahem) 'lucky enough' to live in Auckland wondering if I'm dead. Well....as far as I can tell I'm not dead (physically anyway), but the reason I haven't written any conclusion for this African sojourn is that I just haven't really reached one, but for interests sake I'll share with you some smarmy thoughts I set down in my notebook during my last nights stay in Kokrobite, Ghana:

"Last full day in Africa, I'd say now is the time that I'm supposed to hazard a guess as to what all this means. Cynical as I am I'm tempted to say nothing. But really, what have I learnt? Especially about people? The experience itself has become such a part of my blood already that it's hard to seperate what exists now from what was there before. Confusion. I have again felt the complexity & subtle variations of the human beast w/ all its hidden shadows. The flipside of this, of course, is that we are all exactly the same, the same blueprint, we are as predictable as we are complex. But why travel halfway across the world to arrive at such generalisations?

More specifically: Africans - who are they? Again I have difficulty. On this trip I have been asked time and time again about the defining chrarcteristics of the NZ people, but have been unable to clearly identify them. How much less so then, will I be able to identify the defining chrarcteristics of the people of one of the most culturally complex regions of the world w/ only 4 months of simple touristic gawking under my belt & only four countries on my itinery?

Children playing naked on the sand before me. Grey sea. Flabby tourist floating on his back. Fishing boats docked on the shore, looking permanent, resolute, dtermined not to go back to sea. The wind has curved a coconut palm trunk like the beautiful spine of a deep sea creature. Today I say a hermit crab, dead on its back, falling from its doorway, claws outstretched as if struck by sudden catasrophe. Do you know what the part of the crab looks like that stays inside the shell? It's a secret..."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1107373560/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1107373560/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1107373560/tpod.html Mon, 21 Feb 2005 06:14:33 -0500 West Africa

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Cape Coast, Ghana

So much has happened since my last update that I can't really remember what I'm supposed to be telling you, so all the following will be brutally edited and hellishly inaccurate....Oh, and I'd also like to point out that the maps on every page of this travelogue are in no way indicative of where I've actually been. It's frustrating to cover thousands of miles of desert and then have the computer reduce it to the shortest possible route between two points, but it can't be helped...

Bamako was both a nightmare of total non-stop movement and a refreshing burst of life (as mentioned earlier about Accra, people actually LIVING in the streets, rather than just shopping in them), but Mali had got to me, finally, and I lasted no more than a couple of days there. The constant hassle, the liars, the overwhelming heatnoisepollution, guides, salesmen, the whole frustrating tourist circus that exists there etc. etc. Nightmare bus to Bobo in Burkina, explosive yell-fest at some slightly rip-off taxi driver, throwing his money on the floor and then picking it up again in the fear that I had gone to far and that he was going to punch me. Calmed down a bit and then spent almost a week in Ougadougou again, waiting for a Ghana visa,in a city that suddenly seemed a whole lot more welcoming than the last time I visited it. Spent most of my time in Ouga with the 'Far West' boys, a group of twenty-something year old students whose primary occupation seemed to be sitting in a dirt road alley drinking sahel tea from about 7 at night until 6 in the morning. On my last night there, when one of them, William, got up and walked away, I asked "Where is he going?", they told me "Hes going to go get a gun to shoot a cat to eat." and laughed. I laughed too, not thinking they could be serious. About 10 minutes later William comes back with an enormous gun, sits around for a while, drinks some tea, and leaves again, this time with a guy called Snake. "Where are they going?" I say. Again, everybody laughs and says "They're going to shoot a cat to eat", and I laugh too, it not dawning on me that they actually could be serious, not thinking that hunting domestic animals with a large gun in a heavily developed and populated capital city is a serious option. 15 minutes later William and Snake come back holding a dead cat by the tail, and are greeted with much jubilation by everybody. I get some photos of the proud hunters holding the gun and dead cat, then a small bonfire is made out of dried reeds ripped off somebodies fence, so as to singe the hair off the corpse. You have no idea how bizarre it is watching somebody singe the hair off a dead cat over a bonfire in the early hours of the morning in the middle of a capital city. Later they open its stomach with the tip of a ballpoint pen (the same pen they give me later to write my address with) and somebody else takes it to his house nearby to gut and cook it. I never got to view the finished product, as by this time it was 3 or 4 in the morning and I had a bus to catch at 7.

