Africa 2006

OK - one of the last top tens…

1. My only swimming of this trip in the pool of the Hotel Alize in Baguida, with opera blasting from the bar’s speakers
2. A visit to the SPES orphanage - although not with enough energy on my part!
3. Crashing the investiture party of the new supreme leader of the the voodoo religion and meeting him in person the next evening
4. All the shared taxis: lots of waiting, lots of life, lots of marriage proposals
5. Painting walls at the Peuple du Monde orphanage in Abomey
6. Visiting the old UNESCO palace at Abomey
7. Dinner with all the mayor’s reps at the Yovettes restaurant on stilts in Possotome
8. Chilling out with great food (especially a memorable prawn and cream dish) at a little cafe in Baguida, near Lome
9. The long bus journey from Ouaga - but only in retrospect!
10. Being told “bonjour” or “bonne arrivee” by everyone - without them wanting to sell me anything

Admittedly, I can be a baby when I get sick, but I’ve never considered myself a hypochondriac. Still, maybe I have some form of it that manifests itself only on long journeys. In any case …

After happily over-paying to get a taxi all to myself back to my auberge yesterday (a sure sign I was feeling unwell!), I collapsed in a sweaty heap in bed and slept for six hours.

When I awoke, I had a chat with the auberge owner: yes, I had a fever (38.8 this time – I little lower than the 39.3 in Mali, but I’d been taking aspirin to try and reduce it), and all the symptoms I remembered from four weeks ago.

Do I have malaria AGAIN? Is it me? Is doxycyclene just ineffective in this region? Or am I just getting some flu thing and over-reacting?

Who knows. In any case, the auberge owner is convinced it’s malaria and, now knowing the routine, I bypassed the doctor and headed straight to the pharmacy for exactly the same pills which I took last time. (Fate’s cruel twist here is that this seems to happen only on weekends, when clinics that could confirm or deny malaria are closed. So I’ll never know for sure).

I’m still pretty tired, but already feel enough energy to come here and visit the CyberCafe – which I officially consider the road to recovery.

So a few more rounds of pills and I should be tip-top again – just in time for the last week of the tour – and Ghana….

PS: Which reminds me: What have I been forgetting about the trip? What do you want to know more about? (safety, border crossings, shared taxis, nature, etc) - Drop me a comment if there is a subject you would like to request!

Earlier I promised I would only be harassing you dear readers twice about donating to a good cause on this blog. One was with the Ecole Christ-Roi in Ouagadougou (and, ok, unplanned was the Peuple du Monde orphanage which is also a good cause) - and the other is Spes.
Spes, which is Latin for hope, stands for Soutien pour l’enfance en souffrance, and is an orphanage in Lome, the capital of Togo. It was started by a group from Iceland, so of course I needed to pay it a visit on my trip!
The orphanage is housed in a multicoloured building with various different turrets – like a fairy tale castle. Everything is in excellent condition and the 61 children all seem well cared for and happy.
The orphanage is funded predominantly by Icelanders and French, but anyone is welcome to sponsor a child. When a child is sponsored, the next person on the waiting list is given a place in the orphanage – this way, every resident always has their place paid for. There is still a waiting list, and Spes are hoping to build another orphanage in Kalime, 120 km north of Lome.
All the kids here sleep in rooms with screens on the windows and get three cooked meals a day. They wear clothes donated from abroad (one had a great Sparisjodurinn Tshirt from the Icelandic bank).
***
Now is the point where I insert lots of insightful comments and little quotes from the children and the staff about life in the orphanage – little details that would really make the place come alive and would make you give to this worthy cause.
But I’m afraid I don’t have too many of those. And my future article on the orphanage will suffer from my (for lack of a better adjective) sucky journalism. For from the night before I visited Spes, and increasingly after I arrived on Saturday morning, I felt unwell … headache, aches and pains, feverish and only just about enough energy to walk (trudge is more like it). Which all led to have rather a feeling of … DÉJÀ VU (so see the next blog!)
PS: For more information, or to sponsor a child, visit www.spes.is or spesworld.free.fr

All’s well that ends well. But, boy was it a long day… (and, strangely enough, another one involving public transport).
My next stop from Burkina Faso is Benin, but it’s a 1100 km journey from Ouaga to the de facto capital, Cotonou, on the coast, about a 20-hour bus ride. In my quest to avoid having to take public transport at night, I came up with a cunning plan: take the bus as far as Natitingou, a large town in the north of Benin, and then continue on early the next morning to Cotonou. Flawless.
So I called and reserved my ticket for NATITINGOU. Then I arrived at the station and purchased the reserved ticket for NATITINGOU. Then I put my bag in the bus storage, clearly marked with masking tape for NATITINGOU. I showed my ticket for NATITINGOU at the door of the bus, and again to the conductor when the journey started.
And then 2-1/2 hours into the trip the chauffeur announced he was going to Togo.
I wasn’t the only one heading for Benin (although the only one for the north). Everyone else for Cotonou, who would now add at least three hours to their 20 odd hour journey and would have to cross another border (and maybe pay other “taxes”) was pretty pissed off.
I was given another option: the chauffeur told me I could disembark at the small Burkinabe village where we were and that another “bus” would be along “any minute” which would take me to Natitingou, in fact probably “even faster” than the initial estimates. Yeah.
So of course I continued on to Lome, Togo’s capital. So much for the plan to avoid driving late at night.
The journey continued with no problems, and it’s only really when we started the daily “race against the sunset” that I started to get nervous:
1) Who knew Togo has hilly parts? All along I’ve been taking these journeys in the comfort of knowing that if the driver did fall asleep or run over a donkey, we’d just careen off into a nearby millet field. Here the picture postcard scenery meant lots more big trees and, as the sun showed us tantalizingly before slipping away, lots of hairpin bends in the road and steep drops. I hoped the hills would end before the sun.
2) After a brief supper stop (tinned sardines squished on a baguette for me), we stopped briefly just down the road where a big discussion ensued with some youths at the side of the road. Turns out they were our mercenaries and the chauffeur was negotiating their fee to accompany us on the bus, in order to protect us from possible bandits at roadblocks – that’s when I noticed the machine guns slung over the shoulders of these kids. In the end, a suitable price wasn’t reached and the youths stayed on the road – I wasn’t sure if that was good or not, but there was really no time to dwell on the threat of armed robbery because I began to realize that….
3) The driver must have been exhausted. He had been driving straight since 7am (and anticipated arrival time in Cotonou was at least 4am) and everyone else on the bus was sound asleep (except me – rigidly looking out the window).
But we arrived safe and sound in Lome at 1am. Then I had to face a throng of taxi men who saw the lone foreign face get off the bus. I agreed a price with one and followed him to what turned out to be an unmarked taxi. Then his “friend” jumped in with him – for “security” I was told. They told me my hotel was 15 km away outside of town.
Although they seemed friendly enough, I was thinking I should ditch and get another ride, but I babbled to them about how I knew the owner of the hotel and he was waiting up for me to arrive and would already be expecting me. And my instincts felt that they were legit people and the “security” was to protect them against rogue clients. A police officer who stopped us at a checkpoint soon afterwards and confirmed the distance of the hotel made me feel even better.
And when I finally arrived at 2am, the taxi drivers really wanted to wake up the owner to confirm that I really had been deposited safely! For the first time in my life, I actually paid them more than I had initially promised – and even threw in a couple of those little Canada flag pins as bonus.
That was the last time (well, never say never…) I’ll be taking mammoth transport like that on this trip. Even better, the hotel where I’m staying has a pool, so it’s all good. And that’s where I’m going right now….