The Ghanaian embassy were in possesion of our passports, which makes leaving the city and its road blocks slightly difficult. However we were fairly lucky in Ougagdougou because we found a nice auberge which was within walking distance of the city, it was also very green and relaxed, making it a nice escape from the hassles of the city. The only people that would bother us were the Touareg traders who popped in every hour or so to try and sell us some fairly terrible souvenirs.
The city was very nice and had allot of modern luxuries, including ice cream! There is a large french expat population, and so where they go big supermarkets full of imported goods will follow. These generally proved a bit expensive for us, but we did buy some christmas decorations for the car. On the Sunday night we opted to check out one of the more local restaurants, which also happened to have a big dance on. We had some good food and watched the africans getting their ‘dance on’ , as the beers went down it seemed like a good idea to trade one of my t-shirts for what at the time looked like a nice ‘Castle Lager’ vest (t-shirt trading with westerners is fairly common in Africa). The young lad was more than happy for the exchange and we decided to meet up the next day for the obligatory photo.
The next day with a hangover that only african (chemical) beer and the baking sun can provide, sure enough he turned up (see photo below). In hindsight it takes a special kind of person to be able to wear a vest like that - im not that kind of person. So we went about our daily routine of reading news on the internet and eating, only this time we were followed all day by our new friend, who was particularly annoying. He meant well, but all day he couldnt get over the comedy value of hanging around with two hungover white guys. Eventually we claimed tiredness and hid in the roof tent.
December 13th is a special day as it is my birthday, I am now nearer 30 than 20. On this day our Ghana visas were finally ready, so we popped to the embassy to pick them up, I was happy to find a little birthday greeting from the embassy in my passport - nice touch. We took the good road to the border at ‘Tumu’, not the border we intended to go to but the road was good. We arrived a little late and had slight concerns about the formalities being closed, everyone was pretty much sleeping or about to go home, but they were (fairly) happy to wake up and stamp us in with no bribes!
By the time we got into Ghana it was pretty late, so we opted to sleep at the border town in a little hotel. The people there were friendly and a local ‘Mr Michael’ was more than happy to take us into town to change some money and get some food. Ghana has a fairly ridiculous exchange rate, to give you an idea 1 Million Cedi is currently about 60 pounds, and the largest note is 20 thousand so you end up with massive bundles of cash that are worth very little.
Michael took us to the local restaurant where he ordered us some Fufu (pounded Yam) with ‘meat’ and sauce. As we were tucking down to eat Tute opted not to eat the meat which I was happily tucking into in my slightly darker corner of the restaurant. I hadn’t realised until Tute pointed out that it was more of a biology lesson than grilled steak, and I had already eaten what looked like two lumps of Trachea! Tute played the vegetarian card and I hid a bit more on the floor. We stuck to the beer and had a good night chatting English (for the first time in ages) with the locals.
