On arrival in Bobo-Dioulasso we made our way to a cheap hotel and were given a room with no windows. That was fine, because after our long uncomfortable journey, we would have accepted any place with a shower and a bed. The upstairs terrace had a view over a town square fronted by civic buildings, with an attractive but incongruous display of Christmas illuminations.
Bobo turned out to be a welcoming and friendly place, with busy tree-lined streets, a lively market and a crazy-looking mosque. This is Burkina Faso’s second city, and is located in the forested South-West of the country. It would have been enjoyable to spend longer here but we had to reach the capital, Ouagadougou, to sort out a visa for Ghana before the weekend. So we booked onto a big red TCV bus for the five-hour journey to Ouaga. The day before we travelled, a collision between a long-distance bus and a passenger-carrying lorry killed eighty people on this highway, and the wreckage still smouldered as we passed.
We located a small lodge in Ouaga and were greeted at the gate by a friendly man who carried our bags, showed us to the bar, gave us advice about transport to Ghana, and repeatedly offered to check that our room was sufficiently clean. When we went to our room he came to the door and explained that this was his father’s guest lodge and offered to fetch a TV for the room. It turned out that this man was a thief and not at all connected with the hotel. When we went out that evening he tried to get into our room, and when that failed he stole a bag belonging to someone else. We had a lucky escape, as I had mistakenly left a money-belt lying on the bed, containing our passports and some of our cash. It was still there when we returned and I was deeply relieved.
Ouagadougou has a cool name and lots of bicycles. As we explored the central area we made our second mistake in two days, allowing ourselves to be enticed into an upstairs market area by a hawker selling clothing. We ended up in a secluded passage surrounded by a group of men and under a lot of pressure to buy something. Fortunately we came to no greater harm than having to endure a spell of relentless hassle, and we were able to get away and descend to the street. One vendor followed us still trying to flog a running vest. Actually this garment was quite smart and I might have been interested to buy it were it not for the high-pressure sales technique and the fact that many years have passed since I last did any running. On the way back to the hotel we stopped for yoghurt sandwiches at the roadside, which we shared with three street children who appeared, looking hopeful and hungry.
Next morning we walked to the Ghanaian Embassy to apply for a visa. On the way I bought a new hat, having lost mine (perhaps the thief took it). It was a blue baseball cap with OM embroidered on the peak, which I later discovered denotes the French football team Olympique Marseille who are popular in Francophone Africa. The embassy staff were strict but efficient, and allowed us to use their table-tennis set in the yard. Horsey enjoyed a game too. We then made our way across town to the STC bus depot. A huge man in a tiny office sold us tickets to Accra, and told us that Ghana is much better than any other country in West Africa. When pressed for a reason, the best explanation he could conjure up was that Ghana is less dusty. The transaction nearly floundered when he asked to see our passports, which of course we had left at the embassy for the purpose of obtaining visas. But Louise smiled disarmingly and we showed our VSO cards which also display the passport number, and the large man was apparently satisfied. We then spent the rest of the day relaxing in the garden of the OK Inn, a fancy hotel near the gare routière, dozing, reading, and purchasing sufficient drinks to justify using their pool. Here’s a random fact about Ouagadougou. In Ouaga, the airport is closer to the centre of town and the gare routière is further out of town. Well, I thought it was worth mentionning. Most places would have a bus station in the centre, and the airport some distance away, I would have thought.
We arrived early at the STC depot for our 20-hour journey to Accra. There is an additional charge for luggage. One couple had eight very large suitcases; perhaps they were moving house. And we left Ouagadougo behind us, travelling south towards Ghana. As we approached the border it became clear that one British man on the bus had no visa. In some places, a visa can routinely be bought on entry, but not usually for Ghana. This was an expensive oversight; after protracted negotiations he was eventually permitted to enter the country, but he was charged more than three times the published visa price by the immigration official. This delay gave me the opportunity to buy some Cedis. Whilst many countries West Africa share a currency, the CFA, Ghana retains an independent currency, the Cedi. I was pleased that the money changers accepted my British Pounds (usually Euros and Dollars are more popular) and I benefited from negotiating with a pack of individuals, who incrementally dropped their price in order to outdo one another, until we reached a favourable rate of exchange.
The bus rolled on through northern Ghana down a well-maintained tarmac road. We stopped briefly in Bolgatanga where a man tried to sell us a bow and some arrows. We crossed two branches of the Volta River upstream of the northern extremity of Lake Volta. Night fell and we passed through Kumasi, once capital of the Ashanti Kingdom. And at four or five in the morning, we arrived in Accra, weary, disorientated, and with aching limbs. There is not much to do at that time of the morning in an unfamiliar city so we opted to continue to Togo. We crossed the city to another bus garage and located the first bus of the day to Aflao. This was another three hour ride, first through the city, then past attractive coastal scenery, and finally along a narrow strip of land between the sea and the Keta lagoon.
