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.
In one posting, you tell us more than would fill an entire issue of National Geographic -- it's amazing how much you've seen and experienced in such a short time. Envy you the wee hipp - and the wee mask!
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