Lobi Country
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2004
1
4
8
Trip End
Ongoing
Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso
Thursday, December 2, 2004
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...
