As Lu will tell you, in Lomé we visited a fetish market for vodou practitioners: I made a project of recording all I could from the site, but the images may be disturbing to animal lovers, so I won’t include them here. If you’d like to see them just click here: Lomé gallery

Enter Togo, by means of the least likely looking dirt road imaginable. That there can be both a Ghanian and Togolese immigration Post at the end of this meagre country road, where the grass grows as tall as men and trees abound, seems impossible, and yet there they are. Only a few passengers produce passports and receive entry and exit stamps; the majority hand over folded notes of local currency to the border officials and resume their seats in the truck. After purchasing a visa in a nearby one horse town, we’re dropped off in Kpalime. I want to call it a city, but can’t – its just a small town – but it feels like a city in the sense that you can breathe in the belched black fumes of a dozen cars just by standing on the street, and in that even though it is hemmed in by stunning countryside, it has the frenetic energy that makes you look both ways five times before crossing the road. It’s an interesting looking place but the first thing we do is leave. Two moto drivers take us out of town and up a vast hill of winding roads and blind corners to the village of Kouma-Konda – our ‘K’ – passing en route a gushing waterfall, and driving so fast the ride feels like a rollercoaster, inducing spontaneous grinning. We stay at the simple Auberge Papillon, and arrange for Prospere (hotelier, artist, butterfly expert) to take us walking in the countryside the next day. He’s a pro, having done this many times before. He even gives us a price that is kinder on our budget than the usual one. They’ll be a picnic, a waterfall and many butterflies in the forests. All that’s left for us to do now is relax, take a stroll around the village, and hope for good weather come morning. Kouma-Konda proves to be tiny, and butterflies a growing industry. A small boy with a net the size of his body greets us, ‘bon soir’, and hurries off towards home. We see butterfly traps hanging from trees, and colourful specimins pinned and mounted in glass cases. In the woods nearby there is a strangely pleasant smell of rotting fruit, and the sun sets a pleasing pink over hills that appear bluer and bluer in the changing light. A beer in the local ‘bar’ gives the local kids

a chance to come and giggle at us. We’re sat a low table, on plastic chairs, all of which have been set up outside the small shop selling sweets, sardines, cigarettes, that also doubles as the local offie. Some stars come out. Life feels lovely. I consider, not for the first time, how impossible it is to imagine travel in African countries until you are actually there, doing it. I wonder, when time has passed, how real any of this will seem.

The walk the next day becomes a seven hour epic. Prospere is a true master of the net and the butterflies are stunning. There are spiders, grasshoppers, giant millipedes, shiny beetles and at some points gorgeous clusters of bamboo, the sight and smell of which bring my Japanese pilgrimage right back to me in an instant. There are yukkas too, but a hundred times bigger than the ones kept as houseplants. Everything grows in this environment; cocoa in pods on trees, coffee on branches, indigo plants, cassova… By the time we’re back at the auberge, I’m sure that this is our most gentle, pretty alphabet destination to date. I give my sketchpad and good pencils to Prospere, knowing that its about time i gave up trying to sketch when i’m clearly no good at it, and that here’s a man whose every inch the artist. He sits down with his paints and, while Seth and I play with the resident chameleon, paints me a picture of the butterfly that was my favourite. That he remembers this touches me, and he’s kind too to offer us a lift back down to Kpalime despite the rain now falling (after the lost keys have been retrieved, and the car jump-started.)

Kpalime is our base for exploring the falls of Kpime and Wome, the first a beauty cascading down a cliff in several streams, the second secreted away and little visited, in a thick forest near the Ghana border and down slippery steps. The journey, with moto drivers Bruno and Pascal, is as much of an event as the falls themselves. First there’s a little gang of young hustler guys posing as questionable ‘official’ ticket vendors to the falls, who we have to pay off to some extent to get them to back off. Then the road up to Wome is just barely a road, covered in rocks and dotted with puddles and divots. Bruno and Pascal both take it in their stride, and we cheer whenever we conquer ominous obstacles. All four of us enjoy the falls, and I’m amazed at Bruno’s capacity to drive us one handed while he eats a corn on the cob. It’s a bit of a relief when he chucks it away, but he then proceeds to pick the corn out of his teeth… (you know what sweetcorn’s like…)

It’s as though all of Togo must be this way – beautiful, gentle, its civil war hard to imagine – so when we travel to coastal capital Lome (in a crammed minibus with five live turkeys in the boot), it’s a dose of another reality. The beautiful white beach is off limits unless you want to get mugged. The Grand Marche looks vibrant and exciting as we drive through it, but sits in the area of the city known most for crime. After dark I’m totally uncomfortable on the streets, and the whole scenario begs the question, why is this our ‘L’? I remember Dakar; not all alphabet destinations are a walk in the park. I don’t see how I can write about, nor Seth photograph, a city that isn’t really safe enough to properly explore. Both of us could, however, produce very detailed projects on the interior of our hotel room. The Lome situation is saved by taking a trip to its voodoo market, ‘the market of fetishes.’ Our guidebook accuses the market of being a tourist trap, but when you’re in Togo of all places in the world, in a dodgy capital, looking at rows of stalls piled high with skulls and horns, and breathing in a detestable stench of dried animal spit, it doesn’t exactly feel like a Thomas Cook package deal. There’s an entrance fee, a friendly guide (who thankfully negates the otherwise faintly ominous atmosphere, and occasionally deters the young boys following us with buckets of chameleons and asking for money), and a chance for Seth to take all of the photos he pleases. Our friendly cabbie comes in with us, and i think he is almost as intruiged as we are. I have pen and paper in hand but don’t really know where to start, given all that’s coming in at the eyes. Later, I can hardly read my handwriting (nothing unusual) but selected notes read as follows (NB: all dead,but some even more so than others…):

