Les Palmiers, Ouagadougou

The sat phone is not getting much use lately, except to check for messages to us. Thank you to those who are keeping in touch both by email and texts.

Th OK Inn was a good place to stay for 1 night as it was free parking, but it was very noisy: outside music playing continuously (not our choice of easy listening), trucks coming and going constantly, planes taking off and landing close by and finally the chorus of muezzin which started around 4am and grew to a crescendo by 5.30. The place would have been almost impossible to find without the lat/long co-ordinates as trucks were parked 2 deep blocking the entrance and we were pleased it was still daylight. It did mean that this morning we were up early and ready to leave to search out the Ghana Embassy and a bank with an ATM around 7. The roads were already swarming with 2-wheel traffic including several driving towards us at speed down the wrong side of the dual carriageway. The cars were fortunately all going the same way as they had no hesitation double overtaking into oncoming traffic.

We arrived at the embassy 30mins before opening time at 8am so had time to find our way around the main part of town and get some more cash (CFAs). We were the first into the embassy to fill out our visa application forms in quadruple plus 4 photos and a hand written explanation why we had not applied in the UK. We were then interviewed by the First Secretary who was very polite but a little stern. He told us that if he agreed to grant us a visa it would not be ready until Monday which was what we expected. However, the receptionist received a phone call to affirm that we can collect them tomorrow at 11.30am. Hurray!! We had planned to then go to the Benin Embassy. There is a Visa d'Entente which covers 5 counties: BK, Benin, Togo, Niger and Ivory Coast but most people had led us to believe we stood little chance of getting this. We decided to give it a go as we had the address of the Police office and just as we were stopping to park we saw the Italian lady with the Austrian husband (from Zebra & Camel). She had just applied and was told to come back Monday. We had a lovely smiling officer who was very happy to practice his English and filled in the forms for us. He is doing his best,  to have our 5 visa pass ready by tomorrow afternoon, so by 11.30am we had applied to visit 6 countries!

We remained in the quiet back street and had our cereal, orange juice and coffee and studied the Lonely Planet for another place to stay. This place close to the centre of town sounded good. It is set in a very attractive courtyard under thatched shelters and bougainvillea. They are fully booked for parking space - we found our friends were already here - but we have parked outside the gates and had lunch here (very tender lamb chops with mixed salad) and used the free (open) wifi in the shade with cooling fans. It is up to 35C in the Enterprise but we can bear that overnight with our side windows open, shields up and Artois purring to us.

On Friday mornings there is a 7am ceremony at the Moro Naba's palace (the traitional Mossi tribal chief) so we hope to be able to go and watch this. No cameras allowed as it is a solemn government occasion. If we get all our visas tomorrow we intend to depart for Benin. If not, we will go somewhere else until Monday as it is too hot and noisy in the city and there are a lot of mosquitos here.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER IF YOU CAN

Live Long and Prosper

Or as the retired Polish fighter pilot in Banfora translated “Have a long life and make a lot of money”!  The adventurous grandparents are having a lot of fun. We are sitting in the carpark of the OK Inn in Ouagadougou drinking Shwepps tonic and Gordons gin with ice while we consider the future. The sad death of hot-air and gas balloonist friend, Dr Janet Foulkes, from cancer yesterday has reminded us that you must live every day as if it were your last.

Carpe diem doesn’t quite get to grips with the way we think (Chris talking). Don’t just seize the day, grab it by the throat and shake it until the pips squeak!!

Today has been interesting on the journey to Ouagadougou. To start with we have a clean windscreen for the first time in a month. We had a tour round Bobo in the Enterprise, stopping for a quick walk around the mosque. Pics to follow. Had a second breakfast with pain au raisin from the Boulangerie Patisserie plus coffee at a café where all the young men were gathered (very pretty waitresses) before setting off for the 360km drive to the capital.  Saw cotton loading lorries, pickers on cycles with conical baskets on their backs, men fishing in lakes from reed rafts, vultures, parakeets, villages with spiky roofed granaries, a man on a bicycle with 30, repeat 30, 5-gallon drums.

The road to begin with was the best road in Africa, but deteriorated later until after the 3^rd diversion on bumpy, dusty red laterite roads. Our newly cleaned Enterprise is again somewhat dusty.  We are following the route via small scale paper map, Tracks4Africa, and better still another mapping system we got from Chas, a motorcyclist in Bamako. Chas was one of 3 motorcyclists, the other 2, both called Tony, one from Sheffield who had our balloon on his Facebook page.

