Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Fes, Morroco
Sam and I meander through the souks of Fes el Bali – the largest, living medieval city in the Islamic world. Enjoy occasional guest appearances by my scarf (my sincerest apologies – it’s evidently what you get for taking blind, chest-level video) and find the wheelbarrow man who almost missed his cue. Amazingly, despite what it might look like, I didn’t bump into anybody. What you hear me say to Sam: “Where are we?”
Friday, May 29, 2009
Elephants!
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Mole National Park, Ghana
Planet Earth did it better, but ready-to-where can deliver wildlife too. Here, blurry elephants drink at a watering hole.
(Blogger dumbs down the quality even worse than Sam's camera, so make that very blurry elephants.)
Mole National Park, Ghana
Planet Earth did it better, but ready-to-where can deliver wildlife too. Here, blurry elephants drink at a watering hole.
(Blogger dumbs down the quality even worse than Sam's camera, so make that very blurry elephants.)
The Bumpiest Bus Ride in the World
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
Tamale to Mole National Park, Ghana
Sam, Anne, and the Dutch nurses ride three hours along a washed-out, washboard dirt road from Tamale to Mole. Watch Sam’s head (and my shoddy camera work) try to compensate for the bumps! That sound you’re hearing is the bus shaking apart.
Tamale to Mole National Park, Ghana
Sam, Anne, and the Dutch nurses ride three hours along a washed-out, washboard dirt road from Tamale to Mole. Watch Sam’s head (and my shoddy camera work) try to compensate for the bumps! That sound you’re hearing is the bus shaking apart.
ready-to-where is back online!
Hello again! We’re back, finally. Sam and I have both been out with a terrible head cold and allergies since arriving in Morocco (you’ve been reading ... surprised we got sick?) but we’re finally feeling better and getting back to the business of travel and blog!
While we whip up the missing entries, please enjoy a few this-and-that photo entries and a small selection of sloppily-recorded video we’ve been haphazardly collecting along our way.
More to come soon.
- a & s
While we whip up the missing entries, please enjoy a few this-and-that photo entries and a small selection of sloppily-recorded video we’ve been haphazardly collecting along our way.
More to come soon.
- a & s
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A funny thing happened on the ouay to Ouagadougou
The funny thing was we started to enjoy ourselves.
Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
April 28th to May 3rd, 2009
Perhaps it was the French-inspired cuisine (baguettes!), the charmingly laid-back and friendly attitude of the Burkinabés, or the knowledge that we had really left Ghana behind us, but we arrived in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou on Tuesday April 28th feeling like we’d earned a new lease on our trip.
We had taken a rather bold risk on our way out of Ghana (at that point not really uncharacteristically) by waiting until the border to buy our visas. But – apart from our startled realization that we’d really have to start communicating in French, really all the time – we found no trouble getting what we needed from the friendly, chain-smoking, jauntily-bereted border guard on the Burkina side. A cab, bus, and cab again later and we arrived in Ouagadougou to find that I had indeed been successful the previous evening, in my then-garbled French, in securing us a room at our desired hotel – or at least there was one available avec ventilisation, sans climatisation.
Actually, we should have taken the latter (that’s AC to you) as our ventilisation turned out to be pretty ineffectual against the unrelenting heat and dryness that we would continue to encounter (during, eventually, nine sleepless nights in a row) as we traveled northwards. In fact it seemed as though, as soon we arrived in Burkina Faso, we just couldn’t keep up with our thirst. For all our harping about the sameness of the lorry-park or roadside offerings in Ghana, we’d become accustomed to being able to find those ubiquitous sachets pretty much every time we turned around. In Burkina Faso we started to have to work harder as actual shops replaced roadside stalls and as the climate pulled every drop of moisture from inside us out.
Having spent two and a half months under the same mango tree at the farm we were interested to see the landscape outside the windows of the bus evolve into the increasingly dusty and scrubby Sahelian plains outside Ouagadougou. Just as soon as they had, though, we were heading by bus into the green valleys of the southwest to Burkina’s second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.