Dog heads, 13, all fierce/Storks heads balanced on the noses of crocodiles/Ball-like, spotted heads – hyenas or cats?/Empty shell of an elephant’s foot, nails removed/Yellow weaver birds, squashed into a kind of bird patty/Whole buffalo heads in various states of decay/A kingfisher, a woodpecker, an Abyssinian roller – how did they catch these?!/Box full of fruit bats with bright white teeth/Heads of monkeys/Rats, flattened, with insides on display/Turtle shell/Crocodile skins/Dried out blowfish/Snakes tied into coils or positioned in fake attack stance/6 domestic cat heads/The head of a baboon with demented eyes/Many dried toads/2 huge hippo skulls/Box of vultures/34 dried chameleons…

…and this was just from a few stalls. (I have tried to choose photos that aren’t too gruesome or upsetting, that still give a feel of the place…I’m sorry if they still gross people out.)

It is confusing. On the one hand, you want to avoid getting all judgemental about traditional practises and beliefs, and life is just different out here, and in a lot of ways harder, and people have many different ways of coping with things, facing things, living their lives. Your business is in trouble, you see the chief and he fixes up a chameleon potion (chameleons being especially good for work related issues)… at least it would feel like trying to do something, when everything else you tried failed, and maybe you really believe it will help. But obviously to an outsider, it looks, to be honest, macabre and a bit depressing. Pretty much every beautiful bird or animal we have admired in Africa so far is represented in the fetish market, stiff, sad and dead. The elephant and hippo skulls, you don’t even want to think about how they came to be there. The weavers, kingfishers and owls are heartbreaking. It’s an effort to converse with people here in the market without looking morose. Converse we do though, and in particular it’s ‘the chiefs son’ who wants to sell us some fetishes. We are taken to ‘the chief’s room’ (looks like every other shop in the market, and there are two distracting rats romping in a cage in the corner.) Here we are shown amulets, wooden lovers fetishes, and a clay statue of the thunder god Legba. To me he looks a bit like a furby, and I wonder if that’s blasphemy. There are feathers sticking out of its head and a hole for a mouth.

‘This statue of the god will protect an entire household’, explains our guide, ‘but once a year you must place a cigarette in its mouth, light it and let it burn all the way to the end.’

I wonder what Legba’s preferred brand is. I must look concerned because our guide adds,

‘Don’t worry; if yours is a non-smoking household, you can dab a little water on instead.’

It’s a nice show of flexibility on the part of the thunder god, but I still don’t think customs would be pleased with me taking him home. Instead we choose two simple travel fetishes. They are pink, made of wood, very small and only a tree has died for their creation. We both know we need a Lome trinket but try not to look too keen; we are obviously going to be taken on a ride when it comes to the price.

The chief’s son announces that the gods will decide the price. Right. After much awkward ritual, including bell ringing and whispering our names into tortoise shells, some cowrie shells are thrown on the ground, and the chief’s son tells us that the gods usually like to charge 18,000CFA for two travel fetishes, (about £22), but they will give us a special price of 15,000CFA. Who knew the gods did special offers? Seth says thanks all the same but for two pieces of wood, it isnt going to happen. The chief’s son asks the gods if they might like to rethink their price. Down go the cowries. The gods say 12,000CFA might be ok. We smile, stand up and dust ourselves off, Seth pointing out that since the fetishes have absolutely no material value, 2000CFA is the most we could possibly offer. Now the chief’s wife quickly intervenes, honouring our price in the name of good tourist relations. I guess the gods were just way off with their prices that day.

We spend the next week in Benin, which I want to brush over as it is not as exciting as I thought it might be. There are petty visa complications and an incident in which our rucksacks get covered in goat piss. Cotonou is another dodgy capital city where after dark you keep your head down and walk fast. I tell Seth we should just head to Lagos, making a Francis-Bacon-esque triptych of dangerous cities. (I’m joking, but it very almost happens…) We spend time in Ouidah and Abomey. There is an intense storm that hits the coast and sends forks of lightening so close to where we are sleeping that the hair on my arms stand on end and we both lie awake for hours. There’s a voodoo temple full of pythons and a sacred forest where suspicious monkeys eye us from the trees. We are mere miles away from Nigeria, but the apprehension i thought would set in dissipates and becomes curiosity, and even eagerness, to get there. Our travel is about to graduate in intensity and we both feel as ready for it as we possibly can.

And so we come to Ghana, on the hunt for the Nigerian visa. Seth has arranged to take some photos for a development charity called Trax Ghana and thus we base ourselves in the little touristed northern city of Bolgatanga for a few days. It is a compact, hassle-free town, with chilled out folks getting on with their daily business and absolutely no children asking for presents – amazing. We meet Vincent, the regional director, over dinner and he explains about the projects Trax have been working on, and arranges to pick us up the next day to drive us out to see them (I figure I’ll come along with pen and paper, and try not to get in anyone’s way.) Come morning, however, the situation is such that it is not possible for me to be more than a few metres from toilet access, so the guys head off without me, and I lay in various states of consciousness, making notes that make little sense, and cursing the fan for being so weak. Around midday, a knock on the door. It’s a young guy I passed in the corridor earlier.

