It does seem as though we go to some of the more Fury-struck places on the globe. It isn't perversity, it's ill-timing, good fortune, and dogged ... well ... perversity.

Sometimes it"s better to begin before the beginning.

Getting to West Africa has been a tedious process, marked by paperwork, fees, more paperwork, and surcharges. It's as though these countries have either never had tourism or don't want to encourage it. Yet Ghana for one relies on tourist receipts for a quarter of its income. Maybe that includes remissions home.

Of course, having been post-colonial basket cases for thirty or forty years before getting on the road to development hasn't helped. Some of the forms we had to fill out were like old elementary school permission slips typed on a 1960s typewriter, photocopied, crumpled, then photocopied and recopied again and again. We had to correct the century in which we were applying in one case.

Compared to this, East Africa was a breeze. There, you show up at the border, they use a webcam, take your details and give you a visa. Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Ghana? Oh no. We had to apply in advance with forms and photos in duplicate (quadruplicate in the case of Ghana) and have copies of all for the immigration agency helping us route the paperwork through the various consulates. Hundreds of dollars later, it was done. But they are a suspicious lot. The visas are generally good for entry on a specific day and exit on a specific day. None of this "entry within three months from date of stamp." This is control in a Cold-War-beady-eyed sense.

Maybe not the Cold war .It could just be the French colonial legacy. Papers. Hotel registrations. References. We needed them all. Though Ghana was British, so there goes that theory. Anyway, bureaucracy seems to be an end in itself and it takes time.[1]

But now we have them. Four bright, bold visas to take to, in order, Togo, Benin, Togo again, Burkina Faso, and then Ghana.

Not Ebola country. That's been the other hurdle. Friends, colleagues and (to a lesser extent) family have delighted in warning or updating or admonishing us about the Ebola virus. Which is a bugger of a thing, to be sure. Horrible horrible disease and I am droolingly mad at my government (and others) for ignoring it for so long[2]. Easier for the prime minister to pimp out for the Ukrainian-Canadian vote by waggling his willy at Vladimir Putin, Braveheart-style.

But Ebola. Migration patterns are funny things. I expect(ed) to see it jump from its current home to the US and Europe before it gets to other neighbouring countries. Why? Because when people get sick they go home and in a patchwork of ethnic groups like West Africa, home is nearby, not three countries distant. I feel reasonably secure. Reasonably. I feel the way I did living in Toronto during the SARS outbreak: nervous because I feel it is expected of me, not because I have a deep dread.

That's a slight lie. There's some dread there. But it's dread of Ebola, Guinea worm, the dread candiru[3], ringworm, scorpion bites, and cholera. There's no good reason, as I've written before, for anyone to leave the relative peace and safety of a temperate coastal rain forest at the 49th parallel and head towards the equator. The equator brings warmth, and warmth breeds life: fungal, floral, parasitic, dysenteric, etc. Plus there are a lot of people.

So West Africa it is. What used to be known as the Slave Coast (Bight of Benin) and the Gold Coast (Ghana), with a scraping up into what used to be Negroland[4]. Nasty business, slavery, It doesn't take much to be barbaric towards your own neighbours: you don't need oddly coloured people in strange hats to pay you a visit first. But it helps. I'll probably have plenty to write about the slave trade when visiting Whydah and the Cape Coast, so that's enough for now except to say: what are you (what am I?) doing about the slavery that exists in our own countries? Immigrant women forced into domestic or sexual slavery, for one. We don't care about it at home but we tut-tut the past[5].

At the moment, I'm on an airplane heading to Ottawa for work. I've read my materials, prepped for my panel and facilitation work, and ate something called a beef brisket sandwich that really tasted like deli turkey. Even notice how all deli meats smell and taste the same? Especially when the darker ones get that gasoline sheen to them. So I'm putting some initial thoughts in order for Africa. Lots of flying over the next ten days. Ottawa and back, hopefully not Nanaimo for a day, then Montreal-Paris-Lome.

Just paranoid that I forgot to bring sanitizer to wipe down my airplane seat arms, the tray, the screen, and the people around me. Really I want airlines to be like the spacecraft we see in sci-fi films: put me in a container with an air hose, knock me out, fill the container with sanitizer, and drain me on the far side.

Science fiction, of course, but maybe the last science fiction I write for a while. We might be getting pretty far from science for a bit and into the world of voudun[6], in villages that don't obsess about having the perfect camera lens or the latest Apple iPhone. We're going almost as far off the grid as one can get these days. With CSEC, the Chinese, Russians, MI5, the NSA and Google all looking at us some or all of the time, it's difficult to imagine the ends of the earth. But go to Wikipedia to read about the tribes and towns and peoples of Benin or Togo and the citations are often from missionary reports from the 60s. As recent months have shown, few if anyone in our part of the world gives a damn about these millions of human beings unless and until a pathogen emerges to threaten the denizens of a Dunkin' Donuts in Delaware. No one cares about these countries except perhaps for the voodoo and the slave portals) so why not go? So that intrigues us.

Though, to be honest, our first choice was Iran. Our government's current stance towards that country put paid to that option. Another time.

But anyway, Ottawa is good prep for a trip to Africa. The taxicabs are surprisingly similar in vintage, decor, aroma, and general dishevelment. The drivers are surlier, but one can't have everything. The streets tend to be buckled and heaved, holed and half-patched. The hotels tend not to rate their ratings. I was staying at the Marriott Courtyard wherein, upon checkin, they offered me a deal: due to renovations, I could have a bigger room and--more to the point--it would be quieter as it was an interior room, not overlooking the BywardMarket. The catch? No window. I opted for the window room; however, getting into it and seeing how it overlooked a construction site I thought 'let me try the interior room.' So I asked for the key and they told me room 252. So I searched for room 252 for a while, finally getting a cleaner to help me find it. It was unmarked and for good reason: the 'special room' was a conference room in which they had placed a bed and, twenty feet away, a small television. How could I tell it was a conference room? The whiteboard on the wall gave it away. Charming like herpes or the obsessive ramblings of a herpetologist. So I returned to my original room and settled in. But that's Africa for you. I mean Ottawa. Ottawa. In Africa things are decrepit because people are poor in pocket. In Ottawa they are decrepit because the people are poor in spirit.

Mind, I could live in Ottawa. Most people in Ottawa are lovely when they are nowhere near their workplaces or the general vicinity of Parliament. It's a psychogeographic eczema that inflicts Ontario as a whole, but nowhere more than in the heart of the nation's capitol.

And now, flying home, having splashed hand sanitizer all over my tray and armrests, I've got that fatigue that four days of work travel brings, underlaid with a sense of unreality that this time one week from now I am likely to be in Lome, Togo. Frantic job worries are becoming resigned dull aches. I've a hankering for a final taste at my favourite restaurants before we go and live off of manioc, plantain, rice, and fish for three weeks. I am sadly missing family over Thanksgiving this weekend -- my favourite holiday, one I'd rather make the generic family get-together holiday instead of Christmas -- but that's timing for you.

Tired ramblings. Spin a globe and choose a country. You'll be wrong every time.

[1] The lasting legacy of British Empire in the third world does seem to be red tape. I’m not sure that putting low level bureaucrats in charge of a country is a great idea: paperwork becomes an end in itself.

[2] Although Canada and others had to be invited into these countries (which were denying the problem) my bile was later justified by the mendacious farrago of abuse hurled on returning volunteers.

[3] A joke I make every time I travel, regardless of continent. Look it up if you don’t immediately shiver on reading the word.

[4] Not sure we got that far north, but we did get into camel territory.

[5] Or kids slaving in African mines to get the rare earth metals to make our smart phones. We’re a f*cking nasty lot.

[6] Voodoo, voudun, vudun, voodoun

24 hrs in transit: Into the heart of darkness with Gulliver

I should make clear that it is Neil writing these long missives. Marie is significantly less waffly. I try to be as honest as the day is long but as we approach the equator, that's about 50%. I take full responsibility for my excisions, embellishments and errors. But it's all true, or it should be.

