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Geneva to Ziguinchor, Senegal - October 3rd-5th 2012 

I was not fortunate enough to get offered a salary for it but I was fortunate enough nonetheless to be offered a 6 month internship in the southern Senegalese city of Ziguinchor. It was a place I’d visited once before in 2006 and had fond memories of so it was a great opportunity to a) work for nothing as opposed to sitting around at home for nothing, b) get away from the European winter and finally get revenge on all of those who called me from warmer climes on those cold April mornings when I was living in Helsinki and c) get within view of the first rung on the job ladder which was seeming ever more elusive.

The cheapest way there was with Turkish Airlines, the company which very kindly left my mother and I in the crap for 2 days in Abidjan a couple of months ago. I had a 22 hour layover in Istanbul which I figured was probably enough to account for Turkish Airlines scheduling, booked myself a dorm bed in a hostel downtown and hit the airport for the uneventful flight to Turkey.  I had a vague knowledge of how to get into the centre of town and after a metro and tram ride to the stop by Hagia Sophia, I realised that I had no idea where this hostel was aside from that it was roughly in this area. I had a street name which no one (including the taxi drivers I asked while wandering around) seemed to have heard of and the name of the hostel which, obviously, no one seemed to have heard of. Having walked around old Istanbul for well over an hour during which I accosted various people in the street, restaurant owners and tourists armed with guide books all to no avail, I finally found another hostel where I got directions to the one I was looking for. It was approaching 1am so I did the sensible thing and walked off to get an Efes beer, had a chat with a couple of Italians on the next table and hit the sack quite a bit later than I probably should have. Two hours later, I was woken up by someone in the dorm heading to the toilet and then kept awake by someone else who was snoring with great vigour and after several more hours of sleeplessness I decided to get up. My flight wasn’t until late in the evening and I’d planned to have a day walking around Istanbul. I’d had this same plan on the way back from Abidjan but had been foiled by the flight delay, and this plan was now foiled by a quick inspection of my bag which revealed that I had forgotten to pack swimming shorts and the cables for both my shaver and my laptop.

Having quickly considered growing a large beard, being unable to work and being reduced to skinny dipping, I headed off to a part of town I’d seen on the way in which seemed loaded with electronics shops. The street on the way there was full of clothing shops and housed probably enough bikinis for every woman in Turkey yet male customers were, as in many places, slightly less enthusiastically catered for. I finally found a shop where I was directed to the basement but decided to pass on the small selection of garish Speedos, gave up on this quest and went on a hunt for the laptop cable. An hour later I found a shop with a decent selection, found the cable and whipped out the 17 lira indicated on the front of the box and was promptly informed that the price wasn’t in lira but in US dollars. After a bit of discussion I managed to pay in Euros and emerged into the bright Istanbul sunshine intent on doing at least a bit of tourism. Having seen a few of the mosques and landmarks in town and went for the totally pointless yet satisfying quest of walking from one continent to another, spotted the closest bridge from Europe to Asia and set off on what turned out to be a 2 hour trek to where I discovered the bridge was for vehicles only. A slight letdown, and it was time to head back to the airport for my flight to Dakar.

Despite my experiences coming back from Côte D’Ivoire, I had to say that Turkish Airlines’ inflight entertainment system is second to none and I spent the 10 hour flight watching films, various series and playing Sudoku on my little screen in the seat in front of me and enjoying the food which is, by airline standards, pretty good. Washed down with a little Turkish red wine of course...

Dakar airport can be a slightly bewildering experience. I’d only been here once before and it was to fly out and so the arrival was a new experience. The baggage hall was packed with guys who were trying to help me with my bags and enquire as to whether I’d been to Senegal or not and by the time I’d shaken them off and got to a little hostel by the airport it was 1am. Displaying much sense just like when I arrived in Istanbul, I took a Gazelle beer and enjoyed the heat, still close to suffocating at this time of night, sent a few emails back home and got to sleep at 3am. 6am came, my alarm clock went off and I dragged myself out of bed again to Dakar’s central station, a vast wasteland filled with the saloon cars that make up the majority of Senegal’s public transport system. Waiting time can be anything from minutes to hours as you wait for the car to fill up, being offered everything to buy while you wait – sunglasses, phone chargers, food and drink, mobile phone holders and what can only be described as some sort of assault flick-knife which I assumed would be far more useful to the vendor as a tool for mugging passengers rather than something to sell.