We have had some very good news that our friend Chris Wood has checked out as a gas balloon pilot over the weekend. Chris is another of those naturally talented people who seems to be able to master whatever he sets his mind to. Congratulations, Chris!

A special thank you to Ellen and Peter for being such good friends and watching over things at home. Enjoy your holiday in Sri Lanka.

We will be here 2 or 3 days, or maybe longer, to get our Ghana visas. We have free parking and wifi and use of swimming pool showers at the rear of the OK Inn provided we have at least one meal here. Believe it’s quite expensive. We are eating in tonight.

Live long and prosper!

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Casa Africa, Bobo Dioulasso

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We are both feeling very sleepy, having had a meal of Chicken yassa (very tough stringy chicken but the sauce was very good) at Le Bois d'Ebene not far from the rest camp, where we are the only 'guests'. We spent last night at the end of the disused airstrip near Banfora and were up at 5am to prepare the balloon before sunrise. No wind and a perfect 15 minute flight together, landing in a clear sandy field 5kms on the opposite side of the main road. Chris went back to collect the Enterprise while I packed the balloon away with some friendly villagers and entertained the children. We then drove straight here with a stop for breakast on the way and have spent the afternoon sleeping and cleaning the red dust from the Enterprise inside and out and then ourselves. Tomorrow we will have a look at the Grand Mosque and the big market and do a bit of shopping before setting off for Ouagadougou for the next visas.

Back in Banfora 2

It’s early Monday morning and I am writing this in bed under the ‘bridal veil’ while waiting for the kettle to boil for our first cup of tea of the day. I  was woken at 5am (in a nice sort of way) by the sweeping crones – 2 ladies employed to sweep the large courtyard free of fallen leaves with small besoms. It sounded as if they were sweeping the Enterprise wheels as well!

We both slept very well last night after a long day yesterday, feeling clean from our hot showers and a good meal in the quirky McDonald restaurant. Chris ate a whole chicken and I had the most enormous burger bun (like a small crusty loaf) with tender meat, salad and chips. It feels perfectly safe here walking the darkened streets and it was like coming home to the Enterprise at the Canne a Sucre.

As I said, Sindou was a lovely place. It took us 4 hours to drive the 50kms along a rather bumpy dirt road, with a long stop part way for a rest and lunch. We drove through water meadows to begin with and could see a small part of the 100 hectare Tengrela Lake. The road then wound slightly uphill through avenues of trees to the first large village. The only traffic apart from pushbikes and motorcycles were the large cotton collection lorries, which raced past us empty and trundled slowly towards us once loaded. The last part of the journey was through wooded areas, palm trees and thorny scrub. The Peaks suddenly appeared before us as we approached the old village of Sindou. We had met a large orange truck on the way, owned by a South African we had met at the Sleeping Camel, and he said we would not be able to get into the Campement because of a deep ditch. The Enterprise managed it without too much trouble due to Chris’s good driving and we parked in the shade of the mango trees. The Swedes, in their Land Rover Defender, had arrived just before us. It’s a small world overlanding and we keep meeting up with the same people. We wandered in to the village to see if there was any bread to buy but it didn’t look as if they had a local bakery. Chris did eventually find some small hard baguettes yesterday.

We had an evening walk up the road to have a brief reconnoitre of the rocks, which had steps cut into them in a rudimentary way. Amongst the rocks it was like another world with paths leading in different directions through the tall dried grass and lots of very spiky plants and trees. We decided to wait til the following day to explore as a brief view of the surrounding countryside looked unsuitable for flying, and it was quite windy even at dusk.  On Saturday morning we again walked into the village and found a shop selling new Chinese motor bikes. I enquired about hiring one for the day, and a young man visiting the shop on his small Yamaha agreed to rent us his own. Chris had waved enough cash at him to make it an attractive deal. We explored the backstreets of the village between the houses and were back at the campsite an hour later for the delivery of the bike. After a quick lunch we set off to take a look at the area by motorbike, having had a trial run up and down the main road. Even going slowly in the Enterprise we miss out on the sights and smells you get from open-air travel.