Canada:

The day has come and we are in our 24 hour period of transit. Anxieties subside to be replaced by cold logistics. Somewhere over Winnipeg I realize that my usual ranting about the horrors of airline travel is nowhere to be found. Westjet is our first airline, YVR to Montreal and the ticketing agent moved us from the back of the plane to the premium seats up front for no reason but pure kindness (and possibly pity for our schedule). The service is good, the free food and drink is great. I slept from Richmond to Manitoba. Woke up to a lake-spotted landscape with top-hat-shaped clouds here and there. The sun reflecting off thousands of lakes and swamps. Bah. Mosquito country.

Marie just asked me "what are you writing about?" and I had to confess that I was scribbling about the typical specimen of cheap-airline Canadian unshaved manhood standing in front of me for five minutes with his blue Vancouver Canucks polo shirt, palm-frond-print board shorts, and his Playboy-waistbanded underwear peeking out as he stretched. "Oh," she said, "I thought you were writing about the clouds."

Yeah, I put that bit about the clouds in later, out of guilt.

Mid-Atlantic:

Air France, and you know you're in too small a space when the microscopic pillow and thin blanket the flight attendants provide are enough to squeeze you out into the aisle. There's not room enough even for a cat to swing a cat in this airplane, let alone in what they laughingly refer to as a seat. Even given that the seat cushion's padding has long turned to dust, for which I should be thankful as it deepens my seat, this is tighter than a French letter left in the sun too long.

Air France does love a hot airplane. It must be a bias towards the Mediterranean types. I'm awake and unhappily so. Sri Chinmoy and my hypnotherapeutic iPod app don't help. And, of course, an elderly woman (a Cruisiere Franc Fun, which I first understood to be the descendants of some Franks who witnessed Jesus's being nailed to a tree for telling everyone to stop nailing people to trees, sort of like the Daughters of the American Revolution, but is really just a pack of swinging retirees who like to go to sea together), vomited in seat 37A, the seat right behind Marie, somewhere between Reykjavik and Killarney. People were surprisingly sanguine given the Ebola scare (gallic sang froid?) but we are traveling the wrong way so they might be unconcerned. Yet, what about the Norwalk virus? Good lord, the last thing we need is to be known as the couple to bring Norwalk to West Africa.

Who vomits on airplanes anymore? It's so rare that she appears to have forgotten that the seat pouch conveniently carries a 'barf bag' for her convenience and the convenience of the rest of us. Poor suffering soul, but if Norwalk Nellie managed to spew a virus all over us I will have more to write about her in the future.

France:

Charles de Gaulle airport lovingly provides a few over-used leather chaise longues in the transit section and we adore them for it. We managed three or four hours of good sleep in the midst of the bustling crowds of temporary exiles and refugees from Economy class. I love France.

Otherwise, it is duty free, overpriced cous-cous and quiche lorraine, vending machine beverages (when did Europeans give up on proper coffee, tea, etc., in airports? Schipol is the same: Even when one steps up to a cafe and orders a cafe au lait, the weary vendor merely pushes a button and proffers a watery blend of chicory, civet poop, and milk powder. I lie. They pretend it is civet. It is merely alley cat.), and glitzy Gucci and resplendent Rolexes for the nouveaux riches touristes Chinoises, lord love 'em.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean:

And back on Air France, just past Ibiza. I must praise Air France for serving aperitifs. 'Beverage service' is the sort of term that makes me hate the English language. The booze may not be quality, but the cheekbones of the staff, both male and female, certainly are and they wear them well.

Togo awaits. Our fellow passengers are predominately African, with an exotic mix of extraordinary politesse and determined pushiness, but it's a friendly plane. God love 'em. Marie continues to sleep, I stare at my unshaven reflection in the tiny TV embedded in the seat-back ahead of me and I begin to get excited; excited, but also paranoiacally resigned to the likelihood that we'll soon be beating people away from our luggage and will be ripped off by a taxi driver for a few extra thousand African francs before I can find a friendly bed.

I see that we have just overflown Algiers. Africa, we're back!

Downtime

Day one in Togo and we'd forgotten over the past 11 months the term TIA (This is Africa). The particular manifestation of that expression seems here to comprise equal parts lethargy and pederasty, with a soupcon of insanity.

On the flight down was an old white man dressed in a stylin' baseball cap and a lime green and brown dashiki pant suit. He looked a bit like Redd Foxx at the end of the movie 'Cotton Comes to Harlem,' but hinkier. He sort of embodies the experience: the ordinary (or 'ordinary') rules cease to apply and if you wander around long enough with a befuddled look someone will eventually take you under their wing. You might end up dead or you might end up in the Hotel Intercontinental, but you'll get somewhere.

We landed, got spritzed with hand sanitizer, had our temperatures taken, and lined up for an hour to pass immigration control at the Gnassingbe Eyadema International Airport. Named after a military fellow who led a coup and ended up ruling the country for over 30 years with responsibility for the deaths of over 15,000 through those years of repression, counter-coups, assassination attempts, fraudulent elections, and the like. His poster hangs in the entry hall and it is mesmerizing in its ability to convince that the only path to success and power is via green fatigues. The Strong Man theory holds strong here.

The airport was surprisingly orderly (and slow), the taxi driver dolefully corrupt, and the roads alternately chaotic and dangerously ghetto.

But the hotel room is clean (to a point) the beds comfortable, and the food good. The staff are suggestive of a society in which the Strong Man theory makes sense: dim-witted? perversely obtuse? functionally dyslexic? deliberately maddening? Basically, all of that. TIA to the max.

Lots of sailors stay here at the Hotel Napoleon Lagune. Belgians abound: dock workers and crane operators. Most have shaven heads with little Tintin quiffs. Some are booked to stay six weeks or more. One certifiable maniac here resembling Ivan Sakharine mumbled over his macaroni and cheese at lunch, unconvinced whether it was pepper or flyspecks in his dish. Possibly both. Marie encountered him talking to a leaf.

As Marie has mentioned elsewhere, the pool is crowded today (a Saturday) with children and prostitutes, hopefully the Venn diagram involves no overlap. One British regular arrived off his ship today and canoodled with two ladies in the pool for a few hours. They have since disappeared. As have the children.

The sky is bruising. Possibility of rain. The lagoon is whipping up and the raftsmen have disappeared. Across the lagoon is the half-complete hulk of what I presume is a hotel. It's a standard rectangular lump with a rounded tower up one corner. A modern ruin: there's plenty of those. Possibly not enough graft to ensure its completion, possibly the economy. Soupy concrete and suspiciously brittle rebar ...

Having just relieved myself I noticed that there's blood in the corner of the bathroom. It's a tiled room with a shower at one end, no curtain, a toilet, then a sink. It can be hosed down quickly. Blood spatters always make me edgy. In Canada I'd complain. Here, they'd probably mistake my complaint for a dinner order of barracuda omelette.

In an hour we meet our traveling companions. We've met one so far, a Flemish Belgian fellow of indeterminate vintage and much voyaging. The other two are women we think may be Australian.

A dinner of crocodile tail awaits me. I'm trying to convince M that crocodile counts as fish. TIA, so it just might.

The Voodoo Crew hit the road

We've met our guide, Janvier, a Beninoise pan-African idealist, Wendy, from Australia, the self-proclaimed 'grandmother' of the group, and Claire, a Dane. Together with Albert, these are the people we'll be going through the back country with.

The cynicism of my earlier posts aside, Africa is its own beast, with its own fascinations as well as frustrations. It relaxes me. Sometimes.

Off to the voudun (voodoo) high priestesses and the Nana Benzes who own the markets.

Don't know when we'll next have Internet, perhaps tonight.

There's more than one way to skin a cat

The day dawned, as days do. We had our breakfast, got into our Toyota Hiace and left Bonaparte's third biggest mistake through the streets of the old quartier in which we were staying.