Comfort-wise, the trip depends very much on when you arrive at the station. The first passenger gets the front seat and travels in luxury, the next 3 get the middle row which is fine, and the last 3 are squashed into the back row like sardines. I arrived 5^th and so had a place in the back row but still had to wait for another 2 passengers to arrive which they eventually did in the form of 2 large rastamen, meaning that we spent the majority of the 10 hour trip awkwardly squirming, each trying to get a few drops of blood flowing into our feet. The rainy season was just coming to an end and so the country was plastered in a beautiful array of shades of green, dotted with enormous baobab trees, getting greener as we crossed over the Gambia River courtesy of an improbable looking ferry where workers had to build a ramp out of earth every time it docked to allow the trucks and cars off at each end.

Arrival in Ziguinchor 57 hours after leaving Geneva was as good as I could have hoped – met by new flatmates who were all very nice and went straight for beer and chicken with them.

I’m back……

Border Problems

21^st-25^th September 2012 – Abidjan, Côte D'Ivoire

The bush taxi ride back to Abidjan from Grand-Bassam was not long – a 30km drive down the coast during which we would get dropped off at Cap Sud shopping centre, just near where we were staying. It was the same road we had taken to go to Grand-Bassam and I watched the same things glide by – an endless string of maquis, palm trees and roadside furniture salesmen, and then the closer we got to Abidjan, small buildings, the lagoon to the left. The same police checkpoint we had come through on the way was there but this time, it had a small difference – a corpse was sprawled out on the floor. A big guy with a shaved head, lying in a crucifix shape in his underwear surrounded by police. Gossip and rumour took hold in the bush taxi immediately although no concrete explanation for this event had surfaced by the time we got to Cap Sud. 

Newspapers we looked at later that evening, though, provided the explanation. The previous night, armed men had launched an attack on two police stations in Abidjan and on that checkpoint. An attack had also taken place at a post on the border with Ghana. Twelve people had been killed altogether although no one was able to tell who the attackers really were, or if the Abidjan and Ghana border incidents had been related. Our flight was due to leave on the 23^rd and so we went for a beer to plot our final two days. The result was a planned trip to Treichville market for one day and a wander around the Cocody district on the second.

"La Patisserie Abidjanaise", breakfast place par excellence

The Treichville market we finally made it to turned out not to be Treichville market at all but a smaller market which was also in Treichville but went by a different name. A market it was all the same, though, and we bought a bunch of traditional take-home stuff such as textiles and a kilo of limes. It was surprisingly hassle-free for the wandering toubabs, and apart from a few slightly overly insistent salesmen we were largely left to wander around and look at whatever we wanted. Our walk back to the hotel featured a lot of nostalgia for the last two weeks and we talked about what we'd seen, what we'd done and what we'd felt. It was to be out last night and, to celebrate, we went to Cap Sud and bought some beers and some olives to eat and drink on the balcony outside the room. It all seemed so serene. I reflected on how we'd had 2 catastrophe-free weeks and told my mother that I had a feeling that it couldn't continue like this. I was sure that tomorrow would bring us a surprise, I told her with a smile. Maybe there would be a coup d'état, she responded with the same smile.

Treichville-Belleville market's most pleasant lime seller

"The last night" - Mk1

We went to eat and came back to the room, looking for a film to watch and ended up watching the news on Ivorian TV, our attention attracted by a story featuring the corpse we'd seen the evening before.

“As a response to the attacks”, the reporter said, “President Ouattara has ordered the total closure of all air, land and sea frontiers with Ghana”.

We looked at each other and supressed a laugh of surprise. Our flight touched down in Accra before coming to Abidjan. This closure, if it stayed that way, would prevent our plane from coming into Côte D'Ivoire and we would have the surprise I suspected. It wasn't quite a coup d'état, but we were to be stranded anyway.

The rainy season in Abidjan...