I finally succumbed to malaria in the insane heat of Tamale, Ghana, and spent a few days getting over it. Luckily it wasn't too serious, and I didn't need to spend any time in
Ghana's scarily antiquainted, overcrowded, kafkaesque hospital system, although I did have to visit Tamale hospital to pick up some drugs and visit a doctor after I got my blood test done and one look at the goats running around in the reception and the inhuman howling coming out of the consultation room was enough to convince me that it wasn't a good idea to stay too long.

Went to the Volta region where I spent some time in the rainforest and got to see the first day of rain I've seen in over 3 months (vicious lashing sheets that lasted only 20 minutes)(the 2nd day of rain was today, just a sort of aimless drizzle with thunderclaps).
Spent time on the ghost-like east coast, fishing villages, palms, desolate beaches and unswimmable rips, gentle coastal rot, colonial buildings eaten by the sea. Keta, Ada, onwards to the west, to Cape Coast, rusting corrugated iron roofs and disused slave trading forts, costal languor, grey sea pulling the land back under...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1106723100/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1106723100/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1106723100/tpod.html Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:35:27 -0500 West Africa

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Segou, Mali

Again there's to much to tell for my entry to be detailed, and a lot of my stay in Mali hasn't been really worth sharing anyway (plenty of simple tourist gawking), so...

The harmattan started suddenly at night in Niamey and blew for two solid weeks, tangling the air all in a misty dust. Children begging for food at the edge of visability, perpetual light oif early morning, sand creeping into everything.

Spent my last night in Niger in a town called Ayorou, staying in a once four star hotel that had been sacrificed to the elements: swimming pool filled with rocks, giant catering kitchen inch-deep in dust, sand blowing through empty courtyards, everything a relic, filled with dust.

Nightmare vision in Ayorou, wind storm at night, voices of laughing children echo and are filled with wind and sand. Passive face of a mule lit by the erratic blue light escaping from the bars of the welders hut, momentary loss of psychic bearings, searing dislocation.

Niger/Mali border crossing takes 15 solid hours, me paying extra to sit in the front seat of a 4WD while 27 Mailians share the back. The road is an insane series of potholes, soft sand and featureless scrub. Malian border officials demand bribes from everyone in the car. After everyone pays up we move 200m to customs where the inspector claims that our roofrack is unsafey overloaded and that we can't go on. What he actually means to say is "Bribe me substantially". Despite the fact that these words are never said aloud, everybody in the car understands whats being said, and a collection is taken up, everybody chipping in to feed this uniformed asshole's bank account (and ego). Despite our payment he keeps us waiting until dusk. We drive all night. At one stage we drive through several villages that are undergoing a plague of locusts (as if God wasn't satisfied enough with their poverty already). We wind up all the windows and hundreds of giant insects smack into the cars body like bullets, making a satisfying smacking sound. It's night so we can't see the villager's decimated maize fields. I chew kola nut to keep me awake. The tire blows, we stop and fix it. We finally arrive in Gao at 3am. The people who have homes walk to them, those who don't (me and two Malians)lie down on the rubbish filled sand in the lorry park an fall asleep almost immediately, exhausted. 30 minutes later I wake up with an intense burning pain on my leg and in my armpit. I have chosen to fall asleep on top of a fire-ant nest and am now experiencing their welcome. I curl up in a ball and pretend I'm in a fur-lined coffin with a good sound system.

Anyway 4 days or so later: Hombori, a strip of highway surrounded by giant rock formations, invisable behind thick grey dust still being kicked up by the harmattan. 2 or 3 days there, mostly wandering across the rocky plains, mostly lost, mostly trying to let the vast silence of the rocks eat my bones.