Orange dirt road, traffic running alongside by old rail tracks down the centre. Yellow, orange dirty buildings lining the sides. Barber shops and housewares. Rehoboth Coiffure. Goats grazing under rotted trucks left on the train tracks. This is the original settlement of Lomé. We get onto paved roads, the best ones in town, radiating from the port, thanks to the Chinese: modern Chinese, not coolies like those who built the roads and railways of Canada; these ones are in charge. The colonial quarter (more honestly an eighth or a sixteenth) is an oddity with many buildings falling down or having been converted into government offices. Almost an arabic sense to the architecture with rounded arches on the balconies. Solid white thick slab-like buildings. They weren't made to be pretty but to keep the heat of West Africa out, I suppose. Or to withstand attack.

A modern port (with a new third terminal opened ten weeks ago) gives way to the sandy beaches of the Bight of Benin and an old colonial-era jetty falling into the sea piece by piece.

The Portuguese were here first, slavers and traders. Indigenous settlements grew through that trade. These coasts weren't heavily populated until then. Germans came imperially and their presence can be seen throughout the country, then the Brits and French took it during the Great War of '14-'18, split Togoland down the middle and shook hands in departure. British Togoland became part of Ghana, French Togoland became today's Togo. A couple of political assassinations, coups, one party rule, and now multiparty democracy, such as it is, given that the son has succeeded the father and has changed the constitution to allow for lifetime presidencies.

A man proudly washing down his Mercedes van, a shop reselling old handbags, a colourful woman sporting a triple crown of nail polish bottles on her head.

Then into the administrative quarter. Here Lomé completes the trifecta of so much post-colonial architecture: to the colonial style and soviet-style shoddy breeze-blocks is added the touch of megalomania that is required: all those modern 1960s and 90s parliaments and party headquarters and hotels with spy equipment on the roof (to look across into Ghana for obscure reasons of state). Sweeping arches and monuments to martyrs and tributes to the people. And beside the monument to independence, Chinese motorcycles for sale at 750 euros a pop. How can you compete with that? Yamahas are twice the price at 1,300,000 CFA.

And from the sunbleached yellow and white sterility of the administrative quarter we headed into the Fetish Market which is the place to go when you need ingredients for particular traditional medicines, to consult a voodoo priest, or to purchase a fetish for protection. Table upon table of animal parts: cats' heads here, monkey heads there, dried chameleons, cobra vertebrae, giraffe penises, dogs' heads, bats, hedgehogs, birds: raptors and prey, crocodile skin, goat heads, and bones, bones bones. Though I wonder: I know it is still a functioning market but are people actually buying this stuff? OK, Albert bought a monkey skull, but he's from Belgium. All the animal parts look almost uniformly grey as though they've weathered many a day. Perhaps age doesn't matter. Here are bottles of viscous red and brown liquids to be used in baths or as ointments, and there's an intense shrine of blackened iron, shrine to Gu, they won't say death, they call him the God of War, a shrine of burnt iron like a hellish distended and distorted candelabra with bits of burnt bone, animal skulls, and odd lichen-like lumps of nightmare.

All that said, it's the ring of priests’ cells around the central market where the real action happens. We were guided through the market by Patience, a jovial fellow who was over fond of posing with various bits of the dead. We endured an odd dance of him working his patter while we listened with half-ears and some impatience. It's an old dance and it's sort of a necessity in the tourist world, this repeated ritual. We'd probably get agitated if'n it didn't happen. He took us through all of the corpses to a voudun priest (actually the priest's son) and through the entrance into the priestly shrine. And this is where it felt that real and fake are painfully interwoven. The priest would speak and Patience would translate and then add sales patter of his own. In the shrine were the realest fetishish, atavistic, earthy idols you can imagine. Two muddy figures like human beings and two conical blobs like previous idols that had slowly disintegrated into the earth. Those mounds were where things felt real. The priest sought the spirits' blessing for each of us then showed us the various amulets and figures we could 'purchase' from the spirits. Each item has its own ritual and purpose (safe travels, good sleep, love, virility) and if you choose it, the priest gets the spirits to tell him the price for it. Apparently you can't haggle with spirits but you can haggle with priests. His mobile phone went off at one point. This is the 21st century after all.

He'll get the spirits to imbue it and you'll have your very own bit of gris-gris to treat carefully. You can buy these items from the marketplace but then it is just art. It is only the priest who can invoke the spirits to imbue the amulets, twigs, or statuettes with real 'good' magic.

And of course I bought a mask and paid less than half of what he asked but double what I should have paid and now I have to tote the damn thing across four countries. But Marie and I were both taken by it. Or so I thought. She assumed I was merely asking what the price was and so did I but once you ask that question you get sucked into some bad juju and end up with not only a mask but a tea kettle, a bird cage and a pith helmet.

From the fetish market to the central market but it being Sunday the market was slow with no Mama (or Nana) Benzes around, just some dispirited touts and the usual profusion of fabric, knock-offs, and shoddy dollar store goods. An extremely large market but out-shouted by the churchgoers at prayer. I note that African stalls are never made out of new wood, just old grey dusty wood, grey all the way through. A heavy thumb rub would splinter some off.

Next: Village voodoo on our way to the mountain.

Lome to Kpalime and Kloto Hill in a voodoo trance

As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the thorny[7] crown
Oh[8] Lord, show me the way

- TRADITIONAL AMERICAN SPIRITUAL

Or words to that effect. I never figured it out.

The road out of Lome is a 30 minute long strip mall. Corrugated rust slopped together and almost perfectly uneven wood branches are the building materials of choice. Like the city itself, much is in a state of construction or destruction, impossible to tell which.

The road are littered with the Word of God. The Logos runs freely here.

Entreprise God's Sake

Jesus Sauve Laundromat

Agence Immobiliere Bon Dieu

Provenderie "Le Passion"

Auto-ecole Dieu seul t'aime

And churches. Every brand of western Christianity and some autochthonous. From the Mennonite missionary eating at our lunch stop to Mumblers, Methodists and Mummers, the religious alphabet is taken.

I liked L'eglise rachetterie de Dieu, which I choose to translate as 'Church of the God racket.'

Coiffure Forgive

Etablissement Elohim Bon Appetit

Supermarche la samaritaine.

It's flat out here for a long long way. Discotheques, car repair, bars, coffin makers - Ghanaian-style coffins in the shape of your choice. A helicopter-shaped one, even. A snip at 500 Euros.

Then that gives way to countryside; it'll be a good harvest this year. As in the other parts of Africa we've seen, roadside stalls come in clusters: bread vendors, then nothing, then a dozen vying for our banana purchase. Then the orangemongers. No diversification.

And we stop at a village that is in the middle of a voodoo celebration. Individuals who are thankful will return to their village and buy the spirits (white lightning gin etc) to fuel a celebration at the village shrine. The priest in his white robe (with fluorescent yellow athletic shirt underneath - 21st century, don't forget) welcomed us and we entered the palm shelter to greet the two Chiefs and other elders and take part in the ceremony - five men drumming; a ring of women clacking sticks in time; children being taught the moves; men but mostly women in a fast-footed box step dance hunched over, steatopygously protruding; a cantor leading calls; the Chiefs raising two fingers as dancers approach, trying to prevent the spirits from taking possession; women falling into trances, eyes far gone as the spirits ride them, some with numerous scars from where they used to cut themselves before this village outlawed knives; us dancing with the bolder women, approached by the possessed women who came to slap hands, whirling, falling, being cared for by others who pour water on the heads of the possessed to cool the spirits, on the hands, spraying from their mouths, a woman with a baby on her back being taken by the spirits and collapsing in frenzy but her baby rescued by women before she fell, uncaring clothes dishevelled sweat flying drum beating, talc powder drawings in the dirt and lined with gunpowder for flash bang, us taking pictures, the chief videoing us with his cell phone, other young men doing same, gawk at the strangeness, a trio of maenads in coloured grass skirts, white powder face women in robes and turbans, alcohol spraying, a woman with lit cigarettes in her ears, enjoyment all around, the spirits with us, the event both ritual and prosaic, blasé even, much laughter and tomorrow's headaches. And like the gunpowder flashes, like a half-remembered dream, my adrenaline burning itself out back in the van we continued on our way and the party kept burning in the rear view mirror.