...is definitely not yet over

Cocody took a backseat the next day as we spent the morning in “Le Rallye”, checking the internet for details on our flight from time to time, until my mother suggested in the early afternoon that we just go to the airport and try to find out what was going on. The ladies at the Turkish Airlines desk were very friendly but utterly useless, telling us in effect to sort ourselves out and come back in two days when a plane would be coming out to pick us up. They had received no instructions at all from headquarters, they said, and were as lost as we were. All of the other planes leaving Abidjan were supposedly full and so, rather than leaving tonight, we would have another two days. More phone calls to insurance companies followed and, after six hours in the airport, we finally ended up heading to the Novotel to enjoy the insurance company's largesse. The now-traditional Flag-beer-and-meat evening was enjoyed by all and we went to bed, ending an eventful day and ready to hit Cocody the next day.

"Please go away and sort yourselves out"

"A billion reasons to believe in Africa" - the airlines serving it not being among them

True to our way of doing things so far, we decided to walk to Cocody. Leaving the map behind wasn't a great idea but Abidjan is reasonably easy to navigate, set around lagoons as it is. The high-rises of the Plateau, where we were now staying, are an easily visible landmark as is the 25-storey Hôtel Ivoire in Cocody. Naturally, this didn't prevent us from going the wrong way and ending up Adjamé, but with a few helpful pointers from people we eventually navigated our way to Cocody and, three hours after leaving the hotel, we ended up at the Hôtel Ivoire. The aim here was a reconstruction of our drink in the Hôtel Président in Yamoussoukro – the only difference being that the top-floor bar here was twice as high as the one in Yamoussoukro and we expected a fantastic view of Abidjan, the lagoons and the sea. The security men at the door were very friendly but told us that the top-floor bar only opened at 7pm, which I thought slightly strange given that this would be after nightfall and the view would therefore not be accessible. They directed us to another bar which hovered over the gigantic swimming pool, around which were dotted signs informing us that swimming was forbidden. Logic didn't seem to take hold in this hotel. 

The view from the Novotel - we're going up in the world

We wandered off back out and towards the Alocodrome, a big open-air complex of eating spots specialising in aloco, fried plantains. As we waited, my mother took pictures of the place and was then accosted by a couple of guys who asked her why she was taking pictures.

“Because I'm a tourist...” she responded.

“I don't know. It seems strange that you are taking pictures of this place”, one of them said.

“But I am a tourist, I take pictures !”

“Do you have any paperwork which proves that you are a tourist ?”

The conversation went on a little bit and I'd been watching on slightly amused and waiting to see how she would extract herself from this situation but eventually I decided to try and intervene myself.

“Do we need a permit to take photos here ?” I asked.

“Well... no. But why is she taking pictures ?”

 “We are from Europe”, I carried on. “Have you ever been to Europe ? Are you aware that we do not have aloco in Europe ?”

They seemed surprised.

“Well, if we do not have any aloco, then sure it would make sense that we don't have any Alocodromes ?”

They hesitantly agreed.

“And so this is new to us. We are taking pictures because this is something that we don't have back home”.

"The forbidden picture"

They seemed appeased and we sat down. They followed us, however, and struck up a conversation again, although this time they were trying to persuade us to join their business venture. They worked in vegetable distribution, they said, but needed a partner in Europe to send them second-hand vans to transport the vegetables in. We tried to explain that this wasn't really very easy for us but they kept insisting that it was. Eventually my mother decided to offer them our e-mail addresses, telling them to send their details and we would get back to them. They were duly dispatched with two fake e-mail addresses and our chicken finally arrived.

“What if they try the addresses and realise they're fake and come back...?” she asked.

Our chicken went down quickly and we made our exit, back to the Plateau. We went for a wander to mark what at the time we were only moderately sure would be our last evening. The sun was setting on the Plateau district and people were leaving to head to their homes. In the descending silence, a piercing shriek went up and that could only mean one thing – my mother had just spotted a rat. We walked on, looking back at this rat going about its business and saw a security guard creeping up behind it. He positioned himself, lifted his foot back and, with the aim and power of a rugby player but with the added advantage of a pair of heavy duty boots, booted the unsuspecting rat which flew threw the air across the road, landed ungraciously before running around for a few seconds and suddenly dropping dead. The security man went back to his post, one more disease bag had been eliminated from the face of the earth and all that without the use of any harmful rat poisons. Judging by the security man's approach, it wasn't the first time he'd done this.

Le Plateau - now partially more rat-free

Eventually, two days late, our plane came. It had been an interesting trip for me and a trip down memory lane for my mother. She spent half of the trip back talking about the next place we would go together. Even at her grand age, she isn't ready to hang her backpack up yet !