Later I was in Douenza, attending some kind of party thrown by a whole lot of Bella people. Slow sinuous dancing to a supremely distorted 3-stringed lute, the smell of Guavas, more begging children, arguments with taxi drivers...

6 or 7 hours by 4WD across the Sahel to Timbuktu (yes, Timbucktoo), a town which is such a total waste of time that I'm not even going to tell you about it.

Left for Mopti, 3 days down the Niger river on a public goods boat, endless delays, rice, dried fish and dirty water - the river snaking across the plains, banco mosques, bozo fishing villages with their reed huts and painted canoes. Watching the world slide past and not saying a thing.

Mopti then Djenne then Mopti again then Ségou. Rivers, architechre, elderly french package tourists with phallic cameras that require two hands to carry, guides everywhere, rip off arists, souveineir salesmen etc.

The capital, Bamako is next.

I notice I tell you a whole lot about what I'm doing, but not so much about what I'm thinking.

"No ideas, except in things."
- Jack Kerouac
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1104775860/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1104775860/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1104775860/tpod.html Mon, 03 Jan 2005 08:29:14 -0500 West Africa

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Niamey, Niger

Too much has happened since last time I wrote to give you even a semi-detailed account of what I've been up to, so instead here's a quick run-down sans details:

Fada-Ngourma, last town in Burkina Faso. Vultures harrass you from the rooftops. Three non-working toilets and a basin full of dried vomit - I was glad to leave. Niger border had been closed for three days due to the general election, leaving traffic stacked to the horizon and creating a refugee camp type vibe, as people slept under their cars and cooked with hot coals in the street. Border control itself was a mass of heaving people yelling at each other whilst armed guards manhandled them out of the building. How I got my passport out of that place without bribing anyone I still don't know to this day. Got to Niamey at night, due to regular stops for prayer. Niamey, a city with four lane roads and high rise buildings in which you still have to dodge the camels and goat herders. The Niger river runs right through town, during sunset the air fills with red dust.

Fifteen hours by bus to Agadez, an ancient trading town on the edge of the Sahara, made almost entirely of mud. Had dinner with a Tuareg family in their outdoor courtyard, while they watched a french documentary on Tuareg culture. The savage irony of it all. Caught the one and only trans-saharan bus, after fortifying myself with 11 gallons of water, 3 days worth of dry food, a blanket, 3kgs of chewing tabacco (for the village chief), 3kgs of tea and a turban. The bus was 34 hours late. Yes, 34 hours. Eventually the bus (which looks more like a tank: reserve fuel tanks, sand ladders, winches, water supplies etc.) leaves acconpanied by the obligatory military escort, which consists of about 10 sunglassed, turbaned, semi-uniformed guys all holding giant black machine guns, in a jeep. I am, as per always, the only white guy, which is a great source of amusement to the military. We cross the Tenere, 600kms of solid nothing. The crossing of it is a haze, my water supply tainted with petrol, sleeping in the desert, shooting stars readily apparent. Standing in the fine sand, looking at all four compass points and seeing nothing but horizon, colour the only thing differentiating sand and sky. On the 2nd day when we stopped for prayer I found the sand littered with brittle white shells, left over from the times when the sahara had riverbeds.

2 or so days of this and then we arrived in Diroku in the middle of the night, no electricity, no hotel, no idea whatsoever. Was introduced to someones 'brother' who was part of the military escort, next thing I knew was clambering into the back of the jeep with the armed patrol and being whisked through the black streets of this little market village two solid days of faceless desert away from anywhere of note. It's moments like these that I understand the Muslim concept of 'inshallah', 'God willing'. Sometimes when you travel you have to place yourself at the mercy of the universe and have faith in the kindness of mankind. That night, exhausted, I shared a room with two soldiers, their weapons leaning against the walls like stern unwritten rules. It was the most comfortable nights sleep I've ever had in the prescence of heavily armed strangers...

