There are some pictures available of us on the web of our freshly painted bikes taken just before we left Bobo by Anouar a French guy who was also staying in Casa Africa at the same time. You can check out his blog entry and pictures here, and if your French is not so hot you can see a Google machine translated version here.
We are trying to get hold of the originals and will be posting more pictures soon!
We really enjoyed our stay in the Kangaba Campement in Bamako, though perhaps a little to rich for our blood as a campsite, we were really helped out by the guys that ran the place and we managed to get Keith a part worn rear tyre to replace his bald rear, which should tide him over till we make it to Togo and our next service destination.
Highlights for us in Bamako and Mali in general were among other things, the friendliest people yet, fantastic street food and we discovered Castel – The Queen of Beers!
After possibly too short a stay in Mali we decided to push on to Burkina Faso and then onwards and southwards to Ghana in an effort to maintain some momentum in our progress through Africa… however sometimes you get pleasantly waylaid by a place and just have to stay longer!
So it was with a go go go mentality that we rolled into Bobo Dioulasso, the second city of the tiny country of Burkina Faso. Most of you probably haven’t even heard of the country, or if you have you might not know it’s actually in Africa and in fact right in the heart of West Africa. But what a find it is when you stumble across it! One of the poorest countries in Africa, Burkinabes (as they are called)Â make up for this in spades by being just some of the nicest people in Africa we have met, with a beautiful little corner of Africa thumping to an African beat.
Our original plans for staying in Bobo were happily disrupted by meeting a whole bunch of really cool people and we whiled our days away chilling out eating street food, drinking the local millet beer in bars, bumping into some fellow Irish and listening to them jam with their musician friends over a glass of the local palm wine, exhausting the local yogurt shop of it’s entire supply of yogurt and being taken for wild midnight rides on the back of souped up scooters by the locals!
We also managed to meet a local artist called Elvis who agreed to give our bikes’ paint job an African uplift! Elvis was a really cool guy who lived with a bunch of other artist friends in a sort of artists commune. All of them were really sound guys and they spoilt us with cups of tea while we talked and waited for them to finish their work on the bikes. For the finished result you will unfortunately have to wait till we get another camera in Accra, Ghana and start snapping again – so bear with us for a little bit.
Nearly a week after we had planned to arrive in the fantastically named Ouagadougou (or Ouaga for short) we rolled in. We wanted to spend a few days getting our Ghanaian visas and enjoying the big city life of the capital, unfortunately we had been really spoilt by Bobo and it couldn’t really measure up the same way, it had that big city buzz, a little more hassle, crazy traffic and too many people crammed into one place.Â
Despite not really expecting it though we have been pleasantly surprised by this tiny little unnassuming country and we have really enjoyed trying to blend our white skins into the local street life.
After our long stays in Senegal and Gambia we decided to put a renewed impetus on the journey and our desire to push forward or more appropriately downward. As it stands the journey has evolved into a series of unplanned back to back holidays. That’s not a bad thing it’s just how life off the road has unfolded.
Picking up from where we last left off… we were dashing eastwards through Mali towards Bamako. The only thing we really noticed out of the blur was that the people changed considerably. Poverty has become much more visible and in a way more prominent. However people have become more genuine and less hassling. A constant pain in Senegal and Gambia.
We arrived to Bamako in dramatic fashion. My rear wheel met with a vicious 3 inch nail. The bugger ploughed directly through the thinning Desert tyres and super tough inner tube. Our 27 socket, which is needed to remove the back wheel and fix the puncture, fits into a ratchet which for the last 2 weeks has been out of action. As our luck would have it my puncture brought us to a standstill only 100 meters from a small but very friendly motorbike mechanic. Lucky is not the word.
After we replaced the tube with a spare we rode on and arrived in Bamako proper. While there we stayed in a small encampment recommended to us by friends we had met in Dakhla, Western Sahara. It was cool to have made the association and to have heard a lot more dirt on Colin…. Don’t worry Colin it wasn’t all bad! The plan from Bamako was to head south towards Abidjan in the Ivory Coast and then eastwards along the coast to Accra in Ghana. The cheeky Ivorians had a differnt plan. They’d shut their Embassy in Bamako for a week and we were left with the choice between a new route to plan or a week to hang around and wait. We chose the former and decided to go through Burkina Faso and from there into Ghana. A place which surprised us greatly and made us happy to have been detoured. Luck again was on our side as we heard last night from a local in Ghana that troubles have just started to flare up again in the Ivory Coast.
After our night under the stars and burning half the driftwood on the beach we headed back up north to visit some friends of friends in Diouloulou in the northern part of the Casamance. Their names are Jean Bernard and Jean Augustine and they are Catholic priests who are working very actively in the area.
When we arrived at 10:30 in the morning we were immediately given a huge warm welcome by Jean Augustine and welcomed in, given seats and a nice ice cold Guinness was thrust into our paws. Such a great way to be welcomed if you are Irish!
The rest of the day was much the same as we enjoyed fantastic hospitality and beers with good company punctuated by a much needed siesta to recoup for the evening. In the evening we were joined by Jean Bernard who has been working in the area for a very long time and has a wealth of experience. It was great to spend the evening with the priests and some of their friends, including an old German Frauline who had been working in West Africa for many years. By the time we made it to bed that night the spirits were high and we were both shocked that you could have so much fun with priests!