Old Buildings Galore

18^th-21^st September 2012 – Grand-Bassam, Côte D'Ivoire

Grand-Bassam is a short bush taxi ride away from Abidjan but it's a different world entirely. The old capital of the French Côte D'Ivoire territory, the old town is a quiet patchwork of colonial buildings set on the beach.

The lagoon

"An old building"

"More old buildings"

It was a quite few days in Bassam – walking around, having a bite to eat here and a drink there, wandering up and down the beach and avoiding the odd wandering-rastaman-salesman. We also managed to get in a touch of culture by going to the costume museum and seeing how people dressed back in the days. The museum is housed in the old house of the first governor of the Ivory Coast territory, Marcel Treich-Laplène, and a room on the first floor still contains the bathtub and toilet that he must have used. Seeing history so close up is a very humbling experience.

Wandering the beaches...

Wandering the streets...

And releasing the carnivore within

Evenings were quiet – Bassam seems to switch off at around 10pm and we were the only people out and about after this time – but were generally spent very well and invariably featured grilled chicken or brochettes with a Drogba or two. After a few days of “the hard life” it was time to head back to Abidjan...

"Dumping garbage and shitting forbidden"

Supersize Côte D'Ivoire

16^th -18^th September – Yamoussoukro, Côte D'Ivoire

Yamoussoukro, at first glance, appears to be your run of the mill small African town. A main road runs through town, low-rise buildings stand by the side of it and, 5km later, you have left town and are back in the forest. But a closer look reveals that Yamoussoukro is slightly less typical and, all things put together, it stands very near the top in the weird-places-I-have-been league.

Beware of crocodiles

For a start, the road from Bouaké goes over the “lac aux caïmans”. This is where the sacred crocodiles live, crocodiles which are rumoured to have eaten former president Houphouët-Boigny's political opponents and very much confirmed to have eaten their previous feeder in front of crowds of onlookers. The majority of the lake is unfenced, and I suppose that the list of people to have been eaten by the sacred crocs probably involves several innocent passers-by. The road from Abidjan enters town by the Hôtel Président, a tall, mushroom shaped construction where the head was originally designed to be a revolving restaurant, and I believe that it has never moved. The enormous presidential palace, which overlooks the sacred crocodiles, stands empty and has done for many years, recent presidents having preferred to live in Abidjan, where all of the ministries and embassies are located. This despite the fact that Yamoussoukro has been the capital city of Côte D'Ivoire for the best part of 30 years. But the crowning glory of this odd town is the Basilique de Notre Dame de la Paix, inspired by St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican but, of course, slightly taller. The place has only been filled to capacity twice – firstly for its consecration by Pope John Paul II, and secondly for the funeral of the man who dreamed it into existance, Houphouët-Boigny. No one knows how much the basilica cost to build, as the old man declared that he had made a deal with God and that it would not be prudent to discuss God's business in public. The presidential palace is off limits to visitors but, naturally, the other three sites made up our to-do list for Yamoussoukro.

It looks big at first glance. Then, you notice that I'm in the picture and it looks even bigger

...As does everything here...

Even the clouds are superhuman

Notre Dame de la Paix was first up. The scale of the place is impossible to convey – I got dizzy looking up at the ceiling of the entrance. The entire building was preposterous but undeniably impressive. Its presence just outside Yamoussoukro, which is hardly an enormous place, lended it an even more surreal feeling. This was completed by the sight of herdsmen guiding their cattle past the entrance to new pastures, a sight which looks entirely natural out in the bush but just seems incongruous in front of the world's largest basilica.

Secondly, the hôtel Président. We'd heard that the top floor of this building, the hotel equivalent of the Notre Dame basilica – totally out of place and completely over the top – had a bar/restaurant in it. We went up there, had a drink in extremely comfortable surroundings and eyed the building's balcony, which was apparently forbidden go onto. The views of the surrounding area were still impressive from up here, even if the windows could have done with a bit of a scrub. 

The hotel from the bottom

The bottom, from the top

Refreshed, we went up to the sacred crocodile lake where 5 of the 200 or so crocs were sunbathing for the assembled watchers – there seemed to be a crowd of people here at any time of day or night – although their schedule 5pm feeding had been indefinitely postponed after these crocs ate their last feeder a few weeks before. Biting the hand that feeds you is not a good idea, as we all know – eating the man that feeds you is even worse.