‘Hi, my name’s Junior. Can we be friends?’
I sigh.I feel like a troll stamped on my guts and now I’ve got gentleman callers. I’ve got to stop smiling at everyone I pass in the corridor.
‘Actually, I’m not so well…’
‘How many days in Ghana?’
‘Well… a few… listen, I can’t chat…’
‘How do you find Africa?’
‘…’

Enter Seth, carrying a cockerel. Junior and I gawp. It’s an awesome entrance, I’d give it a nine. Vincent and Stella join the scene and Junior slopes off. After kind enquires after my health, it becomes clear that the morning has been very successful – great photos for Trax to use and kind farmers who have gifted Seth a big (live) cockerel for dinner and some guinea fowl eggs for breakfast. I have clearly missed something lovely. If we like, Vincent can take us out again the next morning to another site, so I spend the rest of the day resting and popping all the right pills, listening to Seth’s stories of the villagers he met. The cockerel is handed on to the hotel chef who cooks us light red soup and doughy banku to eat it with that night. It is a generous gift from a prize winning farmer,but still we feel a bit guilty as we sit there munching in the dark.

‘What are we now, serial bird torturers?’ I ask Seth, remembering Paga the previous day, where it was necessary to purchase a live chicken for consumption by the (also very live) sacred crocodiles. My body recovers sufficiently to join the team the next morning, as we drive on holey dirt tracks to the village of Gare and visit a compound where new soil conservation techniques have generated an especially prosperous yield of onions. The men who meet and greet us show us mud hut after mud hut full of onions. They are happy to see Vincent, who is in turn thrilled to see so many hundreds of the tear-inducing veggies everywhere we walk:

‘Onions!’- he keeps enunciating, ‘So many! It’s very impressive!’ The villagers are keeping hold of the onions and will sell them all at once when the time is right to get the best price. Guinea fowl peck for seeds behind a bicycle, turkeys fluff their feathers at one another and chicks run beneath our feet as we tour the compound, a family fortress where children eye us shyly and giggle together. As we leave, we pass the hut of the traditional medicine man, the soothsayer. He comes outside, stands by a large mound of animist worship and begins to shake a kind of maraca over a hen he has scooped up into his hand. He’s bare-chested, with a head of fine dreadlocks, and has a goatskin tied around his waist over pinstriped shorts. A little crowd gathers, the women looking up from the preparation of vegetables and grains. It all seems a little ominous for the hen, and Seth and I exchange looks in between the clicking of his camera shutter; will this be the third member of the poultry clan to expire in our name in a brutal 48 hour culling? The maraca is decorated with… feathers. It’s not looking good for our feathered friend. The hen looks resigned to whatever bizarre human treatment it may receive.

‘He’s chanting something’, whispers Vincent, equally enthralled. For a minute, it seems certain that the hen is for it, but suddenly the soothsayer stops his chanting and lets it go. (We exhale…) I realise anyway that we can hardly talk about chicken torture – I must have eaten about thirty of them since stepping foot on Africa, it’s just they look different bald and with a side of chips. As we drive back, Vincent talks about the charity and I continue to make scrawled notes that look more like hieroglyphics due to the number of potholes we’re encountering. I’m hoping to write a little piece about it all when I get a chance. What counts most though is that the pictures are superb, and we both feel lucky to have shared in this positive slice of rural Ghanaian life.

We leave Bolgatanga – it feels like we’ve been there an age – and head south to the city of Kumasi, travelling on a South Korean bus that has somehow, along with hundreds of cars, minibuses, t-shirts, and bags, wound its way half way across the world to Ghana. Before we go on board, I stand gawping at the old sticker on its window. It says ‘Andong to Hahoe Folk Village.’ The world suddenly feels tiny, or even claustrophobic; we were in Hahoe Folk Village, and Andong, eight months ago. I liked South Korea. It was like Japan but rougher round the edges. Part of me wouldn’t mind if the bus really did deliver us to Hahoe Folk Village, but Ghana is working its charms on me. The dust, the heat and the hassle that rose between Southern Mauritania and Mali have calmed, and I’m more at one with my environment. I like how the people here seem relatively laid back. This is my impression, at least, until we visit Kumasi Kejetia market. It would be wrong to say the women vendors bully me, because at 29 you presumably can’t get bullied, but let’s just say they are generally twice my size and they like to grab me and hurl me around a bit. All in the name of fun, you understand. This time my fertility is not directly questioned, though one woman, a smiley vegetable vendor called Victoria, does comment on my big shoulders, ‘like a man.’ (She then almost rips my arm off when we shake hands.) (The shoulders thing I’m used to by now.)

It is the craziest market yet. Palm oil pods, dried fish, neon pink pig trotters in buckets, walls of candy shops and a sense of being completely lost in another universe. It is more a city within a city than a market, and even the outskirts,the surrounding roads, are clogged with traffic and goods spread out along the pavement. Trying to escape and receiving further grabbings, this time from young male T-shirt vendors who practically imbed their fingerprints on my arms, I am tripping over cassavas and starting to get grumpy. In a local spot (a ‘spot’ is a bar in Ghana) I have to douse the flames with a cold bottle of Star Beer, then I unwind and feel less persecuted.

From here, we hit the coast. Accra, the capital, is where we will try for the Nigerian visa, but first we want to take a little sidestep westwards to visit some of ruined European forts that line the coast, standing as a reminder of the slave trade. In Elmina, we stand in the dark dungeons of Fort St George where the Europeans (Portuguese, then Dutch, then Brits) imprisoned West African slaves. The slaves were unable to wash, weak with disease and given only enough to eat and drink as would keep them alive. Though imprisoned in the same fort, whole families were split up and kept in different sections, never to see each other again. The women were raped by soldiers and punished if they resisted. In the case of both the men and women, buckets were left in the corners of the dungeon for toilets, but as people got ill and weak they couldn’t reach them; the slaves were sleeping in their own excrement/vomit/urine/blood, and the tropical heat and humidity along the Ghanaian coast was – is – intense, making life even more horrific in such conditions. Waiting this way for weeks for a boat to arrive, sometimes up to two months, many died. On the boats the people were bound together in chains and laid out like sardines as they were forced to leave their home continent. The tour of the fort was the most depressing and important ‘museum’ experience I’ve had since Hiroshima. The picturesque nature of these forts, surrounded by swaying palms, blue sea and white shore, is thankfully dampened by the aggressive old cannons poking out of their walls. Otherwise it gets confusing, that buildings with such hideous historical significance can be pleasing on the eye. Our visit to Princess Town is a strange exception to the rule. It takes numerous tro-tros (minibuses) and a drive through tropical forest on a slim dirt road to reach the isolated town, the simple houses fighting back a wild army of trees on three sides, the sea on the fourth. From the small fort, the view of the coast is so stunning that the past seems to remain firmly in its place – behind us all – and for an evening and a morning the world feels very beautiful. (The night, admittedly, is spooky. We are staying in a basic room located inside the restored area of the fort itself, and the long walk to bucket showers and toilets has an eerie feel.)