[7] Starry crown …

[8] Good Lord …

Misty mountain morning

Voodoo dancing leaves its traces in your blood. The village shrine gives but takes. The road continues but it seeks libation because the roads of Africa are thirsty roads. All things have two sides.

We've pooled money to buy water in bulk. Where we are going on this trip there's little potable water. But right now we are heading up to the plateau country, paralleling the border with Ghana, approaching Mt Agou and the thunderclouds it corrals. Rooftops are painted red against Shango the Thunder God, even the RC cathedral in Kpalimé, which is an African town that suffers largely from being a supporter of the Opposition; thus, it is starved of investment.

We're not a group yet, merely individuals traveling together for reasons of ease, safety, and cost. We are too few to avoid each other, too few to have a mass of similarity.

Our van rattles, the smell of the upholstery reminds me of canvas tents too often damp and slowly dried, the seat covers could be wallpaper from The Prisoner TV show, the curtains are ink blot projections from some swinging sixties London 'event' featuring Yoko Ono and The Pink Floyd Experience.

Cassava and corn. Teak.

Auberge Detente Plus.

Kpalimé in the sunset light and twilight and church after church, driving past their open doors, illuminated pews, more or fewer people in each. Then a twisting mountain track up through the rainfall and forest and waterfall to our night stop: the Alberge Nectar JB, a funky 70s white erratic tile and brown grout establishment with the dropping of water and the night creaks on the cool mountain air. The sort of place you could imagine as the setting for a demented Decameron film: the world around us drowning in its Ebola sputum while we wait out the apocalypse, supplies running low, madness setting in. Drip, drip of the rainforest.

Kuma-Konda is the name of this town. Cocks crow at 4am, a palm-sized spider greets us above the shower head. This is the home of possibly Togo's most famous son, Prosper Papillon, as he's known, an expert in the flora and fauna of the region and an artist in his own right. After breakfast he led us on a walk through the forest to see orchids, phasmids, butterflies and more. Midwives and morning millet beer drinkers and goats, pigs, chickens, a mud-walled house in midst of slow-dry construction, the women's coffee cooperative that grows a hybrid of Arabica and Robusta: Arrobusta. We crossed a field of red ants that swarmed up our shoes and bit their way up our legs, met a man who proudly displayed the freshwater crab he had caught, saw Prosper's vegetal dye paintings and an enormous stick insect and it was time to hit the road again.

We're backtracking to Lomé whence we'll take the coast road to Benin. It being a Monday, there is more roadside activity. We stop at a school to view its art and, more importantly, go looking for 'shiners to sample the local home brew. From palm wine they distill 'Kill Me Quick,' the local hooch known as Sobamay (? I never quite got the name)[9]. It took us four stops, including one false one to find one that was firing today. At the false stop we sampled his wares which were vaguely reminiscent of methylated spirits. I made the mistake of sampling in earnest, not merely sipping. Three or four times. Then we find the operating still and I have a couple more, this one still warm from the distillation, fruity and peppery almost like a lovely mescal. And the moonshine takes me tight around my eyes, I've an ache around my brainstem like there's something primordial or vestigial or reptilian that is raging. I find it hard to focus and the space between near and far sight is both elongated and flattened like figures in a diorama.

Kill me quick. Before you can ask for a woman's hand in marriage you have to give a bottle of this stuff with tobacco and money to each of her elderly relatives and to a representative of the youth in the family. Only if that is acceptable can you then proceed with a dowry offer.

The brain spasms last me through to Lomé. We pull off onto a dirt yard so our driver can drop off some bananas for his wife, make our way in through a more active city than we left and I still can't get over the architecture. What is it? Banana republic pseudo 'starchitect' postmodern? Triangles and circles and columns and porticoes, and rectangular windows set inside oval windows and staircases that dip outside then inside, tile and glass and stucco. I have to think about this some more - there's something nagging at me.

Back to the port and the good Chinese roads. I count 60 or 70 freighters at anchor.

Inland I saw strange brands of vehicles. No Hondas, but Fondas and Hondzas. Here at the port are hundreds of used cars from Europe, cars that will be driven until they have no road clearance, use hooks and eyes for door locks, and have twine holding the hatchback on.

Marie snaps photos and chats with our companions. I type madly into my little machine during the ordinary spots and stare wildly at the world otherwise.

The old national capitol of Aneho is caught between lake Togo and the sea and will slowly get swamped as nature finishes off this abandoned colonial wreck.

And then the border with the usual delay and worn wood and ink and bench, and that is Togo, for now.

[9] So-da-bey: supposedly a corruption of “So that be,” or, as I like to think of it “Well, THAT happened …”

Running on fumes

Benin feels only slightly different from Togo. That difference could be my imagination but the Beninois have not had the stuffing knocked out of them by quite so oppressive tyrants. Otherwise these countries along with Ghana (and Nigeria) to an extent are like a layer cake with commonalities and communities that stretch east-west and borders that run north-south. It's a good way to ensure dysfunction.

It looks a bit more orderly and cultivated than Togo, but that's in part because college students can't get jobs so the local mayor has granted lands temporarily for them to grow food and survive.

There's the same odd architecture popping up from time to time but I figured out what it is: it reminds me of the monster homes of the Indian/Pakistani diaspora in Vancouver but without the symmetry.

Grand Popo the first city of Dahomey, Benin-that-was, but like its neighbour over the border it is caught between the river and the sea and slowly fading.

Bad roads here. East-west is terrible but north-south is supposedly good[10], which makes sense if you are trying to suture the slices of humanity together. And the roadsides are laced with children with what I can only imagine are umbilical hernias. Is there such a thing? Big bulging protrusions around their navels.

Bad road, ripped up to be repaved but the government decided to spend money on ripping up more road rather than pave this section. Potholes and detours. One detour outside Ouidah (Whydah) took us through a small town/suburb where youths put a log across the road and tried to extort money. Janvier yelled at them and they moved it and we moved on but then came to an intersection with more roadblocks and young and middle aged men who yelled and beat on the van. The youths came running behind us yelling that we hadn't paid. 'You should be nervous, whites,' one shouted. Shouting, more shouting, cars and trucks in a tangle. We got through and reached a third roadblock with old men, yelling, families sitting to watch and help with the yelling. The anger was that the little town bridge had been built by their grandfather and the detoured traffic from the highway was going to ruin it. Thus the payment. A note exchanged palms and we pulled into Ouidah late.

Stayed At Auberge le Jardin Secret but ended up through poor advice and poorer roads eating at Thaty's Sports Bar. Basically a dimly lit canoodling/prostitution pick-up joint.

There's poetry in those last few hours but I can't reach it. Sensory overload and jet-laggy (lack of) sleep patterns taking their toll.

[10] Something of a lie.

Memory is a stranger

The slave trail through Benin made many people rich, but you see no evidence of that on the ground, save the house of (one of) the descendents of 'Chacha' Da Souza', the man immortalized in Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah, and likely tormented on a regular basis in Hell for cultivating and growing the slave trade. The house sits in the old slave pen compound, behind the tree under which slaves were sold.

The path to the beach was a long one: ignore for a moment the hundreds of kilometres the slaves walked to get here, there’s the house where people were weakened in body and broken in spirit so as to be sufficiently docile, the tree around which they were led seven times to erase their memories of their homelands, the pits for the dead, and the final long walk through the brush and over the sands to the beach where they were ferried out to the slave ships. The time is 9am and the sun is already macheteing its way through my skin. The palm trees behind, the orange coarse sand stretching for miles, the pounding of the surf with its wicked undertow in which so many slave drowned in their chains either by accident or device.