Spot the feeder...?

The last night was upon us and we headed up to a maquis that we'd spotted earlier where we ordered our meat and I ordered a Drogba, a one litre bottle of beer (“because it's big and strong, just like him !”). Maquis food is generally grilled from scratch and so takes quite a long time to arrive and on this particular day I was starved. I ripped the meat off my skewers and onto my plate and started eating with enthusiasm. It was great. Towards the end my tongue started to tingle slightly and it wasn't until I'd finished eating that I realised that I'd scraped my meat off the skewers and onto a huge pile of pili-pili sauce. By this point my mouth was on fire and all the Drogbas in the world weren't going to save me. We slinked back to the hotel under cover of darkness, ready to head south the next day.

Pre-pili-pili delight with Drogba

Travels With Mongoose Man

14^th -16^th September – Bouaké, Côte D'Ivoire

Korhogo-Bouaké minibus station. You could just tell that this would be a speedy one 

The return trip to Bouaké was for two nights and a day. The minibus going back down was quite a bit quicker than on the way up and we also shared the back seat with a guy who was travelling with a small box with noises emanating from it. At the beginning I thought he had some chicks or something in there. I asked him anyway what was in the box, and he smiled and whipped out a mongoose. He'd had it for a year and a half, he said, and took it everywhere he went. I'd never seen anyone with a pet mongoose before and this guy seemed very attached to his furry friend, stroking it and playing with it for the entire trip.

Mongoose man and Mongoose

Bouaké's TV tower, an essential landmark for those who don't really know where they are

Our stay in Bouaké also consisted of more trip-down-memory-lane stuff, even if a lot of things had changed. The Provençal restaurant was no longer a classy restaurant run by a guy from the south of France, but was now a faded-charming place with very little in the way of furniture and nothing in the way of running water which served sandwiches and beer having just been taken up by an elderly, permanently smiling Ivorian gentleman. It had been emptied and had stayed empty during the war, he told me, and they were just trying to get it up and running again although clients were few and far between. The Harmattan, formerly the swankiest hotel in town, had been completely gutted and stripped of everything during the war, leaving only a concrete shell. Some of the bottom floor and the restaurant had been converted into a maquis but nothing more was left of it. The RAN Hotel, by contrast, had not changed at all – down to the cushions on the chairs in the lobby which were the same ones as graced the chairs in 1978.

Le Provençal still looks good on the outside. And serves tasty sandwiches.

The RAN hotel still looks good from the outside. And serves cold beer

But it mostly consisted of aimless wandering and allowed us to pick up the luggage we'd left here for the trip up to Korhogo, as well as getting a bit of a rest. Next destination: Yamoussoukro.

Mobile phone torch and flip flop - essential weapons in the fight against mosquitos

The Revolution

12^th-14^th September – Korhogo, Côte D'Ivoire

Arriving in Korhogo under heavy rain, we faced a patch of uncertainty. The minibus station was on the far edge of town and the assembled Ivorian women clucked with disapproval, concluded that there were no taxis and so refused to alight from the minibus, declaring that the driver would have to take us into the centre of town. The driver showed no such inclination and we found ourselves in the middle of a face-off which lasted several minutes. Hoping that such a drop-off would materialise, we stayed in our seats, but when the assistant started unloading the bags we saw the writing on the wall and starting trekking towards town. A passer-by indicated that the Mont Korhogo hotel, our home for two nights, was around 3km from here and, with a lighter load having left one bag in Bouaké, we walked on. The rain got heavier until at one point it formed a curtain of water before our eyes, and we scampered into a large compound containing tables under large tents. It was here that a strange event happened.

"Le Mont Korhogo"

My mother went to the nearest shack to enquire about drinks. She asked for tea, water and Diet Coke, being turned down each time and eventually asked what they had. The answer was beer, and only beer. A lifelong, resolute despiser of beer, she picked a large one up for me and contented herself with nothing.

“I'm thirsty”, she said. “Give me a bit of that”.

With a smile, I handed it over knowing that she was let one drop touch her tongue, recoil with a look of disgust and hand it back to me. Such a thing didn't happen.

“Not bad”.

I've seen many new and radical things in my lifetime but they all pale into insignificance when faced with the prospect of my mother enjoying beer. I like to be very open minded, understanding and am proud of my ability to reason with anything but this sight was just too much for me.