The next day I caught a jeep to Bilma, a small oasis town 45kms away. Bilma's economy depends entirely on the mineral salt they mine in the wasteland at the edges of town. Theres is so much salt in the town that even the buildings are made of it, so the only way to make any money from it is to move it via camel caravan for 3 weeks across the desert to towns where it's more scarce. Random chunks of it lie everywhere. Even the water is tainted with it, in fact the mineral content of the water is so high that it tastes like blood. The centre of the oasis itself is all cool date palms, citrus trees and thorn fences. The inhabitants of the town are called Toubou, everybody carries a knife, including the women. Out on the eastern edge of town, human bones reach up through the salt. 8 days in Bilma sick with Giardia and sick of the God-awful food (couscous with sand, spagetti with sand, couscous with sand, spagetti with sand etc etc). Went back to Diroku, where of course there was no return bus to Agadez. After some unpleasent dealing with some Libiyans who quite obviously hated my guts, I managed to secure a space on top of a goods truck returning from a Libiyan cigarette smuggling mission. Two days of solid all day all night drving with about 40 or so other people, perched on top of all their worldly belongings etc. No shelter, blazing hot during the day and freezing cold at night. I was lucky, for some reason our truck had only taken on 40 people, normal practice is to take 100 - 120 people, as well as tying more goods to the side. It is not uncommon for these things to tip over and kill scores of people. Anyway made it back to Agadez, where I tried to get over my sickness before heading south to Zinder, near the Nigerian border, where I promptly got sick again, this time with the flu.

Zinder is just a cool mellow market town run by the Hausa people, some of who have distictive cat-like facial scars to demonstrate their ethnicity. Didn't do so much there, felt ill, avoided guides, caught an attempted pick-pocket, moved on...

Now I'm back in the capital, am picking up my visa for Mali tomorrow morning, and am hoping to cross the border in the next couple of days.

Happy new year...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1101972960/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1101972960/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1101972960/tpod.html Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:23:32 -0500 West Africa

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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Ouagadougou to Bobo-Dilasso, missed the 6:45 bus (it was 5 minutes early) waited for the next one (it was 2 hours late). 5 or so hours through the desolate scrub, occasional bush fires, police checkpoints...

Bobo, renowned for its music and markets, neither of which I caught much of in my few days there. I moved on pretty quickly, as the hustlers were closing in.

Was invited to dinner with a local I met on the bus and her friends. Before we sit down to eat one of the guys pulls a gun out of the back of his pants and pulls the clip out. He catches me looking, smiles and says "Don't worry, I'm a policeman.". "You're a policeman?", I say. In reply everybody laughs, except for me and my host, who had started looking distinctly uncomfortable. After dinner he reloads it.
"How much did it cost?", I ask.
"How much did what cost?", he says, elbow bent ninety-degrees, gun pointed at the ceiling terminator-style.
"The gun, I mean".
"The gun? It was very expensive. You can only get this gun if you're in the army."
"Are you in the army?"
"No." he replies tucking the gun back into his jeans.
One them drops me at the bus station on his mobylette, me balanced on the back with my bags, zipping past red dirt roads, mango trees, mosques, traffic. Later I learn that a lot of the Northern rebels from Cote D'Ivoire are based in this part of Burkina, and things begin to make a bit more sense.

Banfora: arrived at night, saw nothing but dust and car-parts. Found a bush taxi to Sindou the next morning. "When are you leaving?" I ask. "Now," he says, "go get your bags." I go and get my bags and spend the next 5 AND A HALF HOURS waiting for the van to leave. My bad.