Our guidebook told us we’d be charmed by Bobo and it didn’t disappoint, not least because of both the lovely auberge where we stayed in the middle of town and the impeccable timing of our arrival there. Still the cynical and harassed Westerners we were in Ghana, when our taxi driver asked if we’d ever seen an “African Mask” we assumed he wanted to sell us some curios and so we replied in our best French, Thank you very much but we’d really just like to go to the hotel. Weren’t we surprised then to see him point out the window and find the “Mask” walking by – a man covered from head to toe in colourful fringe like a scarecrow, carrying a whip and a crook and intermittently followed by and chasing packs of young men around town.
From the balcony of our hotel, facing over the main intersection and square, we got a great view of the action below and no understanding whatsoever of what the meaning of it all was. Our best guess is no better than a play by play of what we saw. There were large bands of young men, some dressed in humourous costumes, roaming the streets after the Masks. (We saw, for example, what were perhaps “videocamera operator”, “shutter-happy tourist” and one, according to me, “knee-socked, colonial safari-man” or, according to Sam, “blazered, effeminate sea-captain.”) The masks, as many as twenty, walked around the main square acting like they didn’t care about the young men getting progressively closer and baiting them until suddenly they did and the chase was on! If you were caught by one the boogeymen they spanked you on the bum with their whip or crook and the crowds roared. This continued – the men creeping up, the masks not caring, the masks chasing – for a few hours, with the occasional extra excitement of the masks sometimes running up into the various peanut galleries, like our hotel balcony. Around sundown, everyone gave it a rest and went off to dance by the mosque.
Our time in Bobo was generally spent wandering the streets, positively green in comparison to cities past, and taking a short trip out to the town of Banfora on Friday May 1st. From Banfora, another little dusty spot made popular by guidebooks, we took a taxi to Lac Tengrela from where we boarded a pirogue for two and set about scanning the waters for pods of hippopotamuses. Blessed with the same uncanny luck we had in Mole, and a very helpful fisherman in the stern of our boat, a few minutes later we actually saw some. For 10 or 15 minutes (all the time we could handle in the midday sun) we watched the heads, backs, and bums of about six in all including at least one biggie and one wee one. Pleased with our success, and not terribly keen to negotiate private transport to the other sights in the area, we headed back to town and to the bus back to Bobo. On Saturday we took a wonderful tour of the local mud-and-stick mosque where, to our great pleasure, we were allowed to roam inside and the good-natured guide spoke slowly enough for us to understand almost everything.
As the sun was rising Sunday we left our hotel for the early morning, 12-hour bus ride to Bamako along with Francis, a friendly English traveler and also former Ghana volunteer who we’d met the previous evening on the hotel terrace. Setting off – this time with visas already in hand, and our attitudes towards our travels warmed by our time spent in Burkina Faso – we looked forward to Mali, the third country in our continuing odyssey.
A breakfast kiosk in Ouagadougou where we stopped two mornings for our oeufs et pain.
Other spectators watching the Fetes des Masques from the balcony of our hotel in Bobo-Dioulasso.
A Mask delivers the bad news.
There were little ones too. Each Mask had a posse of local boys or men who were safe from the beatings.
A couple heads of hippopotamuses spotted from our pirogue on Lac Tengrela.
Our lovely cheapie in Bobo.
Impressions of Sam inside the grande mosqué in Bobo.
An exterior of the mud-stick mosque. The sticks, which are intermittently replaced, are for beauty, structural support, and climbing when the mosque needs repair or cleaning.
Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
April 28th to May 3rd, 2009
Perhaps it was the French-inspired cuisine (baguettes!), the charmingly laid-back and friendly attitude of the Burkinabés, or the knowledge that we had really left Ghana behind us, but we arrived in the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou on Tuesday April 28th feeling like we’d earned a new lease on our trip.
