April 28th

So I’ve been travelling for about the past 10 days with Jenna. A lot has gone on but I think I’ll just try to hit the highlights and you can check out my sweet pictures and videos on facebook.

Saturday the 17^th we spent on a bus going to Tamale, Ghana. We were heading up to Burkina Faso but had to stop over in Tamale for the night. On Sunday we made our way up to the Ghanaian border town of Paga. Paga is known for their sacred crocodiles. Legend has is that a man made a pact with the crocodiles that his people would not kill a crocodile if the crocodile helped him across the river. There’s more to it but that’s all I can remember off hand. You could probably google it. So the crocodiles are considered sacred and are very docile. We visited a crocodile pond where they said there were 500 crocodiles. A man lured a crocodile out of the water with a small (live) chicken and then we were able to go up behind the crocodile and pick up its tail. The crocodile was probably around 6 ft. long. The crocodile just sat there and chilled while we took pictures. Afterwards they threw the chicken to the crocodile. The crocodiles seem to have a pretty easy life. The men at the pond said they are even able to swim in the crocodile pond. They invited us to swim but we politely declined.

After that, we made our way across the Ghana-Burkina border. We were planning to go to a village to see its unique architecture but as we found out, it’s difficult and expensive to travel to smaller towns in Burkina, especially on days when no one else is travelling. So instead we made our way up to Ouaga, the capital. Ouaga is short for Ouagadougou but that’s a really intimidating name. It was about 9 or 10pm when we arrived in Ouaga. We had some names of hotels but we really didn’t know where we were or where to go. Luckily we had met a really nice guy, Ishmal, at the Ghanaian border who took the bus with us. He’s a business man who sells gold all over the world. In his own words, people in Burkina are either extremely poor or extremely rich. And he certainly wasn’t poor. His brother was picking him up so they took us to a decent hotel.

The next day we just hung out in Ouaga. There wasn’t too much to do but it was really nice to just be in one place and enjoy the city instead of the rushing from place to place that travelling normally is. We took it pretty easy. We went to some markets and shops and saw some really cool Burkinabé art. In Ghana, it feels like if you’ve been to an art market, you’ve been to them all. But in Burkina we found some really interesting and more modern African art. We walked around the city some and saw the mosque. I got to practice my French. All of the countries we visited spoke French as a national language on top of all the local dialects. Jenna doesn’t know any French so it was all on me. I didn’t mind since it was helping me remember things I had forgotten. That night we went out for a little bit with Ishmal and his brother. In the car they showed us a small bar of gold that they had on them. I can now say that I’ve held $9,000 in one hand. It started to get a little creepy with them after that so we didn’t see them again.

The next day we just hung out in Ouaga again. We went to the National Museum that had exhibits about the role of women in Burkinabé society and tribal masks. That night we saw some traditional Burkinabé music and dancing which was really interesting. We had gotten a bus ticket from Ouaga to Contonou, Benin for 5am so we decided not to bother getting a hotel room for the night. We listened to music until 1am and then went to the bus station to wait for our bus. The bus ride was hopefully the longest bus ride I will ever take in my life. It was 20 hours from Ouaga to Contonou. I’m not going to lie, it was painful, especially since we hadn’t slept the night before and we were forced to watch about five different Welsey Snipes movies dubbed in French. It was worth it though because taking a bus straight to Contonou saved us a lot of time and money instead of hopping transport to Benin and having to stop over another night.

The first day we were in Benin we went to Porto Novo. Contonou is the biggest city but Porto Novo is the capital. In Porto Novo we went to an Ethnography Museum, the market, and saw a few churches. There wasn’t much to do there but it was nice to chill there for a day.

The next day, we went a few miles outside of Contonou to a village on stilts called Ganvié. It was a really cool place to visit but unfortunately our tour guide was a jerk and tried to ripe us off. We paid for a boat ride including someone to drive the boat and a guide, but when we were walking to the boat the guide tried to convince us that we had to pay 10,000CFA (about $30 or the price of one night in a hotel) more for him to come with us. Obviously we argued with him about it. Then he tried to get us to pay 2,000CFA but we opted to go back and talk to the front desk about why we had to pay more. When we got there, he back pedalled and we didn’t have pay anything. The boat ride to the stilt village was about an hour. When we got there, the guide only took us to a souvenir shop barely inside the village. The tour was supposed to include a circuit of the village but he said we had to pay extra for that. So we didn’t have any choice than to get back in the boat and head back to shore. I’m still glad we went, I think, but he was probably the biggest jerk I’ve met in West Africa.