It's hard to know what to write because walking the slave route is all so personal - some people are affected by it, some not. Do the trees shriek it, does the wind whisper it as Janvier suggests?

Museums in Africa don't make top ten lists. The old Portuguese Fort museum had such a paucity of artifacts that you could put everything in one small room. Holocaust deniers would love the same scarcity of evidence (although the human evidence of slavery is obviously awesome in scale - that being the sort of evidence the Nazis were very efficient at reducing).

I digress. Zomachi, the house used to store slaves, weaken and break them has been rebuilt as Zomaï - the house of returning – intended to be a centre for conferences, accommodation for visiting descendants of slaves, a place of memory. But since it was started 22 years ago it remains a concrete shell, an unfortunate symbol for the continuing problems of Africa, a reminder of dependence on outside aid, the transience of political theatre, and the competing priorities of a poor country. Only the rich have the luxury of memorial.

I'm such a downer. At least I can travel like a king here for cheap cheap cheap! Oh. Wait ...

Now we are safe

Oct 21

When someone dies here it is said that 'he is traveling.' And the journey into death and resuscitation as a spirit is a boat voyage, which makes sense to me. Whether it's a slave ship or a pirogue, a sea change that is required before one's spirit becomes promiscuous and voyeuristic enough to both protect and rage against its family.

Interesting to see the juju here, the astrologers, the keepers of mysteries like the Etablissement Saint Salomon, in which I can find the same grimoires, Le Grand Albert, the Secrets of Solomon, etc. that I'd find in Port-au-Prince, New Orleans, Harlem, Paris, London. Metamorphosis and syncretism: these cobbled-together tidbits of gimcrackery take their place alongside voudoo (itself cobbled together from priests of various tribes during the slave years), Roman Catholicism with its excrudesences, Islam with its various baggage trains and Christian evangelism with its claim to early insights. How is this not the home of tolerance and equality?

A word about the Temple of Pythons: a practicing temple since early days, the Roman Catholics saw fit to put their church right across from it. It didn't work; instead, congregants got used to attending Mass and then wandering across the square to make offerings to the pythons and the visiting priests who live in the tiny huts therein. The pythons themselves are docile and mesmerizing, and it is an integral part of Ouidhan life.

On the road again. Less overt religiosity here, with owners' names prominent, joyous names, and a wonderfully literate Patisserie le Pantagruel. That was in Cotonou, where we boarded a pirogue to take us across Nogwé (nog-way) Lake to the Venice of Africa.

No one actually called it that but Ganvié (here-we-are-safe) is exactly what I imagine Venice looked like before its imperial days: a collection of (in this case) 25,000 people living in shacks built on stilts, protected from shore-borne invaders. Some more elaborate mosques and churches provide local grandeur, but it is largely a fishing community, fishermen who farm the lake, owning small plots delineated by dead palm fronds along their borders. Your plot is where you fish. If you are a man. The man takes his fish and sells them to his wife. She in turn sells them in the market. Both are earners and each pockets their own profits.

The lake is reasonably shallow, I think 3 metres at its deepest, with lush green vegetation throughout. In the dry season it is mostly mud.

There's three other smaller villages like this on Nogwé; we passed Agégé (agaygay) and we also passed a Nigerian smuggler, his black pirogue stinking from afar with oil and gas he was taking into Benin to sell.

I can be credited, I imagine, with being the first person to sing 'Barrett's Privateers' on Lake Nogwé. I accomplished this feat as we continued to Port Novo, our captain periodically tilting his outboard motor out of the water to either clear it of weeds or allow the air intake room to breath.

Dubious honours I collect.

Let us sing sad songs of the death of kings

Q: How do you know he is a king?

A: He hasn't got shit all over him.
-MONTY PYTHON’SHOLY GRAIL

Oct 21/22/23: From the silt-dredging cement boys of the lake to Royalty itself. Porto Novo, the capitol, where the new Parliament is being built by the Chinese.

A trip to the herb market for local medicine. Gris gris medicines as well as more scientific pills. I looked at one man's shopping list, over his shoulder, and the only name I believe I recognized was Asafodo, asafoetida, which I imagine would ensure that, like Buckley's Cough Syrup, it tastes bad because it works.

Our night was spent at the Centre Songhaï a holistically self sufficient teaching community established by priests from Nigeria. Marie and I almost expired like ropey beef jerky from the heat in our room but all else about the place was impressive: animal husbandry, biogas, plastic recycling, crop cultivation, and management are all taught, the buildings and operations are professional and it is spawning similar centres elsewhere in Benin and other countries.

Marie is more cynical about this place because she has the knowledge and experience to see where the self-sufficiency 'leaks.' I'm the closet Utopian idealist. I ate home-raised quail because, due to Ebola I couldn't order the acouti (grass cutter, or giant rat to give it its most appropriate name) as it is technically bush meat and a known vector for disease. Bah.

That reminds me that I have to mention the children on their mothers' backs. They start out swaddled but soon learn to cling, unbound, like lemurs or sloths or koalas - tiny fingers and heels holding onto mama's sides.

Back to it: Unrested and drooping from too little sleep is not the best condition to meet royalty, in this case King Gbessa IX, of the 400-year dynasty founded by his grandfather to the 23rd degree, (King Tofa, brother to the founder of Dahomey) King of Porto-Novo.

We visited the palace built by Tofa and used until 1976. The last reigning monarch, Gbessa I, was deposed by the French, then moved to the current palace: a fair sized house in a run-down (is there any other kind?) quarter. We slipped past a government delegation, took off our shoes, waved at what seemed to be the royal harem and children and seated ourselves before the throne as a courtier sought out the king himself.

And the great man entered, and we knelt and kowtowed three times, and he granted us permission to sit. We introduced ourselves and spoke for a few minutes before he had to meet the government delegation. He changed into his robes of state for photos, but he seemed a bit grumbly. At one point I let my body touch the royal hand and he jerked it back. I suppose I might be cured of scrofula now.

In this kingdom, the Queen mother (known as Dzjeen Pahrtor, I believe)[11] was second to the king. Chosen from among his paternal female relative, she was the keeper of the treasure, admin and tobacco.

When the king dined, only those 2 or 3 of among his dozens of wives who would be sacrificed upon his death were allowed to serve him.

They don't do any of that any more.

Albert, Marie, and I each took a slug of 'Kill me Quick' before meeting our next king, from a kingdom a few hours north. The King of Ketou, 50th king since his ancestor and six brothers left their father's court in Nigeria. All six established Yoruba kingdoms, three in what is now Benin, one of them based here in Ketou. A real palace, this time attached to the police station, courtiers lounging in the heat, a period of waiting and then the King appeared from behind an emerald and black cloth and took his place upon the throne. Kowtowing, blessings, benedictions.

The Commissioner of Police apologetically intruded on us, prostrating himself in front of the throne to seek a blessing, the handle of his pistol sticking out of the back of his trousers.

Kings must eat. In both cases we had to bring 'something of interest' for the king. Kings like little envelopes, it seems.

Those visits were a far cry from the throne of Guezo of Dahomey which we were to visit the next day. It stands five feet tall, resting each foot on a Yoruba skull. He took what he wanted, waging war after war to consolidate the Kingdom of Dahomey and profit from slaving deeper and deeper into the interior as well as out to the coast.

The Dahomey kings were Fons who came originally from Togo - three brothers who left to found their own kingdoms. Circa 1600 the eldest established his base at Abomey (meaning inside the wall (abodo)) and took the name from having established himself inside a conquered chief's territory:

Dahomey: inside (conquered chief) Dah's belly.

At the UNESCO site in Abomey, the two (of 10) palaces that have been restored were those of Guezo and Glele, father and son (between them they ruled from 1818 to 1889) both of which have temples to themselves (established after death) -- huts made from clay mixed with the blood of 41 people, gunpowder, gold dust, pearls water from seven streams, and seawater. Nowadays they use cow's blood.