Sindou is a small village in which I tried my hardest to do next to nothing for almost a week. Endless shot glasses of black saharan-style tea on a charcoal oven. No electricity. A trip on the back of a moblyette o a roadless little village called Konodougou, where I decided against buying an Osama Bin Laden watch from the market as a souveiner. Attended a traditional funeral, which was more like an extremely well-attended party. People came from the surrounding villages to attend. African in such a cliched fashion on paper, but as real as the ground below to witness: mud huts, thatched roofs, balaphons, musical spirit possession, masks, dancing, people dressed as spirits chasing fire, people firing ancient muskets into the air. Spent a lot of time in Sindou getting filled in on the final details by a fantastic French guy called Ivo. Big props to you Ivo if you're reading. Thanks for the fine cooking and conversation...

I can't really be bothered recounting everything that's happened since then. Spent time again in Banfora, moved on to the small village of Loropeni, and the horrible dust-hole of Gaoua, where I struck major problems of a financial kind when I ran out of local currency and nobody would change my Euros. Its a tedious dust, sweat and stress-filled episode that's better left to fade in the back of my cluttered fragile memory, hopefully to be overwritten by something much more interesting... Anyway, after some run-ins with local guides, pimps, police and missionaries (who helped save the day in the end), I wound up here in Ouagadougou again, where I'm eating fried bread and peanuts, plotting my border-crossing into Niger, and into the Sahara....

Talk to you all again in a month or so...
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100614320/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100614320/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100614320/tpod.html Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:14:50 -0500 West Africa

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Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Border Crossing: Dog meat for sale in the lorry park, "May God bless you more abundantly" said as a parting courtesy, sharing a taxi through the barren north with a goat...

1st town in Burkina Faso was Po, where I got off and stayed for a couple of nights. As I was told so many times, Francophone Africa has a totally different vibe from Africa entirely. The poverty is greater and more immediately apparent. Burkina Faso is a land cursed by geography. Everywhere in central Po the buildings were made of mud, sticks, corrugated iron, general rubbish. Virtually o-one spoke any English. I speak no French. Let the party begin. The 2 days I spent in Po felt like 2 weeks. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Within that time I managed to: ascertain that my hotel was in fact a brothel, ascertain that the 'cooks' were in fact prostitutes, have drinks with the lieutenant colonel of the Burkina Faso national army training headquarters twice (the village lives in awe/fear of him, he never has to pay for his meals), discover the joys of kola nut, be threatened by a drunk guy holding a dead mouse and talking to it (this was in a Goronousi village 5kms from town, he eventually gave the dead mouse to a little girl who took it home to eat). The poverty in the villages is harsh. Just outside Po, in the village Tikele, when they saw me they begged for food, not money.

Lesson learned in the bush just outside Po:

first the termites ate the wood
then the ants came and ate the termites
then the lizards came and ate the ants.

Anyway, now I'm in Ouagadougou, the capital, where I don't really want to be and no intention of coming to, but alas some transport didn't work out and blah blah blah, I ended up here anyway. Went out to get something to eat at dusk with two American girls who were staying at the same place as me on my first night here, when some guy rips a bag off one of the girls, runs through 2 lanes of traffic, jumps into a sewer canal and runs off. As if that wasn't bizarre enough a guy walking close to us whips out a gun, starts screaming and jumps into the sewer chasing after him. Thieves are not taken to too kindly in West Africa, and its not uncommon for someone who is caught stealing red-handed in a market or other such public place to be mobbed and beaten to death. So when us, a guy with a gun and half the neighbourhood on bikes and motorbikes joined the chase I was uncertain of the consequences. After an hour or so of running around the city (where the soil is soft with the feathers of sacrificial chickens) we gave up and reported the whole thing to the police (turns out the guy with the gun was an undercover cop). The police station was all about semi-automatics and knives behind unlocked doors, crazy amounts of gasoline everywhere and the cops arriving with vast quantities of beer just as we were leaving.

Seems like half the city has been or is in the process of being demolished, no one can tell me why. "It's because it's growing so fast." a Swedish girl who lives here told me. To me it seems like the government has decided that the entire city is a mistake. They're wiping the slate clean...'lets start again from scratch'...

Had two nightmares about being swallowed by a star, coming towards me like a giant white headlight.

"Je ne comprends pas."