Back in Cape Coast, we have one more sidestep to take before heading to Accra. There is a town beginning with ‘J’, Jukwa, in-between us and a nearby national park, and we plan to visit both. Kakum National Park is the only national park I have ever been to where I have seen absolutely no animals. It is also the only one I’ve been to where you get to walk on a series of rope bridges through the trees, 30m above ground. All in all, a surreal place, and perhaps the only chance in life to pretend you are walking around an Ewok village. Jukwa is 105% less touristy. Our huffy cab driver waits while the two crazy obronis (that’s the local slang for white people) insist on exploring Jukwa market.

‘Hey!’ I say to Seth, ‘Do a 360. What do you notice?’
‘I don’t know. What?’ (He’s trying not to trip over any avocados.)
‘It’s all women. I can’t see a single guy! It’s awesome. It’s like the opposite of those purdah towns we drove through in Pakistan.’

Every face in the crowd is female. Shopping for soap, selling fish, chatting with friends, hawking vegetables, cutting great rolls of cloth… all women. The only exceptions who show themselves are some clowns who come to perform, a man with a megaphone selling traditional medicine and a crazy man who walks around the edge of the market yelling sporadically. Seth sets off for photos; I set off for a trinket. The Jukwa ladies are less inclined to grab me than their Kumasi contemporaries, which makes for a slightly more relaxing shopping experience. That night we stay in the most eccentric and excellent hotel of the trip so far. It is near Jukwa, and it has a pond full of Nile crocodiles that are pretty much free to wonder where they want, trees full of yellow weaver birds building nests, a pool (croc free), table tennis, a security guard with a passion for wearing a plastic policeman hat and an open air restaurant with a view of all of the above. It also serves a fittingly bizarre breakfast and I appreciate the presentation of the baked beans, in their own little metal ice-cream dish.

Accra is a muddle in my mind, very indistinct. For a big city, it has a lot of sky. It sprawls. My Grandpa Billy was stationed here in the Second World War, part of the Gold Coast Regiment. All I really know about it is that he liked the Ghanaians very much, and that he had a pet monkey that used to throw poo around the room. He talked a lot about the war but I was always too young to take it in. On the night we arrive in Accra it’s the champions league final and as we watch it in an Irish bar awash with expats (white faces look strange!), I toast William Norris Heaton with a glass of red wine, and remember how much he used to talk about Winston Churchill after a glass of the same. The wonderful thing about coming all the way to Accra to try for a Nigerian visa is that our efforts pay off. There’s a big hole in the money belt but our passports – already pleasingly rich in red, green, black and blue smudgy ink – are adorned with the full page, dark green authorisation we have been hunting for.

Ghana continues to stun us, and I am especially seduced by the area to the east of Lake Volta, rich in forest and green hills. Roadside stalls have pineapples and watermelons piled high, and there is a waterfall close to Wli village that plummets off a great cliff as big bats cling to the mossy walls. At the village of Tafi-Atome, the local mona monkeys are considered sacred (quite Indian…) and are therefore protected. When we visit, the village is loud and busy because of the many funerals being held. Rather than being solemn occasions, people have dressed up brightly and are enjoying themselves. A few men are drunk and staggering. Loud music plays. The life of the person lost seems to be celebrated at this time rather than mourned for, but I’m sure it’s more complicated than that. Despite the relative chaos, the monkeys still want their bananas and they are incredibly cute, with grey, white and terracotta fur, and wise old faces, even on the babies.

When we leave we have been in Ghana longer than in any other African country so far, and are fond of it. Since we have come by necessity rather than choice, I feel glad that our visa hunt took us here; it’s the first time Africa has felt chill-out-able-in, if I’m honest. Perhaps it is us and not the dynamic that has changed; perhaps we have just settled into the rhythm of life and travel here now. But I do think there’s something special about this country. Togo is our next destination, and in fact the region we will be crossing into is just on the other side of Wli waterfall, just a short distance across from villages like Tafi-atome, and rich in the same beautiful forest and hills. We travel there from the city of Ho, and as we wait for our bashed up vehicle to fill up with passengers – (think half 4 x 4, half bizarre windowless safari style vehicle…) – I smile at the name of the hardware shop across the road: ‘Still Observers Are Worried.’ Ghana is full of excellent signs and names, often a combo of heavy Christian with pleasingly erratic. ‘God Is King Burger’ on the back of a taxi. The ominous ‘You Again’ on a village stall. ‘No Condition is Permanent’ warning me from the back of a tro-tro. The best is a big blue bus that races past us one day on the coast, leaving us in hysterics; ‘Cape Coast Mysterious Dwarves F.C.’ Yep, there’s a lot to love about Ghana.