Glele's symbol is a lion, almost identical to the one in Tintin au Congo. Guezo's is a bull wearing a coat (only a fool would try to remove it).

The Kingdom of Dahomey was also noted for its Amazon corps (the Ahosi). Women with scimitars and clubs helped fuel the French gutter press's sales and the bloodthirsty tales helped justify the French war and takeover, leading to the establishment of the Republic of Dahomey in 1908.

But it wasn't all blood. Arts and ironmongery and music as well. And the expansion really fuelled what we know now as voodoo, as the shamans and magicians and priests would not be enslaved, but would be free to practice, bringing together the traditions of disparate groups, as well as Islam and Christianity, which arrived from different directions in the 16th century.

Don’t enslave the witchdoctor. The king had to be careful, after all. Sorcery could end his reign and enslaving known sorcerers is not prudent. One royal daughter always carried a lidded calabash bowl full of sand into which the king could spit. She would privately bury that sand at night so no one could use the king's saliva to curse him.

The palaces are littered with cannons. Each one cost the king either 15 young men or 21 pretty young women. Thus were Brazil, Haiti, Aruba, Mississippi populated.

Apologists for the slave trade will point out that prior to the slave trade prisoners of war were (mass) slaughtered in an annual rite. So slavery was, ergo, a good thing. Dubious. Especially since there would never have been warfare on that scale.

Anyway, As currency goes, slaves and cannon probably felt a lot more regal than the cowry shells the Germans had introduced as currency.

Then time to head north to Dassa, our guide Janvier's home town. The more rural we get, the more the towns resemble East African towns: there's only so much one can do with mud and thatch, or concrete and corrugated metals. The savannah lands give way to some hills, mostly rocky outcrops that are quite fetching in the late afternoon sun.

This being the former Adaché kingdom, independent until a king died and Glele went to war to install one of the sons who was being educated in Dahomey. We met with the grandson of that king (Adjike Zomahoun) and son of the final king, Demondji Gassagan Pierre. Mr. Zomahoun Demondji Pierre Gassagan is an old man who resembles his grandfather. He was asleep in his courtyard when we arrived but he kindly welcomed us to see his grandfather's famous wooden horse.

The royal horse: King Adjike had a problem: he couldn't keep his horses alive. He complained in front of a Portuguese trader. The trader saw an opportunity to curry favour and had a life-sized replica of a black stallion carved from wood, mounted onto four wheels, and sent to the King. The king had riding drapery made for the wooden horse and was pulled/pushed around his kingdom for many years.

Mr Zomahoun and his family offered us water to drink and to pour on the ground as libation for the ancestors. We were excused from actually drinking it, given the difficulties tourists have with local water. After pleasantries, a son showed us a room just off the courtyard with three pictures of the old king, including one of him on the horse. The horse itself was parked in the next room over and it's pretty respectable as wooden horses go, especially 110 year old horses

The descendants of kings run museums.

I won't go into our visit to the granite garden except to say that young artists here have grand visions as they do elsewhere and it is energizing to see them pursue their dreams when so many of us collapsed along the way and are being carried over the finish line of death with heads bowed in the ambulance Van. I hope one day to see the Okuta Symposium finished.

It's a good life.

Next time: we meet the dead, and boy are they pissed.

[11] An unremarked and unremarkable dig at my Grandmother.

[12] Quite possibly wrongly

Diet: An interlude

West Africa is decidedly not a place for foodies; at least, not in the south; perhaps the coastal areas closer to Morocco benefit from variety and the spice trade.

It is a monotonous diet, and I want to go back and kick myself for eating fish and crocodile in Lomé instead of pizza. A monotonous, but rhythmically pounded diet: pounded yam, pounded sweet potato, pounded cassava, and I still can't tell the difference between cassava, manioc, and taro. Pounded maize and millet and sorghum. Pounded rice.

So many swollen bellies from the starches. No (other) obvious signs of malnutrition, though.

Protein: 'bicycle chicken' which is tough, lean, long-legged and ropy pullet; fish, usually small, fried or grilled, insides and all; and the occasional bit of beef, usually so chewy and dry that you'd swear it was the cow's Achilles' tendon.

For sauce, peanut or tomato. Sometimes a chill paste on the side. They can do a decent tomato sauce; they just don't, as a rule.

This is still better than a Roman's diet under the Empire. Thanks be for travellers and cross-border trade. Without innovations from China (noodles) or decent crops from the Americas (corn, tomatoes, chilies) Italians would still be eating tapioca three times a day, and English cooks would still be the food professionals of choice in rich households across Europe.

I think we ate some bad fish. I now know that 'food poisoning' is the worst excuse for a sick day. Unless you've just shit out a lung, the sushi you had was fine.

Service? Well, this is not a service culture. I can't imagine worse people to try to enslave than independent, tradition-proud tribes. It seems tradition as well to get the order wrong, to wait at least an hour before presenting the food, to not write up the bill until ten minutes after it is requested, and (for a group) to take another ten to fifteen minutes to be convinced that we are not doing any mathematical jiggery-pokery. Don't even think about getting change.

My diet for the past couple of days has been largely disease free, consisting almost exclusively as it has of pharmaceuticals. An example:

Saturday Oct 25:

0635: 1 immodium anti-diarrhoea

0740: 1 malarone anti-malarial

0755: 1 ciprofloxacine antibiotic

0805: 1 immodium

0845: 1 Pepto Bismol

1015: 1 Tylenol

1320: 1 Pepto Bismol

1645: 1 Tylenol

1645: 1 Naproxen

2015: 1 ciprofloxacine

I do not regret the meals I have missed.

Running from death: the Agun dancing of the Mahri of Dassa, a Fob people

Oct 23:

The Agun (or Egun) are the spirits of the ancestors. They can be protective and they can be retributive, based on the actions of their descendants.

We arrived in the village of the Mahri people of Dassa, also a Fon group, in the middle of the week when the Agun rise annually to express their feelings. The spirits run through the village and, if they touch you, you can expect to die or at least spend some moments unconscious. The Agun spirits then make a display in the village square during which they charge at the villagers like bulls and dance to the music of the villagers, all the time kept in check by the sticks of their individual 'handlers.'

On a particularly materialist basis, the spirits are embodied in the person of Agun initiates, covered from head to toe in layers of more and more elaborate fabrics. But that's neither here nor there. What matters is not the person underneath but that the spirit of an ancestor is now embodied and acts out. Villagers run as it approaches ... well, that's not quite right: there seems to be different behaviours: the wee children hang back; as they get older they come closer to the action, until about the age of nine to twelve, I'd say, at which point they make a practice of trying to get as close as they can before running. Older youth hang back or sit around on walls, pretending indifference but fall/scramble off the wall when the Agun approaches; adults are intermingled with children until a venerable age (or status), when they get a bench seat. Then they seem to have a duty of throwing money at the Agunwho grab it and dismissively cast it to the ground (unless it is a bill!) where their handler hits it with the end of his stick (pounding it into the earth) before picking it up and pocketing it.

It strikes me[12] that this elementally earths the money after the Agun has handled it, making it safe to pick up.

Periodically, the shaman comes by with a calabash of herbs (from the three trees of voodoo) and water, sprinkling the water over the crowd with a brush, like a Christian priest with a censor, cleansing and purifying the people.

One or two of the Agun costumes flip open to reveal wooden heads when the Agun bends over. I'm reminded strongly of a turkey cock all fluffed up.

One of the Agun is pint-sized with a slightly taller handler. He's a show-stealing spirit. At one point he comes out on the shoulders of another Agun and they dance about like a possessed Yao Min.

A bit of gris-gris: a handler gets a child to fill a vial with sand. The Agun takes it and dances madly, throwing it to the ground; upon reopening it, the handler shows that it has been turned into gari - pounded yam. We all eat a pinch of the spirit food.

And it is time to leave and the villagers continue with their high spirits.