We had taken a rather bold risk on our way out of Ghana (at that point not really uncharacteristically) by waiting until the border to buy our visas. But – apart from our startled realization that we’d really have to start communicating in French, really all the time – we found no trouble getting what we needed from the friendly, chain-smoking, jauntily-bereted border guard on the Burkina side. A cab, bus, and cab again later and we arrived in Ouagadougou to find that I had indeed been successful the previous evening, in my then-garbled French, in securing us a room at our desired hotel – or at least there was one available avec ventilisation, sans climatisation.
Actually, we should have taken the latter (that’s AC to you) as our ventilisation turned out to be pretty ineffectual against the unrelenting heat and dryness that we would continue to encounter (during, eventually, nine sleepless nights in a row) as we traveled northwards. In fact it seemed as though, as soon we arrived in Burkina Faso, we just couldn’t keep up with our thirst. For all our harping about the sameness of the lorry-park or roadside offerings in Ghana, we’d become accustomed to being able to find those ubiquitous sachets pretty much every time we turned around. In Burkina Faso we started to have to work harder as actual shops replaced roadside stalls and as the climate pulled every drop of moisture from inside us out.
Having spent two and a half months under the same mango tree at the farm we were interested to see the landscape outside the windows of the bus evolve into the increasingly dusty and scrubby Sahelian plains outside Ouagadougou. Just as soon as they had, though, we were heading by bus into the green valleys of the southwest to Burkina’s second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.
Our guidebook told us we’d be charmed by Bobo and it didn’t disappoint, not least because of both the lovely auberge where we stayed in the middle of town and the impeccable timing of our arrival there. Still the cynical and harassed Westerners we were in Ghana, when our taxi driver asked if we’d ever seen an “African Mask” we assumed he wanted to sell us some curios and so we replied in our best French, Thank you very much but we’d really just like to go to the hotel. Weren’t we surprised then to see him point out the window and find the “Mask” walking by – a man covered from head to toe in colourful fringe like a scarecrow, carrying a whip and a crook and intermittently followed by and chasing packs of young men around town.
From the balcony of our hotel, facing over the main intersection and square, we got a great view of the action below and no understanding whatsoever of what the meaning of it all was. Our best guess is no better than a play by play of what we saw. There were large bands of young men, some dressed in humourous costumes, roaming the streets after the Masks. (We saw, for example, what were perhaps “videocamera operator”, “shutter-happy tourist” and one, according to me, “knee-socked, colonial safari-man” or, according to Sam, “blazered, effeminate sea-captain.”) The masks, as many as twenty, walked around the main square acting like they didn’t care about the young men getting progressively closer and baiting them until suddenly they did and the chase was on! If you were caught by one the boogeymen they spanked you on the bum with their whip or crook and the crowds roared. This continued – the men creeping up, the masks not caring, the masks chasing – for a few hours, with the occasional extra excitement of the masks sometimes running up into the various peanut galleries, like our hotel balcony. Around sundown, everyone gave it a rest and went off to dance by the mosque.
Our time in Bobo was generally spent wandering the streets, positively green in comparison to cities past, and taking a short trip out to the town of Banfora on Friday May 1st. From Banfora, another little dusty spot made popular by guidebooks, we took a taxi to Lac Tengrela from where we boarded a pirogue for two and set about scanning the waters for pods of hippopotamuses. Blessed with the same uncanny luck we had in Mole, and a very helpful fisherman in the stern of our boat, a few minutes later we actually saw some. For 10 or 15 minutes (all the time we could handle in the midday sun) we watched the heads, backs, and bums of about six in all including at least one biggie and one wee one. Pleased with our success, and not terribly keen to negotiate private transport to the other sights in the area, we headed back to town and to the bus back to Bobo. On Saturday we took a wonderful tour of the local mud-and-stick mosque where, to our great pleasure, we were allowed to roam inside and the good-natured guide spoke slowly enough for us to understand almost everything.
As the sun was rising Sunday we left our hotel for the early morning, 12-hour bus ride to Bamako along with Francis, a friendly English traveler and also former Ghana volunteer who we’d met the previous evening on the hotel terrace. Setting off – this time with visas already in hand, and our attitudes towards our travels warmed by our time spent in Burkina Faso – we looked forward to Mali, the third country in our continuing odyssey.