As we entered Burkina Faso the border official stamped a one week visa in our passports.  Naturally it felt a little restrictive, but it was a good thing, preventing us from dawdling and forcing us to pick up the pace.  South Africa felt a whole world and too many thousands of miles away, and our aim to reach it often became clouded by the glories and distractions of the here and now.  We’d given over a fortnight to Morocco and the Western Sahara, 9 days in politically dubious Mauritania, 10 to tiny Gambia, and even our sometime nemesis, Senegal, had eaten 9.  As for giant Mali, with its absolute abundance of things to see, we’d taken 15 days. ‘This is good,’ we convinced each other, eyeing the modestly dated Burkina stamps, ‘we’ll just have to take in the best of the country in a week’. Compared to Mali, the country was small; another landlocked country, giving the traveller the pleasing sense of being deep in Africa.  With the exception of one street in Ouagadougou and the bus stand at Banfora, Burkina also proved relatively hassle-free – a welcome break from touts, hawkers and intimidating loading boys in minibus stations.  All in all, life in BF slipped down to a cooler gear, and the hot Malian harmattan dust was replaced with skies that brought to us the first rain in two months. Vincent was on his way from homeland France to jungley Togo to visit friends, and it was a pleasure to be his passenger.  The three of us listened to Bob Marley, drank tea, were given a tour of a traffic circle (don’t ask) and ate mangoes by the roadside, enjoying our new, greener environment.  Locals constantly offered to buy his white camper van, and I noticed he had the admirable gift of charming everyone he met with his genuine, open-minded attitude and big smiles; an all round good guy.  It was still light when we reached the capital and took rooms in the Pavilion Vert. I can’t tell you much about Ouagadougou.  We ran practical errands there.  The Nigerian visa has been an issue and a worry since before the trip even began.  One is supposed to apply for it in one’s own country of residence, and a letter of invitation is required from a Nigerian citizen, as well as a photocopy of their passport – intense.  Luckily the father of one of Seth’s work colleagues was able to kindly oblige, but we ran out of time to apply in the UK, receiving the info just days before leaving for Morocco.  Now we were running a gauntlet of Nigerian Embassies, hoping to be allowed to apply for our tourist visas despite our non-African citizenship.  If we failed we would have to take a flight from Benin to Cameroon, breaking up our overland flow and missing out a country so vast and significant as to hold one fifth of Africa’s population (can that really be true?  It seems mad!)  If you glance at a map of the continent, you’ll see the kind of roadblock Nigeria can be for a traveller not granted access.  Neither is there a feasible way around it; Niger is currently unsafe for travel, as is Chad.  (NB:  there are other such difficulties to be faced further along our planned route, not least the 200km wedge of the far Western DRC between Congo and Angola, plus visa issues with the latter, but the massive scale of our journey forces the mind to cut it down into chunks and deal with one chunk at a time.  At first it was Mauritania and its safety problems.  Now it was Nigeria.)  This takes us to the embassy in Ouagadougou, where a notice pinned outside regarding visas didn’t mention anything about them being exclusively available to citizens of Burkina and gave us hope.  Inside, a big bubbly character behind a desk had a rapport going with the visitors around the room.  The TV played a Nigerian soap opera.  Walking in, I felt instantly uncomfortable.  Getting this visa was beginning to matter too much and I was sure we were wearing it all over our faces. ‘Hi, how are you?’ I asked the official.  There’s no such thing as just ‘hi’ out here; it’s always ‘hi, how are you/bonjour, ca va?’ and a handshake with a big smile, otherwise you’re being rude. ‘Very well’, (the beaming official), ‘What do you want?’

‘We want to apply for tourist visas for Nigeria,’ asserted Seth, and I hoped it was only me who could sense how desperate we were.  The official, reclining casually behind his desk in the small, dark room – lit only, it seems, by the television, nods.  He seems positive but non-committal. ‘From where do you cross to Nigeria?  You can get your visa from the last country you visit before Nigeria.’

‘So… Benin?’  I volunteer.

‘Yes, Benin, you get your visa there,’ he smiled and nodded.  We must have looked depressed.  ‘It’s a tourist visa – tourist visa, no problem.’