We decided to leave the next day for Mali as unfortunately Jean Bernard was going to be in Guinea Bissau for a couple of days and we wanted to get the wheels rolling again after having spent way too long in and around Senegal already and we really needed to make some progress again if we were ever going to see South Africa this year.
So the next morning we were up just after dawn to once again load up our bikes and get on the road, but not before a hearty breakfast with the priests once again. It was only about 24 degrees Celsius when we left in the morning but by the end of the day the mercury was touching over 40 and it was getting really humid! Incredible how as you go inland the temperature just rises and rises.
The scenery changed too, from the green lushness of the Casamance to a much drier dustier landscape. The red Africa soil that was mostly covered by the trees and rich green bushes of the Casamance was uncovered once again and more and more Banyan trees started to appear – big silver bulbous shapes with no leaves but whose bodies store up so much goodness and provide shelter for smaller animals that live in and around them. This is part of the joy of traveling through such an amazing and diverse continent as Africa, as the scenery and people changes so much from place to place.
We managed a pretty formidable 700 km day including crossing the border into Mali but it was a long hard slog on all sorts of road that varied from tarmac to intermittent tarmac to dirt to dust a foot thick and back up to intermittent tarmac before hitting some decent tarmac again closer to Mali. We even rode through some drops of rain near the border with Mali, which just served to send the humidity even higher!
By the time we pitched our tent somewhere off the road just after Kayes in Mali we were both soggy messes in the heat but had made great progress and just crashed out in the tent feeling satisfied to be in a new country.
We finally managed to prise ourselves away from the delights of The Gambia as the crew was slowly going different ways. Theo in his truck to Mali, Tina back to Austria and Alex & Sabrina had already headed off on their BMW F650 GS Dakar bike to go to Senegal. So we thought it was time to move on.
However we managed to get Colm on the back of our bikes for one last hurrah together in the Casamance region of Senegal. And the following day Max joined us in his Nissan Patrol for a couple nights.
The Casamance is the southern part of Senegal which sandwiches The Gambia and is really a much poorer area than other parts of Senegal, the roads and infrastructure have traditionally been notoriously bad, with years of discrimination against the Jola who live in this region by the majority Wolof who control and run Senegal. This is also a region with more Christians (mainly Catholic) than other parts of Senegal and this fact may also explain a small part of why they are discriminated against, though Christians and Muslims coexist very peacefully in Senegal.
Originally a Portuguese colony before being handed over to the French, the area still has some visible heritage going back to this period. Nowadays though this very poor region relies on rice growing and tourism for an income of sorts, though many here only earn about 8 Euros a month! The amazing beaches are still pretty empty and there is certainly a lot more room for tourists and their money in this spectacular region.
We spent our first two nights in Abene, described by the guidebooks as one of the most chilled out places on earth, it certainly lived up to its reputation. A town full of rasta’s who were running small shops, restaurants, art boutiques and teaching the drums! We certainly enjoyed the laid back approach to life and spent time on the beach chilling out!
One highlight from our time in Abene was stumbling across a reggae party on the Friday night. We headed out on both bikes with Max and Colm on board looking for the Friday night party full of Swedish girls that must exist somewhere. After heading to the slightly larger town of Kafountine down the road, we followed the sounds of the night and a drunken rasta on a bike with no pedals to find a really thumping party! Picture 15 to 20 guys beating their bongos together in an amazing rolling rhythm of sound and beats, then throw in some dancers who jump in front of the band and try and set their own rhythm into the on going beat, it was really incredible to be in the middle of this wall of sound! Despite not finding that elusive bus load of Swedish girls, we did find an amazing kicking party and in usual comedy form the only 2 foreign girls at the party were in fact Swedish! Though slightly out of our age range as they were a middle aged duo looking for property to invest in before the impending tourism boom in the Casamance.
We were also able to spend an inspirational afternoon talking to Laurie, a French woman who is living in Abene, she has very little resources or experience, but she has started to teach the local people basic computer skills and runs the only Internet cafe there – with a laptop on a dialup connection (painfully slow for us techies!).
After Abene we all moved on to Ziguinchor, the regional capital, where quite surprisingly we bumped into Antoine and Chantal, a crazy couple who are cycling through Africa, we had last seen them over a week ago at the campsite in Sukuta in The Gambia! It was all the more amazing to have met them as we all rocked up at the first hotel we saw in Ziguinchor that had a bar and a fridge to get a cold beer before looking for cheaper accommodation in town! The road is a small place at times! Check out their website at www.cycletheplanet.com to hear more about their craziness! And you thought what we were doing was crazy!
The next day we rather sadly headed our different ways, with Colm going back to The Gambia to try and get an NGO job, Max northwards back to Austria and Keith and I south to the very bottom left corner of Senegal – Cap Skirring.
We spent an amazing night camping on the beach, far from any civilisation, with only our huge bonfire to entertain us! It was really quite nice to be so far out in the middle of nowhere with the sound of the waves and the full moon and stars above us!
To be continued in another post… we promise priests, beer and a hot dusty road!