A breakfast kiosk in Ouagadougou where we stopped two mornings for our oeufs et pain.
Other spectators watching the Fetes des Masques from the balcony of our hotel in Bobo-Dioulasso.
A Mask delivers the bad news.
There were little ones too. Each Mask had a posse of local boys or men who were safe from the beatings.
A couple heads of hippopotamuses spotted from our pirogue on Lac Tengrela.
Our lovely cheapie in Bobo.
Impressions of Sam inside the grande mosqué in Bobo.
An exterior of the mud-stick mosque. The sticks, which are intermittently replaced, are for beauty, structural support, and climbing when the mosque needs repair or cleaning.Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Photos While-U-Wait
Some months ago I hinted at the possibility that I might be taking way more photos than you could ever reasonably want to see (2987 and counting), but that I was having trouble loading even a small number of those to the web here. Well, clear your calendar folks because I have been tirelessly loading those photos - on mindnumbingly slow internet connections from Accra to Ouagadougou and beyond - and they're now available for your viewing pleasure.
For the full story, here is a link to my flickr page where you'll find a series of collections covering everything from our arrival in Accra to, thus far, almost the end of our stay at the farm.
For those with a little less time on their hands, try the not-intentionally-ironically-named Quick Tour in which you'll find a collection of the highlights.
We are now in Bamako, Mali waiting for a plane to Casablanca from where we will update you on our week in Burkina Faso and the strange circumstances that have brought us here, to surprisingly fast and free wifi at the Bamako Airport surrounded by a mob of soccer-mad Malians hollering in support of blue-and-whites of Chelsea (we think) on the lounge tv.
Oh yes, and I'm still working on the captions. :)
For the full story, here is a link to my flickr page where you'll find a series of collections covering everything from our arrival in Accra to, thus far, almost the end of our stay at the farm.
For those with a little less time on their hands, try the not-intentionally-ironically-named Quick Tour in which you'll find a collection of the highlights.
We are now in Bamako, Mali waiting for a plane to Casablanca from where we will update you on our week in Burkina Faso and the strange circumstances that have brought us here, to surprisingly fast and free wifi at the Bamako Airport surrounded by a mob of soccer-mad Malians hollering in support of blue-and-whites of Chelsea (we think) on the lounge tv.
Oh yes, and I'm still working on the captions. :)
Monday, May 4, 2009
Pains, Plains, and Park Entry Bills
Kumasi to Bolgatanga
April 21st to April 28th, 2009
On Tuesday April 21st Sam and I arrived in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city and the capital of the Ashanti Region, feeling pretty travel weary. After leaving the Coconut Grove Tuesday morning we’d taken our first bus from Cape Coast – a step up in our transportation odyssey that had been looked forward to since my library days watching the local orange buses speeding by and thinking, Imagine the comfort! Unfortunately our expertise in tro-tros didn’t translate and – after receiving no significant help from two of the grumpiest ladies masquerading as bus company employees – we were yelled at by our bus driver for not being able to find our seats (were they assigned??) and eventually found ourselves squished into the very back row of the bus where I baked for four hours in the sun, and a little boy slept on Sam’s lap and then burped in his face.
Once in Kumasi, Sam and I reflected that perhaps all the time we had in us for Ghana was about two and half months. Certainly we’d sometimes speculated that a better time might have been had at the farm had we limited ourselves to two months there. In planning our trip after EDYM our original challenge had been figuring out how to fit all of the our desired travel into the time we had before our supply of Mefloquine ran out (needing to be out of the “malaria area” with a month’s worth to go). Now so many activities were on the chopping block that we could potentially find ourselves more than a week ahead of schedule and additionally arriving in Bamako far too early for a Wednesday train departure for Dakar. Feeling tired and fed up, I wrote home complaining that the “adventure” of constantly being hassled and stared at and cheated and meeting unhelpful people and stuff never working was kind of losing its charm.