We thanked him and left, wishing that it was no problem, but feeling faintly optimistic.  As we walked in the hot sun, I reconstructed the conversation in my head and wondered, had we come at it from a different angle, would the outcome have changed?  If we had explained how much we wanted to secure that visa as soon as possible…?  Our guidebook sited Accra, Ghana, as a good place to apply for Nigerian visas abroad, so we walked to the Ghanaian Embassy, paid our fees and left our passports with them.  (We hadn’t planned on visiting Ghana, hoping instead to head into Togo or Benin directly, and had no idea at this point that it would actually prove to be our favourite country so far, lush, stunningly beautiful in parts, with friendly locals and a laid back air.) At dinner that night Vincent explained his day’s explorations in Ouagadougou, its markets and museums, and we felt a little ashamed to give in return only tales of bureaucracy and of an amusingly bad run in with beef bone jelly soup. The following day, Seth and I took a bus to Bobo-Dioulasso.  The city is considered a tourist destination in itself, but we were going because I had – from guidebook, postcard and internet research – identified the nearby Banfora region as the most beautiful in the country, on account of an awesome rocky range called the Sindou Peaks.  (That Seth was not so impressed by the images and that these peaks were way off our route, far, far West, and practically on the border with Cote D’Ivoire, yet we still went, is testimony to both his kindness and my persuasive skills…) Bobo I could take or leave.  The 106 year old mud mosque, still with the prickles but painted cream, was my favourite thing about it.  Otherwise, the market had as much atmosphere as a stroll around Morrisons (bitchy!) and as for the tour of Kibidwe, ‘the old town’, offered by local guides, it was a tourist trap leading from one shop to the other.  Ugh! At Banfora, we arranged a taxi to the Karfiguela falls, the Sindou Peaks, and back, which took over an hour of bargaining.  This journey was the reason for our big diversion west and utterly worth it.  There’s nothing like a good dose of natural beauty to soothe the soul, especially souls troubled over visas.  At both the falls and the peaks, you could count the number of other visitors on one hand, and the sounds of bees, bugs, birds and falling water replaced the sound of shouting and car horns.   The falls tumbled from a cliff top over unusual chunky brown boulders that looked like giant chocolate brownies.  Near the top we found a secluded section with its own powerful, solitary flume, and splashed in, resting in the full force of the water.  There is nothing better for the skin than the pounding force of raw water on the shoulders, neck and face.  For hours after my whole body felt zingy.  As for the peaks, they appear very suddenly on the horizon after an hour of driving through flat countryside full of sugarcane crops and villages full of thatch roof huts, along a road lined with trees and busier with human traffic than motors.  You climb up into the Sindou Peak range and are very soon surrounded by them.  They are very hard to describe – if I think  about it too much, this will go from being a blog into some kind of arduous Byron epic, though far, far inferior.  Sigh.  The best I can do is – they are bobbly, knobbly crags, coffee-to-peach in colour, powder-dust rough to touch (and warm, under the afternoon sun.)  They are like giant stalagmites grown up out of the earth, and like those long, fingerlike termite mounds we have begun to see everywhere we go, yet in monolithic form.  Mostly, they are like, when you switch on a lava lamp and the wax makes that odd, solid, static, bobbly formation before it gets quite hot enough to melt.  Beyond that I am lost.  Luckily, I can attach pictures.  For me, this place was a real highlight of our journey so far; another one of those places you are standing in, and turning 360 degrees, and still can’t quite believe it is real. If you remember from my last blog, the most important thing in Burkina Faso, through alphabetical eyes, were the villages in its midst that began with ‘I’.  From Bobo we rode the bus east to Koudougou, checked into a hotel and inquired at reception, had they ever heard of Imasgo?  Yes, of course they had, it was some 20-25km north.  How could we get there – by minibus, taxi?  A gaggle of staff gathered and debated this, and soon it was decided.  Jacques, the head chef, and Jean, from the laundry department, would take us to Imasgo and back on their motorbikes – all we had to do was cover petrol costs.  It was kind, and brilliant, and a huge stroke of luck.  Ten minutes later we were on the road to our ‘I’, with no idea what to expect, racing through villages full of fortified, circular compounds with straw roofs, and swerving to avoid pot-bellied goats, small pigs and stray chickens.  Jacques drove me, clearly enjoying the outing, and as cheery as his bright lime green shirt.  Jean drove Seth and looked a little more serious, perhaps not quite so in love with this bizarre mission to Imasgo, though to his credit he was polite and helpful throughout.  As you might guess, it was a small place.  Women pounded millet in the shade of trees and flocks of guinea fowl scuttled around in the dust.  Jean led us off the main road, along a short dirt track and into the market; a bustling place you would never have known was there.  Here we parked up, instantly becoming a curiosity, causing excitement, puzzlement and shyness alike.  The four of us trailed through the market single file, lowering our heads (against a poke in the eye with a straw roof edge) and careful feet (against stepping on the endless bundles of green leaves for cooking).  Seth snapped portraits and inspired hilarity, especially among the little boys playing table football – a classic Francophone Africa pastime.  I was focusing on the trinket hunt – plastic jewellery, Avril Lavigne T-shirts, padlocks, vegetables – nothing seemed right.  Then I found it; a small pig-shaped flashlight (the beams of light shine from the pig’s nostrils…), with this pleasing advertisement on the side of the box:  ‘THE PRODUCT DESIGN WITH CARTOON PIG, DEEPLY YOUTH’S AFFECTION.’  (Yeah, deeply youth’s affection, but also certain regressive 28 year olds as well.) Back in Koudougou, after thanking the Jean and Jacques, we rejoiced in our non-Dogon ‘I.’  By now our week was almost up.  We’d been busy – too busy, perhaps, to think much outside our travel bubble.  Burkina Faso is actually one of the poorest countries in the world.  Adult literacy is at 13%, half the population live on less than a US dollar a day and a third of the people will not make it past the age of 40 (these stats are from the Lonely Planet.)  As a traveller passing through for six days, it is hard to believe such things, and it is a reminder of the layers on which one’s experiences exist. On May 16th, at sunset, we left Burkina Faso.  The border official quietly studied my passport and inked up the exit stamp.

‘Is this page Ok with you?’ he asked, ‘Just here?’  I nodded, stunned; it was the first time in ten years of travel that anybody has ever asked where I might like my stamp, and undoubtedly the last.  As we crossed the no man’s land to Paga, Ghana, a colony of yellow weaver birds were screeching in a palm tree, carrying long strands of grass to add to their basket shaped nests. ‘Hey, how are you?’ called a smiling man from outside a chop bar decorated with Guinness signs, ‘Welcome to Ghana!’   

In Bamako, we took a box of a room – the kind dead bodies might be found in come morning – and I think you could even say we relaxed. Certainly we slowed down. Road travel in the Gambia and Senegal had drained our energy and we were flat like pancakes; emergency! Bring on the Vietnamese food, Castel beers and glowing riverside sunsets! Seriously, there is nothing like beef Saigonese style and a view out over the Niger River as the sky turns golden to soothe the impact of eighteen hours of the stench of illness and a soundtrack of baby screams. Less calming was Bamako’s Grand Marche, which was so busy I literally felt high walking around it, trying not to trip over the guinea fowl and severed bulls’ heads in the butchers’ section, then praising the glory of the old fashioned sewing machines in the tailors’ quarter. The human traffic ground to a standstill often, as vendors with wheelbarrows full of soap tried to push their way past women balancing huge metal bowls of fish on their heads. It was all brilliant until someone caught a thief in their stall and all hell broke loose. The fight – if you can call you that – bounced from one side of the crowd to the other, and we were inches away from fists, the lens hood on Seth’s camera even getting flung to the ground in one swipe. The thief restrained, fifty faces looked on in shock as the men who had caught him began to wallop him so hard that he was spitting blood. Later, a Malian friend explained that the country has a chillingly low tolerance for theft; ‘The thief, if he is caught, is lucky if he goes to prison. More likely he is killed. If a thief enters your house, maybe you are shooting him dead.’ I went to bed wondering what happened to the man in the market, and thinking that, if we were to get mugged in Mali and drew attention to it, we could be responsible for murder.

