Bouaké, Côte D'Ivoire - 9th-12th 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.
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