Women once occupied the robes but Janvier told us that they bragged too much about it instead of remaining mum: it is the Agun and the Agun only who appears and that’s that. So the men took over. It seems that the gossipy nature of women is the justification for them bearing much of the burden in the society. Despite Dahomey kicking the crap out of everyone with its warrior women.

Yom people of Tanaka

Heading north in Benin, getting into more Muslim territory, but Islam seems to syncretize with local spirits just as well as Christianity.

We're getting into odd, inverted-cone-shaped huts right now. Heading into Tanaka territory.

We stop at the post office for stamps. The stamp glue doesn't seem to wear well in this climate so Albert is forced to use paste to affix his postage. We bought stamps for postcards we intended to buy but couldn't find postcards for the rest of Benin. Well, the postmaster tried to sell us postcards of bikini butts and bare-breasted native women, but M wasn't in the purchasing mood. The memory of those postcards will keep me warm on many a cold night at sea.

A rutted road takes us up to a mosque that was built for the locals but is unused: they prefer their homebuilt one. We hike up to it and their village.

The Tanaka, a clan of the Yom people, inhabit a village of some 250 people. We are met by the traditional chief - the shaman - in his goatskin loin wrap, his hat and his pipe. He looks like a piece of smoked jerky. He welcomes us and lets us wander the village (as if he could have stopped the children who had been clutching at us since we arrived).

Here the grass roofs of the huts are topped with pots: to keep the rain out we're told but I suspect that there must be more to it than plain common sense.

We are herded into a large communal hut where we meet the chief who, like the Kings we have met, indulged us with questions, but unlike the kings he tries to sell us souvenirs from his village. I buy a pipe but wish like hell I'd brought my daypack on the trip - I could have offered the shaman tobacco and tried to swap my pipe for his long, weathered affair. Damn all such opportunities missed.

On the way out we see a couple of lads from a different tribe wandering about in ritual dress: a week's prep for their upcoming public circumcisions. They have wives and children already but this will be part of becoming a man. They will be stoical as it takes place and then spend a month wandering with their tackle hanging out as proof of their manhood.

I dunno, but I doubt I could be calm and quiet while a painted bloke with a scimitar took a whack at my willie. But it is a rite of passage and it does allow one to air one’s bits for a proud month post-chop.

Fulani people of Natatingou

The Fulani get around. Literally. Generally nomadic they sweep across West Africa, concentrated in Burkina Faso (half of the country's population) as well as Niger and Senegal.

Which is good because they are a largely attractive group of people, the 'Pearls of Africa.' I can only say that were I forced to reincarnate as an average African man with a few wives I'd probably choose to be a Fulani.

Yes, yes, horrible patriarchy and all that. The thing is, one sees so many splay-kneed bicyclers wobbling about on these roads in old tattered western clothes that it is a lovely thing to see a couple of tall elegant Fulani ladies with their beaded necklaces and earrings and colours and smiles walking away and silhouetting themselves against the tall golden grasses.[13]

I'm getting myself into hotter water, I see. So I'll drop that line of thought.

Some Fulani have become sedentary, and it is one such family unit we visited outside Natitingou. A half-dozen children, a few wives and older daughters, a couple of men: elderly or sick. The rest out in the fields.

Round huts.

The women/girls have different hairstyles depending on whether they are eligible, dowried/committed, married, pregnant, first pregnancy, second etcetera. Their hair is decorated with beadwork, as are their ears and sometimes their necks.

Bare-breasted women cover up when they see us coming. Modesty for all strangers or because camera-happy tourists drooled wolfishly once too often?

There are cattle here. A calf will cost you $500 US. Seems reasonably constant across Africa.

Nice place, wouldn't want to live here. Lots of fun with the children, especially enjoyed two pounding yam in a rhythmic beat, throwing their pestles up and clapping before catching them again. The chickens joined in and it was quite a little combo. I caught it on film.

Then on to Natitingou and the Hotel Bellevue which was ineptly named, it seems. The market here is ... well, no point in describing it because these markets are a bit like the universe: they look identical from every direction.

I really like the shirts here but can't find any to buy. No matter. My wardrobe doesn't need to compete with itself for craziness and colour.

[13] Though we never got a picture of prettiest: mere joyful memories.

the Tatas: Somba people of Atakora and Kera

Cutting west again, back towards Nadoba and Togo. This is the pays des Tatas (“the country of the Tatas”) here and on the Togo side, UNESCO-listed and amazingly beautiful.

The Tata houses are fortified mud houses. Not made of mud bricks. Like 3D printers the Tata people slather layer upon layer of a mud/stone/straw mixture. They outline an entrance/kitchen prep area leading to a livestock holding area, then up about three feet to the level of the kitchen, from which steps lead up to the roof about another five feet. Ironwood and mud for the roof. On the roof are sleeping huts and granaries. They look similar except that the tops can be lifted off the granaries to reveal three storage compartments. Each person has their own granary, but only the father can look into his as he might have a mistress somewhere and ...[14]

From the roof the Tatas could be safe from attack, firing upon slavers or wildlife.

The walls are scored into patterns, and the Somba replicate the scoring on the faces of children. It's a visually pleasing form of mutilation, and certainly more extensive that the usual few scars.

We stay at the Otammari lodge in the Atakora mountains, a local concern. It is an eco-lodge built by the educated youth of the village who couldn't get jobs related to their studies (or any job, for that matter). Led by one Parfait (“Perfect”), a man with a hundred plans, they got money out of international organizations to build a large modern Tata with rooms for guests. The locals staff it as well. The service is rudimentary but it is quite charming.[15]

The village offers up our first look inside a real tata and it is as you might expect: smoke-blackened ironwood rafters, chickens and goats, the smell of porridge on the boil (think stale cream of wheat or runny stale Red River Cereal).

The rooftop is a luxury because it gets us up off the ground where we can see the village, over the tall sorghum and corn fields we had been walking through, and we get a whisper of a breeze. It a lovely and enchanting place. We all agree we quite like the Somba Tamberma people.

Togo Redux

Is it better to have your traditions and culture die or to have them preserved in amber solely to attract tourists? I suppose the authenticity I often agonize over is the authenticity of concrete block housing replacing mud, of adaptation. Else, the 'tourist' show is just of a culture at a specific moment: the Tatas built high partly to repel slavers; we don’t preserve the heritage from before that period, long melted into the ground. This culture was dominant, that one in decline, etcetera etcetera.

But even the hokey tourist approach at the UNESCO site is tame and jovial without much worry about costuming up for the foreigners.

We had to cut through Togo again in order to get to Burkina Faso. The police wouldn't stamp us out of Benin for unfathomable reasons, perhaps a local dispute with the Togo staff, perhaps some blind edict, but the Togolais police didn't seem to mind.

So Togo again.

Not far over the border, UNESCO had the locals build a tourist tata to keep the traditional knowledge alive as well as to provide a magnet for touts.

Wonderfully, and hilariously, a local woman moved into the UNESCO house, thus layering the authentic on top of the reproduction. The locals won't rat her out to UNESCO, although I’m sure it’s known. It actually helps preserve the house to have someone smoking termites out, repairing it, stamping the chicken dung into the floor. Best of all, she has a house with western-style steps and a handrail where she used to have to hoist herself up to the rooftop. That staircase It replaced the kitchen area but she doesn't seem to mind—she can cook on the roof or in the entranceway.

The touts are soft and gentle and they dance for us under the baobab tree with its hanging polyps of velvety fruit, dancing in a fast, hunched over kicky way, dancing and singing along. Viking style horned helmets for the women, flatter caps for the men. I take pictures of local graffiti instead.

As we drive, the tatas disappear along with the Somba Tamberma.

The Lamba peoples are Somba as well but recent arrivals, having migrated out from the Somba in search of more arable land. Their compounds are buildings (rectangular, round) with connecting walls as opposed to the integrated houses.

The Chokosi of Mango are ... well, I can't rightly recall at the moment. It'll come to me. Oh yes, no one was home. Huts with walls and wooden gates. Couple of pups in the shade.