In the afternoon, we went to an art exhibit in Contonou called Fondation Zinsou. It was amazing. It was all contemporary African art. There was a guy working there that spoke English and walked us around the whole exhibit and described everything. He was the polar opposite of the jerk we met at the stilt village. There was art from all over Africa that was based on things like the Rwandan genocide, pollution in Contonou (which is really bad because of all the fuel exhaust), a lot of things made out of recycled material, etc. Jenna and I were blown away. They also had a room where children can come twice a week to create art and a room where children have painted all over the walls. It was really apparent to us how much more emphasis the Francophone African countries put on art than Ghanaian does. We haven’t seen anything like that in Ghanaian and the exhibit literally only had one small piece of Ghanaian art. When you go to Ghanaian markets, all the art pretty much looks the same. Considering how developed Ghana is compared to other African countries, it’s disappointing that they don’t invest more in their artists.

The next day we went to the market in Contonou. We just wanted to find the fetish (aka voodoo) section of the market. Benin and Togo are known for voodoo still. It took us a while to find the voodoo section in the huge market but we did. Most of the voodoo items were pieces of dead animals. Pretty much any animal you could think of in West Africa, was there. There were dead bats, birds, snakes, chameleons, crocodiles, monkey skulls, horse skulls, bird skulls, turtles, animal pelts, cow heads, and a huge hippo head. Jenna was really grossed out by it but I was morbidly curious. A person could get years in prison in the US for owning some of the things that were on sale there. We only hung out there for a little bit. I ended up buying a couple wooden voodoo dolls so that they’d let me take pictures of some of the voodoo items. I think the voodoo dolls are harmless. I couldn’t completely understand the man’s explanation in French but I believe the two voodoo dolls have something to do with fertility and male-female relations. Anyways, I’m not a voodoo priestess.

After that we headed across the border to Togo and stayed the night in Lomé, the capital. The first day we were in Togo we went to Togoville. The locals there say that you haven’t been to Togo until you’ve been to Togoville. It is known as the first place the Germans “settled” when they colonized Togo. In 1884, the Germans and Togolese signed an “agreement” that essentially forfeited Togo’s sovereignty over to the Germans. We had to take a boat across Lake Togo in order to reach the village. We got a tour of Togoville which was actually pretty interested. Togoville is also known for being a voodoo stronghold. We saw a few voodoo shrines, a monument to the German-Togolese agreement, the chief’s house, and the cathedral that the Germans built in 1910 among a few other things. I think in the 1980s or something, there was a sighting of the Virgin Mary on Lake Togo so Pope John Paul visited Togoville. After our tour, we took a swim in the pool at our hotel. The fact that our hotel had a pool was amazing. Then we just sat out by the Lake which is gorgeous.

The next day we left Togoville and headed to Kpalimé (pronounced pah-lee-may). From Kpalimé we got moto-taxis up Mt. Klouto. I think it’s the second biggest mountain in Togo. We stayed at a hotel there over night near a village called Kouma-Konda. It was absolutely gorgeous. In the morning, a tour guide took us on a 4 hour hike. Along the way he pointed out a bunch of different plants used for food or dyeing cloth or otherwise. He showed us cocoa plants, cotton, mango, avocado, coffee, papaya, etc… It was amazing how much he knew about the plants. He even told us all the scientific names. The area is also known for its amazing variety of butterflies and we saw some beautiful ones along our hike. He took us to a couple waterfalls and we had a picnic next to one of them. He also took us up to a bat cave. After our hike, we packed up and left again for Lomé. We stopped for lunch and then crossed the border back to Ghana. We got back just late last night.

Well, I guess that’s my trip in a nutshell. Now it’s time for me to really hit the books. I have my first finals on Sunday. I’ll be back in the states in less that 20 days.