Compared with the hectic towns along the coast, however, we found Kumasi to be relatively quiet, surprisingly clean, and almost charming. In search of a few more souvenirs to send home, we visited the National Cultural Centre and the Kejetia Market: the former a quiet and leafy haven; the latter an incredibly clamorous labyrinth of choked and narrow corridors spilling over with goods and people in what is apparently the largest covered market in West Africa. It was hot, cramped, noisy, and smelly, but all in all kind of exciting as we got pushed around while trying to find and buy our various goodies, though I left never wanting to hear “White Man!”, “White Lady!”, “White Boy!”, or “Obruni!” (that's Twi for Yevou) ever again.
From Kumasi we took another, better bus to Tamale and started to notice the landscape changing as we moved North. The palms so ubiquitous in the South started to be replaced by fewer, hardier trees in a progressively flatter and drier landscape. The buildings and people were changing too: we saw fewer buildings made of concrete and more made of mud-brick; thatched roofs became more conical; and mosques replaced churches as we moved North. The men we saw in traditional dress were less often in the ballooning smocks of the South but rather negotiated their bicycles and mopeds in caftans. Plenty more women were driving around on those mopeds and bicycles that only continued to increase to incredible numbers as we traveled onwards.
The purpose of our trip to Tamale, apart from moving onwards and upwards, was principally to make the long and arduous trek into Mole National Park where we hoped to catch sight of a few elephants before leaving Ghana. Amazingly the trip didn’t disappoint, either in its difficulty or in the wildlife seen. Warned by our guidebooks that we might be waiting for a bus that would never come, we certainly felt that way as we baked, basting in sweat, for four hours at the most hectic and disorganized bus station yet. Every person had a different but equally adamant assertion about which bus was actually ours – the most helpful turning out to be those not employed by the bus company – but, eventually teaming up with some fellow travelers, we found our way.
At the park we spent two nights at the “Mole Motel”, perched atop an escarpment with an expansive view over a watering hole frequented by elephants, antelope, waterbuck, warthogs, and many birds and monkeys. Prepared to be utterly disappointed we instead turned out to be incredibly lucky, seeing no less than sixteen elephants, the closest no more than ten meters away. Other wildlife novelties were the warthogs that startled Sam ten feet from our front door and the baboon that tried to steal someone’s backpack from beside the pool. After an even bumpier and more crowded 4:00 am bus back to Tamale, we sought out the soothingly familiar tro-tros for our trip on to Bolgatanga.
Once in Bolgatanga, a town without much to recommend it but an excellent pizza parlour, we prepared for our exodus from Ghana. Via shared taxi we arrived the next day at the border town of Paga where, as if to warmly wish us Bon Voyage, we were mobbed by more enthusiastic would-be guides and taxi drivers than anywhere previously in Ghana but, un-tempted and undeterred, we pressed on. On the Ghanaian side of the border I thought for a moment I might not be allowed to leave as the official had trouble interpreting some of the many stamps, visas, and visa extensions littering my passport, but eventually he relented. On the other side we alighted our cab and, African-style, walked over the border to the Burkina Faso where we were met by a charming scene – border guards in berets, smoking cigarettes, and a friendly efficiency as we organized our visas and were welcomed into L’Afrique Française!
April 21st to April 28th, 2009
On Tuesday April 21st Sam and I arrived in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city and the capital of the Ashanti Region, feeling pretty travel weary. After leaving the Coconut Grove Tuesday morning we’d taken our first bus from Cape Coast – a step up in our transportation odyssey that had been looked forward to since my library days watching the local orange buses speeding by and thinking, Imagine the comfort! Unfortunately our expertise in tro-tros didn’t translate and – after receiving no significant help from two of the grumpiest ladies masquerading as bus company employees – we were yelled at by our bus driver for not being able to find our seats (were they assigned??) and eventually found ourselves squished into the very back row of the bus where I baked for four hours in the sun, and a little boy slept on Sam’s lap and then burped in his face.