“What ?”

“I said it's not bad. It's refreshing.”

She even had a few more sips before the rain abated and we carried on towards the Mont Korhogo, getting directions from a friendly passing policeman and settled into this hotel, which she had stayed in in the 1970s. It had become pretty dog-eared in the meantime (Korhogo was far into rebel territory during the war and not many people must have stayed here during that time) but for my standards was still perfectly fine. We went for a small wander around town in the afternoon but the mud streets had turned into lakes with the rain and the one tarmacked street through town wasn't particularly interesting, lined with mechanics and spare parts shops for the passing traffic, Korhogo being the last town before reaching Burkina Faso and Mali. We retired to the bar when I had a couple of beers and my mother had a couple of gin-tonics. She remarked that they were quite expensive and that she would have a beer tomorrow. My jaw dropped slightly.

Dodging the puddles

While we ate breakfast the next day, we were approached by a young guy who introduced himself as Petit Solo, who outlined a few tours he could do and gave us a price. With hindsight, it was too much but we accepted and we agreed to meet again at 1pm where he would have a friend and two motorbikes to take us to Waraniénié, a weavers' village, and to “le rocher sacré”, the sacred rock of the Sénoufo people. He was quite happy to cancel everything if the weather turned and we watched the sky for a few hours before concluding that we should be OK, and eventually, the four of us got going. My mother and the friend went on ahead as Petit Solo was eating a sandwich while he was driving and decided that he wouldn't go so quickly. We caught them up at a military checkpoint on the outskirts of town, where Petit Solo showed a little bit too much attitude to the assembled soldiers when told that his lack of vehicle insurance was a problem. His bike was promptly impounded, the soldiers told us to both get on the back of the friend's bike and go where we were going. “When you come back, he will still be here, and he will give you half of your money back”, we were assured. That was that, then. 

We carried on to Waraniénié where the friend (so called as neither of us remember his name...), who was from the village, gave us the grand tour and explained the art of weaving and the collaboration between Muslims and Animists here, where the entire village has become a cooperative. Men, women and children each have separate roles in the industry and their products are sent all over Côte D'Ivoire and sometimes to France as well. Petit Solo eventually caught us up where my mother gave him a friendly lecture about the police always being right.

It does look like a sweat shop, but I can assure you it isn't

“But no one here has insurance ! Why did they single me out ?”, he protested.

He eventually accepted the be-nice-to-the-police theory but threw out some revolutionary rhetoric about how the government must make it possible for people to earn money if they expect people to buy insurance. A fair point, but you still don't tell soldiers that. We moved onto the sacred rock, which I asked (through a spiritual interpreter) to ensure that I find work soon. The interpreter threw some kola nuts around and declared that the way they fell indicated that the rock would indeed help me. He then asked what I would sacrifice if my wish were to come true, and I promised to come back and sacrifice a chicken when I found work.

“I hope you know that the rules state that you must kill it, cook it and eat it all right here” Petit Solo told me. So if anyone reading fancies a trip to Korhogo and a big chicken dinner, get in touch with me when I find work.

"I'd like a million dollars... and world peace... and a neverending plate of grilled chicken..."

We stopped off in the carvers district of Korhogo on the ride back and got co-opted into a wedding where the old ladies instructed us to dance with them. As soon as we started, the entire assembled congregation of women burst into tears of laughter. We were assured that this was not because they found us ridiculous but because they were unused to seeing white people dance, which I was sceptical about, although the fact that they all wanted to dance hand in hand with us as well convinced me that it might possibly be true. As we left, a girl asked for my hand in marriage and, sad as it was that I had to decline, it was still a delightful ego-boost to end the day with. She wasn't bad looking either. Ha !

The sculptors' quarter

The evening was spent in the maquis (an Ivorian open air restaurant, usually by the roadside but in this case inside the grounds of the hotel) of the Mont Korhogo and had probably the best meal so far – an enormous helping of grilled chicken with an equally enormous helping of attiéké, a tasty couscous made from cassava. True to her word, my mother had her beer. The revolution was complete. 