We left the capital for Segou, a real non-destination in that it had been given a glowing account in our guidebook and had consequently received such quantities of travellers as to mar the peaceful riverside atmosphere for the visitor, who is instantly tagged by gangs of touts and hawkers, the kind that if you shake them off complain loudly that you don’t like Africans and should go back to your country; ugh. The extra sting in Segou’s tail is, since its recent and bizarre popularity, every hotel and restaurant has hoiked their prices up. What you’re left with is a few glimpses of boatmen gliding along the Niger river, and glances of families washing their dishes and clothes in the river, but a great big dollop of grievous hassle. Shame, because this is where the famous traveller Mungo Park first laid eyes on the Niger and I couldn’t link this place with the one he saw.

Eastwards, to Djenne – much better. The Grand Mosque at Djenne was every bit as odd and wonderful as the photos would have you expect. Built from mud and pierced with wooden poles, it looks like a prickly sandcastle, and there really isn’t much to be done but stand there gawping at it. What I didn’t know until reaching the town is that it is on a small island. The streets are dusty, the houses old, also of mud, and the whole place has a look of melting chocolate. An oddly abiding memory of our Djenne time, though, was the night on which my evil cough and sore throat, caused by the desert harmattan wind, reached their worst point, and I was lying in bed, gargling water every twenty minutes, listening to bad karaoke renditions of Celine Dion songs blasting from a nearby hotel, and feeling very sorry for myself. Seth was sleeping restlessly, perhaps having lariam-induced nightmares, and this perhaps explains why he woke up, mistook my hand for a rat and started walloping it. Sigh. As if the Celine Dion wasn’t bad enough already.

There were villages close by which we reached on a shared motorbike and by hitching a ride on the back of a donkey cart loaded with bricks (as you do). The first village was populated by the children of doom, screaming for presents, deliberately ruining Seth’s photos and toying with the idea of chucking rocks at us. The second had angelic kids who walked with us, shyly holding our hands. The vast difference in atmosphere was much appreciated. The reason we had ridden out to see these places was to get a look at the smaller mud mosques built in the villages. They were smaller but no less austere, and in a way all the more picturesque for their setting among little granaries and huts. We saw maybe fifteen, twenty mud mosques while travelling in Mali and no two were alike. They leave a very firm impression on you; simple elegance, and an undeniable sense of the exotic. If I wasn’t such a useless artist, I’d have sketched them. (It’s a wonder I haven’t yet given away my sketchpad and pencils, like some crazed part of me expects to wake up tomorrow morning the next Da Vinci.)

Mopti, on the Bani River, was raw and we both liked it a lot. The port thronged with boats gliding in all directions and the markets were full of stinky dry fish, scorched looking chillies, chunks of salt on weighing scales and – of course – piles of Drogba and Obama t-shirts. We were lucky enough to join a busload of school basketball players when heading to the city of Gao, and as we lay across the backseat of the luxuriously roomy bus, the kids chanted victory songs, the stars shone and the rocky landscape of the Douentza-Hombori range cast impressive silhouettes beneath the moonlight. Gao would be our ‘G’ and it felt like the first alphabet letter in an age. Seth fell asleep on my lap and I eventually realised my constant nudging him to point out every passing rock formation was not making me popular. It was 4am when we arrived at crazily remote Gao (on the Niger River beyond Timbuktu, and at the fringe of our old friend, the Sahara). Seth wisely suggested waiting until dawn before checking into a hotel, so as not to be charged for two hours sleep. This is all very well but after a nine hour bus journey on the back of a long hot busy day, it is hard to sleep on a wooden bench in a waiting room where ‘The Power of Love’ is being played at full blast and your neighbour, a goat, keeps bleating disapprovingly. I got the giggles in the end, especially when Toni Braxton started crooning about unbreaking her heart (bbleeeee-aaah, said Mr. Goat, and I agreed).

Gao was a long thin town. It looked as old as it was – a mere 1300 years – and as though it had grown up out of the sand, natural, earthy, dusty. The odd tumbleweed flying around town would not have been out of place. Security issues in recent times meant that Gao’s tourist industry was in a dry patch. It really felt like an outpost, with barely a building over a storey high, a general lack of people in the streets and vast, sand blown patches of vast nothingness. We were the only people at the awesome Tomb of the Askias, and among the few mad enough to take a boat ride along the Niger in its driest, shallowest season, to see ‘the pink dune’. (‘It’s orange’, claimed Seth as we admired it at sunset. ‘It’s pink’ I said, uncertainty leaking through – damn. ‘It’s blatantly orange,’ he affirmed.) From there back to the shore at Gao, we passed a mini-age on sandbanks, the boatman and his son trying to push off to a deeper part of the river only to land moments later on another one, while our guide backseat sailed and Seth tried to explain the usefulness of his GPS which showed the exact route along the river we had taken on the way to the dune. Our boatman took an unimpressed glance at the machine and continued on his way. I felt the victory was his because we did eventually make it back to Gao, albeit in the dark, and what fisherman wants foreigners claiming their strange objects know the river better than he does? Our ‘G’ trinket was a bronze statue of a heron, bought from a hardcore saleswoman in the artisans’ market.