Once in Kumasi, Sam and I reflected that perhaps all the time we had in us for Ghana was about two and half months. Certainly we’d sometimes speculated that a better time might have been had at the farm had we limited ourselves to two months there. In planning our trip after EDYM our original challenge had been figuring out how to fit all of the our desired travel into the time we had before our supply of Mefloquine ran out (needing to be out of the “malaria area” with a month’s worth to go). Now so many activities were on the chopping block that we could potentially find ourselves more than a week ahead of schedule and additionally arriving in Bamako far too early for a Wednesday train departure for Dakar. Feeling tired and fed up, I wrote home complaining that the “adventure” of constantly being hassled and stared at and cheated and meeting unhelpful people and stuff never working was kind of losing its charm.
Compared with the hectic towns along the coast, however, we found Kumasi to be relatively quiet, surprisingly clean, and almost charming. In search of a few more souvenirs to send home, we visited the National Cultural Centre and the Kejetia Market: the former a quiet and leafy haven; the latter an incredibly clamorous labyrinth of choked and narrow corridors spilling over with goods and people in what is apparently the largest covered market in West Africa. It was hot, cramped, noisy, and smelly, but all in all kind of exciting as we got pushed around while trying to find and buy our various goodies, though I left never wanting to hear “White Man!”, “White Lady!”, “White Boy!”, or “Obruni!” (that's Twi for Yevou) ever again.
From Kumasi we took another, better bus to Tamale and started to notice the landscape changing as we moved North. The palms so ubiquitous in the South started to be replaced by fewer, hardier trees in a progressively flatter and drier landscape. The buildings and people were changing too: we saw fewer buildings made of concrete and more made of mud-brick; thatched roofs became more conical; and mosques replaced churches as we moved North. The men we saw in traditional dress were less often in the ballooning smocks of the South but rather negotiated their bicycles and mopeds in caftans. Plenty more women were driving around on those mopeds and bicycles that only continued to increase to incredible numbers as we traveled onwards.
The purpose of our trip to Tamale, apart from moving onwards and upwards, was principally to make the long and arduous trek into Mole National Park where we hoped to catch sight of a few elephants before leaving Ghana. Amazingly the trip didn’t disappoint, either in its difficulty or in the wildlife seen. Warned by our guidebooks that we might be waiting for a bus that would never come, we certainly felt that way as we baked, basting in sweat, for four hours at the most hectic and disorganized bus station yet. Every person had a different but equally adamant assertion about which bus was actually ours – the most helpful turning out to be those not employed by the bus company – but, eventually teaming up with some fellow travelers, we found our way.
At the park we spent two nights at the “Mole Motel”, perched atop an escarpment with an expansive view over a watering hole frequented by elephants, antelope, waterbuck, warthogs, and many birds and monkeys. Prepared to be utterly disappointed we instead turned out to be incredibly lucky, seeing no less than sixteen elephants, the closest no more than ten meters away. Other wildlife novelties were the warthogs that startled Sam ten feet from our front door and the baboon that tried to steal someone’s backpack from beside the pool. After an even bumpier and more crowded 4:00 am bus back to Tamale, we sought out the soothingly familiar tro-tros for our trip on to Bolgatanga.
Once in Bolgatanga, a town without much to recommend it but an excellent pizza parlour, we prepared for our exodus from Ghana. Via shared taxi we arrived the next day at the border town of Paga where, as if to warmly wish us Bon Voyage, we were mobbed by more enthusiastic would-be guides and taxi drivers than anywhere previously in Ghana but, un-tempted and undeterred, we pressed on. On the Ghanaian side of the border I thought for a moment I might not be allowed to leave as the official had trouble interpreting some of the many stamps, visas, and visa extensions littering my passport, but eventually he relented. On the other side we alighted our cab and, African-style, walked over the border to the Burkina Faso where we were met by a charming scene – border guards in berets, smoking cigarettes, and a friendly efficiency as we organized our visas and were welcomed into L’Afrique Française!
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