"Ceci n'est pas une bière"

House Hunting Exercise

Bouaké, Côte D'Ivoire - 9^th-12^th September 2012

As happens so often on African road journeys, the beginning was uneventful. We moved up the main road in our classy, air-conditioned Chinese bus (of the same brandwhich seems to have been bought by bus companies all over Africa) and watched the banana plantations, forests and rolling hills move by. A short stop in Yamoussoukro apart, it was plain sailing and the traffic on the road was light. So it was with a bit of surprise that I noticed us slowing down and come to a stop somewhere between Yamoussoukro and Bouaké. Murmurings came through the bus and reached us at the back – Ivorians often speak in a creole of various African languages and French making it easier for the toubabou to understand them – a mention of a truck-related incident was made and I got off the bus to investigate.

Keep on truckin

The spectacle in front of me was something I had never seen – a truck lying on its side across the road, with the cab sticking straight up into the air. This was an impressive crash if ever I've seen one and even the other passengers on the bus, who I would have thought would be more used to trucking accidents, turned to me with a look of amazement and comments suggesting that they were as amazed as I was at this display. By some turn of fate, a track disappeared off into the bush just before the crash and emerged back onto the main road some 500m further up the road, and soldiers were on hand to direct traffic. The track was barely large enough for one vehicle to pass and the state of it led to the passing trucks and buses hurtling along it, sending people scattering in all directions. One vehicle from each side trying to go through at the same time would likely had led to further carnage but the soldiers, with willing help from the masses of bystanders, made the system work. A bunch of guys were unloading the sacks from the trailer and a kid was siphoning from the now exposed petrol tank. About an hour after coming across the scene, with smiles and excited chatter, everyone piled back onto the bus and we arrived in Bouaké with no further ado...

Bouaké is where my grandfather lived and worked for several years and we had two missions for our two full days there. The first was to find the old house (using my mother's vague memories) and the Loka dam which he worked on (using my mother's vague memories). Our base for the three days was the charming hotel Mon Afrik, home to an owner known as the “wife of the rebels” for her close collaboration with them during the war and who was happy to tell her endless stories of those days. It was also home to Princesse the antelope and Caroline the tortoise who would both wander around the garden and occasionally wander into the restaurant looking for lunch.

The first of the two days was to be the house-searching day. My mother remembered the name of the district it was in, and also that one had to turn right off a main road going uphill. It promised to be a still challenge – Madame Delon, the hotel's owner, said she had lived in the same district for many years but could now not find her own house. We wandered off through town to the Air France district armed with two photos of the old place and, in time, found a street which seemed to be a likely candidate. In the meantime, though, much had changed in Air France (as it had in Bouaké and Côte D'Ivoire as a whole) and the spacious gardens were no more, instead filled with smaller buildings. We walked up and down the street, showing behaviour that would probably have gotten us into trouble in Europe (peering over walls, eyeing buildings through gates and so on), but failed to find anything which looked good. 

No luck so far...

Peeping Toms in Air France

We showed the pictures to anyone old enough to be able to remember the 70s – one of them was the right age but was born in Senegal, another had only moved to Bouaké recently, and a couple of old women sat by the road had a long look and an equally long discussion with each other about them, but couldn't help either. One house had similar-looking (but not identical) tiles on the patio and as we looked, a couple of girls came from the house and said hello. We showed them the pictures but too many things didn't match up. The door was in the wrong place, the windows were the wrong size. They said it was probably in this area but it wasn't that house. We went back to the main road. The house may have been modified beyond recognition or it may have been destroyed during the war or in order to build more, smaller houses. It might still have been there but been hidden by new buildings. We went for a beer to contemplate the defeat and rounded off the day in Mon Afrik's pool. A good end to a slightly disappointing day.

Living the hard life

The dam-hunting was, on paper, an easier prospect than the house-hunting. Besides the obvious size difference, people had heard of the Loka dam and we rented a car for the day to aid in the search. Two men showed up with the car – one was the driver and the other was Monsieur Koné, the company boss. Monsieur Koné explained that the driver was ill and so he would be driving us himself. First stop was a petrol station where he put in twice as much petrol as we needed and, naturally, billed us for it, and we then headed off into the countryside. Monsieur Koné was quite a character and very chatty, although he obviously had not done much driving himself and seemingly had no idea where anything was. After asking many people by the roadside (“he who asks rarely goes wrong”, Monsieur Koné liked to say) we finally ended up on a dirt road, and then a smaller dirt road, and then parked in front of a track that was too small for a car to go down. A 2 kilometre walk later, we finally reached the dam and concluded that it would probably have been easier to approach from the other side. But no matter – we'd found what we were looking for. 