Alfao was busy and the bus crawled through narrow streets packed with traders before dropping us a short walk from the frontier. We completed Ghanaian exit formalities without difficulty, and then joined a queue to enter Togo until being led to a desk where visas were issued on the spot. Whilst we waited we witnessed officials taking bribes from people for a variety of reasons (though on this occasion, not from us) and sometimes using fairly brutal tactics to obtain them. A man loitered at my shoulder throughout the entire process; it turned out he had a taxi and wanted to take us to Lomé, but I declined since we would get a much cheaper fare by walking a little further on. In fact Lomé, the capital of Togo, is only 2km from the border, so when we did get a ride it took just a few minutes to arrive at the Hotel du Golfe.
The Hotel du Golfe has clearly seen a grand history but is now a crumbling relic. The dining room is boarded up, the swimming pool is empty and the bar is dusty and deserted. But it provided somewhere to sleep and that was our main priority, having spent the previous night on a bus. We ate our lunch at a small place on a sidestreet, and then Louise slept whilst I went in search of a TV showing football. I failed, but did catch the end of a rugby match between France and a Pacific Islanders team. I also discovered the disused railway, and a section of pavement where workers appeared to have misunderstood instructions on exactly how and where to locate and arrange about fifty concrete bollards.
From Lomé we made a day trip to Togoville, on the northern bank of Lake Togo. We took a minibus to Agbodrafo, and then a pirogue across the lake, which is so shallow that fishermen stood way out into the lake only had water up the waist. Our boatman punted us across the lake using a long pole and we landed at the jetty in Togoville to be greeted by a number of young men offering to act as guides. Another man was very persistent, telling us that we had to go and greet the chief and sign his book. In remote villages taking a small gift to the chief is an appropriate courtesy, but here we judged that this man was simply after our money, and whoever he took us to see would not be the chief in any case, so we declined and he eventually went away.
Togoville is a centre for Voodoo practices and traditional animist beliefs. As we explored we saw fetishes and shrines, none of which we understood since we had not accepted the services of a guide. However, the main religious spectacle we encountered was a procession from the Catholic Church with much dancing and singing, and with the priest sheltered in the shade of a colourful portable canopy. We watched for a few minutes and then retired to a bar to escape the midday sun. We were joined there by a group that we had seen in the church procession, and who drank beer just as enthusiastically as they had danced and sung.
Leaving Lomé the following day we travelled by minibus north and west into the forested mountains and stayed in a town called Kpalimé. We found a cheap basic room in an auberge called Bafana Bafana, across the road from a huge church. Louise found a tailor for some emergency clothing repairs and that afternoon we walked to the edge of town and up a hill. We left the road and explored down narrow paths through rice fields and cocoa plantations, encountering occasional villages and crossing streams on log bridges. We found a bar at dusk, and watched in awe as a million bats coursed across the sky on their way to a conference somewhere. On the road, people passed on bicycles and on foot, seeming purposeful and well-occupied, in a way that I was not used to seeing back in The Gambia. Like The Gambia, the borders of Togo resulted from spurious historical European decisions. After the first World War, German Togoland was divided between Britain and France. The British third became the Volta Region in eastern Ghana, and the French two-thirds formed Togo. Like The Gambia, Togo is a small, barely viable country. But it gave us an impression of organisation and self-belief far in advance of anything we had seen living in The Gambia for two years. Perhaps that’s harsh, but that was the impression we were left with. That night we found that none of the restaurants recommended in the guidebook actually exist, so we ate pasta, sauce and a very tasty salad, prepared at the roadside under candlelight. And we finished the evening watching Arsenal beat Dynamo Kiev 1-0 in a very full bar.
Kpalimé is just a short distance from Ghana and we ended our brief diversion into Togo with a ride in a decrepit ancient Landrover back across the border. Since the distance was not great, we sauntered to the taxi garage (known in Togo as le station, not le gare routière, which briefly caused us a little confusion), diverting en route for breakfast and to buy water. As a result we missed the first vehicle and were obliged to wait for the next one to fill. So we sat for about four hours in le station, changed our last CFAs into Cedis, and Horsey met some children.
At last we were full and we drove to the far side of the gravel square before the driver decided he needed a look at the engine. This further twenty-minute halt led to a fair degree of consternation amongst the twelve passengers squeezed into the back of the Landrover like overheating sardines. The road was potholed and bumpy as we climbed into the mountains. At the border we discovered that Louise’s visa had not been signed on entry into Togo. ‘Ce n’est pas correct’, the official told us, and he had a point. Fortunately his supervisor was in good humour and we were allowed to proceed without impediment; we were pretty much in the wrong and this incident could have worked out much worse. But the barrier lifted, and we were on our way again descending the dusty mountain road towards both the setting sun, and the Ghanaian town of Ho.
Click to follow our journey into Ghana.
Return to West Africa Overland introduction and index of pages.