In us all, the same disdain.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100177880/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100177880/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1100177880/tpod.html Thu, 11 Nov 2004 08:18:00 -0500 West Africa

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Bolgatanga, Ghana

The heat is oppressive, the connection slow, and the mind frayed after an all-night bus trip to this arid border town, so I'll keep this brief, any more coherent is beyond me currently...

Incidents:

- Kumasi market - biggest in West Africa, like Burroughs' 'Interzone' come alive

- Hanging out with hairdressers all day in their shop "Why do white people come to Ghana?" they ask. "Why do you think?" I ask back at them. "To laugh at us.", they say.

- Me and a British journalist share a balcony overlooking Kumasi, I record the night sound of the city as cockroaches flit around us.

- In the market an old lady starts to talk at me in Twi, I ask my friend what shes saying. She's saying "Do you see now how we are suffering here in Ghana?".

- Ritual scarring, Ramadan, potholes, distrust, openness, like an insect feeling about in the darkness.

- Border crossing tomorrow; Burkina Faso. And then what?

- I'm in Accra. I'm at the Akuma beach village. I'm sitting on rocks at night as the waves crash around us. I'm being told "If you don't get on the togetherness train, then you'll be left behind at the station..."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1099673520/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1099673520/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/slowchimes/africa/1099673520/tpod.html Fri, 05 Nov 2004 07:33:26 -0500 West Africa

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Accra, Ghana

OK, so heres what I wrote on my first night, in a garden bar under the influence of local beer, tropical climate and sleep deprivation:

"Where to start? The Maori security guard on his way to Iraq on the Sydney/Dubai leg of the journey? Dubai airport itself? Thouroughly crazed place, people from every conceivable breed, like mad machines, going from nowhere to nowhere, as I'm sure I've written before, like diamond pinballs, moving too fast to see, fading...Or how about the Cantonese businessman returning to his Nigerian PVC factory on the Dubai/Lagos leg of the journey? Too strange, too strange, almost uneccessary to land in Africa the way the flight was going: late Coltrane, "Interstellar Overdrive", J.G. Ballard and malt whiskey. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I should stay in the air, better to meet people fleetingly, only find out half the story....3 continents and 32 hours later I find myself in Ghana's bracing heat, getting ripped off twice in 1 hour and marvelling at how similar this city smells to another I experienced a few years ago... Accra initially was hard to deal with, in the way that the chaos of 'developing nations' is always something that will give you a slap in the face when you first get off the plane, no matter how well you think you are prepared for it: the streets crawling with all those intense "we're not in Kansas anymore"-type input overloads, that are so typical yet so foreign to us - goats and chickens, seemingly ownerless, wandering the streets - people cooking and selling food everywhere, all the time - people actually LIVING in the streets (just like in Kathmandu, as opposed to our shopping in the streets) i.e. chopping food, cooking, washing clothes, washing themselves, sitting outside with their families in makeshift outdoor living rooms - and also like Kathmandu, I suppose: the contradictory / complimentary notions of beauty and horror living side by side, sometimes one in the same".

That was a couple of days ago. Now my impression is a little different, but the initial ones always the sharpest isn't it? Had a tradtional breakfast this morning (well traditional isn't really the right word, people only eat this stuff because they can't afford anything else) at a roadside stall, with an old homeless guy I've befriended named 'Freeman'. We have an arrangement where he sits around talking with me for hours about Ghana, and in exchange I buy him breakfast and lunch. Its a sweet deal, I'm learning a lot. Todays breakfast was a handful of peanuts in some sort of thin gruel, with bread. Like everyone else in Ghana I've come across Freeman wants to leave the country: "If people had money, if more countries were open, I tell you: nobody would be here. Ghana would be empty, nobody would be left, not even one old man."

Am picking up my visas for Burkina Faso and Niger this afternoon. Can't believe I've managed to obtain the Mythical and elusive 'Visa Touristique Entente' already. its 34 degrees, I'm tired and my hotel doubles as a brothel.....I don't know what else to say....
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