Monsieur Koné explained that he did sports every morning...

La Loka

 La Loka part 2

 La Loka - part 3.

On the return, we tried to find the village of Tanou Sakassou, recommended to us by Madame Delon as a great place to buy pottery. True to form, Monsieur Koné had never heard of the place and, having asked directions a few times while repeating his mantra about he who asks, we ended up going to the village of Wassou, which also did pottery. We bought a few pots and got given one for free as we were leaving, although only two of the six were to survive the potholes and baggage handlers in Abidjan and Istanbul and eventually make it back to Europe.

 "I am a tourist just like you !" - Monsieur Koné's first visit to Wassou

Generic white-guy-with-Africa-kids picture #29299930083

Monsieur Koné, maybe worried that we'd report back on his petrol-grabbing to Madame Delon, offered to take us to the minibus station the next morning, from where we headed to Korhogo, in the country's far north.

Ivory Towers

Abidjan, Côte D'Ivoire - 7^th-9^th September 2012

Côte D'Ivoire has been a small family project for many years. My grandfather worked here in the 1970s and my mother visited him several times. She hadn't been back since 1979 and 2012 was to be the year that she took me along to revisit memory lane – finding the old house, the dam my grandfather worked on, and various bits and pieces that she remembered seeing back in the day. Our first port of call was Abidjan, a huge sprawling city set around some lagoons poking inland from the Atlantic. The “Paris of West Africa” back in its day, Abidjan is a little more dog-eared than it probably was but is still the nerve centre of the country, despite not having been the capital since the 1980s. It's also home to the international airport, which is where we landed after a 16 hour trip with a short layover in Istanbul.

As we were planning to come back to Abidjan at the end of the little tour, the one full day here was more a question of finding our feet than seeing anything in particular. We were planning to head up to Bouaké the next day and spent the morning exploring our transport options – loosely translated, we went to the train station to see what day the train left and would take the bus if it didn't suit us. The station is in Treichville, the next district along from Zone 4 where we were staying, and so we set off by foot along the Boulevard de Marseille (which was possibly named after the city in question because it's dusty and dirty). The timing of the trip left us landing at the end of the rainy season and we were reminded of this after a short time when the heavens suddenly opened and we were forced into a roadside shack for shelter. We had to persuade the owners that we would buy a drink from them as they told us they were quite happy for us just to take shelter until the rain subsided. 

Taking shelter

As I reflected on the paradoxes of Africa (you are hassled to buy things when you don't want to, but in cases like this you are politely told that it really isn't necessary to buy anything), we watched the potholes fill with rainwater and the dust “pavement” turn to mud. My mother then asked what was to be her favourite question during this trip - “is this rain going to last long ?”. We then got the same answer we were given every time this question was asked. “Probably not...”. The worst of it passed and my flip flops did battle with the new swampy conditions as we headed on our way. The train to the north left on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. It was now Saturday morning. The decision was made, and we made plans to take the bus.

"Pissing forbidden - 5000f fine"

An afternoon wander around the Plateau district was similarly punctuated by rain although this didn't seem to bother the tens of thousands of orange-clad Ivorians gathering in huge crowds slowly moving towards barricades manned by soldiers. This could only mean one thing. There was a football game of sorts on. As it turned out, Côte D'Ivoire were playing Senegal that night. The Plateau district is where move of Abidjan's high-rises are and the huge building-top advertising hoardings greeting those coming across the bridge from Zone 4 masked an entire district of these buildings – some of them were tasteless 70s buildings and some, such as “La Pyramide” were symbolic of a slightly more daring style of architecture. Le Plateau might not win any modern design awards but it's impressive in its own way and a pleasant place to wander around. It's also Abidjan's business district though, and as it closed down during the early evening we headed back to Zone 4 – just in time to see Côte D'Ivoire destroy Senegal 4:2 at “Le Rallye”, the bar-resto attached to the hotel.

"La Pyramide" - original building, unoriginal name

Singing in the rain

More Plateau

An early morning departure to Yopougon bus station was on the cards for the next day but we weren't worried – there was plenty more of Abidjan to see and a few more days towards the end in which to do so...

Foot hygiene - a high priority