Hombori was a village lying at the heart of those rock formations I mentioned earlier, and we had long planned to make it our ‘H’. On arrival, finding that the accommodation facilities required that we sleep out on a rooftop, I was briefly mortified. For two weeks I had been coughing incessantly and speaking in a growly voice like Rani Mukerjee’s. Now I was finally beginning to feel better but we would be sleeping on the roof of a mud guesthouse in a town full of sand. If the sand winds of the harmattan were to re-infect my respiratory system, this would surely be the place for it to happen. The toilet was a hole in the floor. The shower a room with a see-through wooden beam door, and a giant goat that looked much like the Mouth of Sauron was living in a little outhouse opposite, glaring at me and trying to butt the door down each time it saw me run by in a towel. It was not ideal. Words like Sofitel, Novotel, Hilton, Sheraton hovered in my head and mocked me. However, this place turned out to be an awesome place to stay. (For the record, we were showered with sand laden winds in the night, but as I lay awake, spitting grit, I saw a shooting star. So nothing’s all bad.) The rocks of Hombori ranged from craggy plateaus to great, finger shaped, leaning monoliths, and Seth fell in love with the place, taking thousands of photographs. Climbing a set of crumbling steps into the rocks – a scene of almost biblical drama – one reached ‘Old Hombori’, where women were pounding millet and kids surrounded us as we walked. Cattle roamed the rocky streets in a lumbering manner a la Hindustan. In all directions the view was magnificent, a world of glowing gold coming in at the eyes.

A cattle market was due to take place in the nearby town of Boni the next morning, and Lelele, the owner of our guesthouse and all round good guy, was going there. We joined him… and half of Hombori village… and six goats… riding in the back of a lorry all the way to Boni, where donkeys were traded, goats slaughtered, and everything from woven mats to football shirts were sold in the shadow of dramatic orange escarpments. Lelele brought his young son Rafael along for the ride, and the four of us ate plates of rice and sauce in a shady compound presided over by a large, hospitable lady, as chickens and children ran around our feet. No transport returned to Hombori for hours, and when a minibus finally went, it was packed to bursting. Seth, Lelele, four other men and a goat travelled on the roof. Rafael and I were perched on a sack of rice at the feet of our fellow passengers in the back of the bus. Sweat streamed down our faces. A man carrying a giant terracotta pot looked dangerously close to falling asleep and dropping it on Raf’s head. We kept knocking on it to remind him we were there, the man beside us – a friend of the family – barking at the Sleepy man whenever he looked to be dozing off. It was fun to chat to the Ghanaian men sat next to me, but the humidity and heat were insane, and when Rafael began to fall asleep, I worried he was passing out. We played games, like hiding from each other under my hat, and messing around with my water bottle (a good excuse to get him to drink lots), but when the bus pulled over and we were invited up to travel on the roof, I was ecstatic. Climbing the ladder, leaping over various bikes and trying not to step on the goat, I joined Seth and Lelele. Rafael was handed up by the driver like a special delivery. That half hour, riding through the classic rock landscapes of Hombori on top of a bus in good company, after a great day, was the kind of travel experience I am always hoping for, the kind that fills you up until happiness is kind of bursting out of you. We were too tired to go trinket shopping that night. Luckily a hawker visited our guesthouse, and from him we bought a chunky Songhai necklace. Our eighth alphabet letter in the bag.

It was over soft white bread and mango jam in a hotel in Sevare that we realised we did not have to go to the Dogon Country to get our ‘I’.

The Dogon Country is Mali’s main tourist draw – ancient villages clinging to rocky escarpments, home to a people whose unique culture is said to have changed little over the centuries. The Lonely Planet dedicates eight pages to trekking in the Dogon. Every single tourist to the country goes there. It is regarded as Mali’s absolute highlight, and for these reasons as well as those of cost and general dislike of voyeuristic ‘village safaris’, we wanted to avoid it. The trouble was, it was full of ‘I’s and we knew of no ‘I’s in Burkina Faso, our next destination. So, over mango jam, resigned to reluctantly heading to the Dogon Country, Seth wondered once again were there really no ‘I’s in Burkina Faso? There was a Michelin map of West Africa pinned to the wall in the breakfast hut, more detailed than our atlas. I squinted at it. Two! There were two! Ingane and Imasgo! We could head on to Burkina, without spending days trying to reach remote Dogon villages! We were free! I should say that I’m sure visiting the Dogon villages could be a great experience and I can see why some people love it. It’s just not for us, at this time, on this trip, nor for the book I want to write. We like to dilute the touristy stuff we do by going to lesser known places too, and a Dogon trek would be… well, hard work diluting. The other thing I wasn’t sure about was how a culture and a people could remain so famously unchanged if so much tourism penetrated it? Anyway, we got a freebie because our minibus to the Malian border town of Koro passed right through part of the Dogon, allowing a glimpse at the crazy rocky scenery and some very nice mud mosques. Certainly, it’s a stunning area.

Our last night in Mali was due to be spent in the mud hut room with no door and zero ventilation. I loved it because it looked like something straight out of Star Wars. Seth hated it, and in the heat of the night, swearing, evacuated us and our mattress to the courtyard to sleep outside. We tied our mosquito net to a tree and slept once again with nice gusts of sand anointing us. Still, life was good. We had feasted on chips and peanut sauce at a street stall (yes really) and a friendly Frenchman called Vincent had offered us a lift in his van to Burkina Faso the next day. We had been in Mali for two weeks and it was time to move onwards, south and east.