We spent a good part of the afternoon trundling along tracks which wove amongst the cultivated areas, past cows grazing in meadows and reedbanks alive with small birds. The most common butterflies were large iridescent green and black swallowtails. There were a lot of crops I didn’t recognise apart from tomatoes growing in ‘paddy’ fields with drainage ditches and sluice gates between them. A great white pile of cotton awaiting collection which looked inviting to jump into (but I didn’t!) and huge heaps of corn husks as evidence to what had been already harvested. Several tracks petered out into rough footpaths but it was fun exploring and Chris became quite adept at negotiating the sandy tracks and rocky areas on the motorbike. I did have to dismount a few times.

After returning for a cup of tea and cool down in the shade of the trees we rode back up to the Peaks and had a long walk in a different direction through the scrub, deciding to save the real exploration until the following morning and get there close to sunrise. It was an interesting walk along the bottom of a small escarpment littered with round stones like dinosaur eggs. I wanted to climb up to the hill to see what was on the other side, which we did but it was hard going. We were rewarded with a good view of the village and smoke rising beneath the peaks where they were burning off the grass. The flames looked very fierce and we were amazed that the whole area didn’t burn. The road and the rocks appeared to act as firebreaks. Egrets were landing quite close to the flames, probably hunting insects disturbed by the fire.

That night we had an owl hooting in the tree above us with a very distinctive call. We have not seen a great deal of wildlife apart from birds since we have been travelling, but it is not a disappointment as we saw so much in East Africa a couple of years ago. We did see monkeys near St Louis, a beautiful brindled fox (or jackal) in Senegal which ran across the road in front of us, a basking crocodile at the croc pond in Diema, hundreds of lizards of varying sizes, lots of ground squirrels and something which could have been a monkey while we were on the motorbike, but it was too quick to distinguish. There are mosquitos around at night in some places, but so far the only time I was bitten was the first night in St Louis when we failed to deploy our net over the bed.

Sunday morning we rose just as it got light in order to be up at the peaks at sunrise. Unfortunatly the bike failed to start from cold, so we walked up the road (15 mins) and missed the first rays.  However, it was still spectacular and we were the only people around. We spent a couple of hours wandering amongst the rocks and climbing the peaks where we could to see the views. No chance of flying in that area as the terrain was unsuitable and there was a strong breeze so we just decided to enjoy the area and look elsewhere in BK to get the balloon flight in. There is an airstrip to the east we will investigate today.  It was so peaceful amongst the peaks with the sound of the hornbills rising from the valley below and watching black? Kites soaring just above us.

We prepared for departure at the camp and then sat outside to have a traditional English breakfast – bacon, frankfurters, fried egg and baked beans. There was a German lone cyclist in the camp who had been interesting to talk to, and a group of 8 other cyclists of a more mature appearance who were probably escorted with their luggage. We have met quite a few cyclists travelling around Africa all the way from Europe, mostly on their own. The group had a copy of the Bradt travel guide to BK which they lent to the Swedes and we photocopied relevant pages on our ‘in house’ printer. It gave a lot of information on this region around Banfora. We could stay here a week just visiting the sights. We did try to get to the waterfalls and the Domes de Fabidougou on our way back yesterday. We drove 5kms out on a lovely narrow dirt road following the Tracks4Africa map on the SatNav. The Enterprise was fine along the ridge between the sugarcane fields, lined with papaya and bananas, but we eventually came to a T junction where the track was only wide enough for single-wheeled traffic so we had to turn around a carefully negotiate the track back where ground clearance was a problem by following our wheel marks.

Besides missing out on the possibility of seeing hippos at Tengrela Lake, visiting the cave dwellers at villages similar to Dogon country in Mali, seeing a Baobab tree which can fit 50 people inside, and other marvels, we were not unhappy to miss the falls (which may have been pretty dry) and the large domed rock formations of Fabidougou. It’s off to look at launch sites today. All still very exciting. It’s good to be sitting in the coolest part of the day (14C at present). At night the temperature inside the Enterprise is usually around 30C and feels pleasant when it cools down to 26C. We do have a small fan fitted to blow on us when we are in bed which purrs gently. I have named it Artois after a nice cat we met in St Louis.

Back in Banfora

We have had a great time in Sindou staying at Soutrala very close to the Peaks, strange rock formations which reminded us both of the fairy castles of Cappadokia, turkey and the Acacus mountains in Libya. Who should arrive at the same time as us but the Swedish couple Mia and Crister. I am off to have a shower before we go out to eat at McDonald restaurant, not to be confused with the golden arches! Will update later.

Peaks of Sindou

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We are at the peaks of Sindou as a possible interesting place to fly.

Africa Sunset