[14] And what? This is one of those wink and a nod moments I would get from locals that made no sense. What? His supply would be depleted? He’d keep gifts in there for her? Mememtos of conquests? A copy of the Kama Sutra?

[15] Composting toilets really do work.

Moba people of Natigou

Natigou village, not to be confused with the city of Natitingou, is unremarkable. We did have a lovely experience at one house, though, which we slowly approached, Janvier calling 'Ago. Ago' to make our presence known. Papa was out but the wives and children were there.

Again huts with a connecting wall, but the highlight was the fun we had with the children - showing them our pictures, videoing them, even just putting them on the screen of my iPod, camera inward so they could see themselves.

It's not all about differences; similarities matter more.

Togo redux redux and crossing the border with Graham Greene

Throw away my misery;
It never meant that much to me.
It never sent a get well card
- THE WEAKERTHANS

As we cross Togo we see the landscape and people change. Donkey carts appear, something we'll see more of in Burkina Faso.

We overnight in Dapaong, a town with a modern palace as we enter, the home of one of the president's girlfriends. The highway from her house across town become a beautiful divided affair with more overhead lighting than the rest of Togo's roads combined. But that's democracy for you.

Hotel Dapaong offers almost luxury after a few nights in ... weaker accommodation. Everything works until 545am when they start testing the microphones for the anticorruption rally taking place that day. At 600am it switches to music. Think Danish dance pop. In democratic form the schoolchildren are marched for kilometers from all directions to come take part.

I can't help but hope some students bribed their way out of it.

The road to Burkina Faso is good but there is an achingly long line of trucks at the side of the road waiting to go north, drivers sleeping under their rigs.

The border is fabulous. Burkina Faso means 'land of the honest people' and the government goes to great lengths to enforce that honesty. The paperwork is wonderful with the officials writing details of each passport and visa into an enormous ledger of graph paper with blue and red lines so thick it’s a wonder that any writing could be intelligible. It's a Scrooge and Marley ledger and the oldest of its hundreds of pages are loose, disintegrating, dirty. Another official is processing paperwork, the sort of paperwork that makes me drool with delight at the intricacies of forgery: old photocopies on just the right paper, the right colour of dirt in the creases, big green paper stamps that need to be glued into place with the right kind of brush and bottle glue, the ink stamps that overlay them, the signatures so precise in thick blue ink. In triplicates and duplicates all being scrutinized with an intensity and solemnity that would otherwise suggest the illiteracy of the scrutineer.

Then we are stamped in and the vehicle's laissez-passer is done, then we drive two hundred feet and the laissez-passer is demanded by the military and scrutinized and our passports are all checked methodically. And one hundred feet later we are stopped again and the laissez-passer is checked (by the police this time) and we are eyed gimletly again.

Certainly they can't all be hoping for 'deux cents avec tes papiers' which is the local understanding of 'descends avec tes papiers?' Not in the land of honest people?

Cassela people of Tiebele: Lumbering across Burkina Faso: two days under the blazing sun

Tell the boys back home
That I'm doing just fine
I've left all my troubles and woes
Sing about me for I can't come home
I've many many more miles to go.
-TOM WAITS

In the border towns I think the reason they keep the roads and markets so dirty is so they don't feel compelled to clean their homes - you don't want your house to look bad in comparison. Frontiers attract opportunists and the indigent.

Immediately we are in the countryside and it is cotton, donkeys and walled compounds, some larger some smaller and clustering around a mosque to make a larger village.

This is the land of the Mosi people, characterized by scarring that resembles a ladder, thickest near the temples then curving down and narrowing toward the mouth. It looks like the xylophones they play here.

Compound houses now with western rectangular building, some made out of concrete blocks, but also mud brick. Local peculiarity or western influence?

Random brain detours in the shimmering heat of Burkina Faso.

Three-donkey cart, man standing on the cart and waving his stick like an orchestra conductor.

Stop at a Mossi house that turns out to be a Mussa house. Sheesh, how foolish of us.Immigrants from Ivory Coast or Ghana.

Why dog barks at cars: long convoluted tale that boils down a dog shouting 'where's my change?' after paying cab driver who then took off. Pun-chlines don’t translate.

Lots of checkpoints in the land of honest people: police, military, transport.

Beautiful lands, flat, also green. Noticeably hotter but tail end of rainy season.

All of a sudden it changes, the compounds now have large cubic towers with battlements or ramparts or whatever or is it crenellations?

Lovely herds of cattle tended by boys with sticks.

Wild West adobe look. Squared walls but tin roofs slope down at back. Round air vents in front. Verandas.

Gathering hay into small stooks.

Drying out. Hotter but less muggy. I feel more comfortable but companion wilt.

Like Malawi, poor but few beggars. Maybe they starve more quickly.

West Africa feels safer, definitely friendlier than east Africa. We're not so rare as to be a novelty but also infrequent enough to be tolerable - a diversion rather than a continuous source of cultural confusion.

Conical hut tops draped in squash vines.

Inside Mossi compound, no open space: maze-like with granaries, sleeping huts, walkways, separate walled yards for each hut, perhaps grew organically with the number of wives? Build a new granary and hut outside the walls, build walls to the nearest huts then break doorways through the (now) interior walls? Walls like a nest of antisocial snakes.

Aqueducts alongside and over road from artificial lake providing for rice paddies and other agriculture.

Away from foetid swamps of the coast, the humidity, getting into a drier heat I'm more familiar with. Everything rots down south, strange molds grow. Here, things scuttle.

Kruga town - like any other, couple of Wild West storefronts, rickety empty market stall area.

Lost on the back roads but I don't mind because Marie and I have McVities shortbreads that we found in a shop this morning. And Pringles. Not a lot of shops in West Africa. A cockroach scuttled over the biscuits as we picked them up.

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day / Teach a man to fish, feed him for life / But teach everybody to fish, they overfish, no fish left, you're back to square one - western dependency cycle.

1230pm all of Burkina Faso is sitting under trees.

Dindeogo town

Wangala village - little black head in tall yellow grass, bobbing along,

Zabre town

Ziou town

Zecco town

I feel at peace as we parallel the southern border on way to Pô. Good people vibe.

Stayed overnight at Pô, in a prison-style compound that was unremarkable save for the words Ko-De-Ta wrought into the staircase railing. Coincidence? In fact, Pô was the centre of the coup d’etat that brought the current president to power.

They don't leave concrete blocks bare here in Burkina Faso: they apply mud or (rarely) a layer of cement. Finish it off to blend in. Nice clean and tidy. Prairie people, proud in poverty.

Interactions with the military seem more tense, strained. The soldiers are more thorough and there is no banter. Saw 2000 CFA pass “honestly” into uniformed hand.

The former Marxist Leninist states seem better than capitalist ones at getting most everyone up to a basic level of deep, grinding poverty. Still impressed by the aqueducts.

But where are the clinics? The schools? See rare classes under trees. Nothing systematic.

Balalaila: we stop in at the palace of Tiebele, home of Cassella people. Literally. The painted palace is a village now, which is the only thing that has preserved it from eroding away. Once the capital of a kingdom of 20,000 inhabitants in over 67 villages is now a tourist-surly warren: rectangular hits are for couples, round for bachelors, hourglass for grandmothers and children. The latter are constructed for higher security against animals, etc.

Low doors (like with Tatas on Togo side) - enemy has to enter crouched, head first. Thwack!

On the rooftops of the palace we feel the first stirring of the Harmattan, the arid winds that come from the Sahara and fill the laundry sails of the dry season.

Pounkouyan town

Then Leo[16], big modern looking hotel. On outside. Inside is just space. Nap, laundry, Internet.

[16] Original missives misidentified this as Po. The days bleed into each other a bit.

Dagarti People of Karite

Oct 28:

The day begins with preparation for a national day of protest: the president proposes a constitutional amendment to remove term limits on his office (currently 2 5-year terms). He has been in power for 28 years now, mostly as a dictator before he introduced elections a decade or two ago. He's now caught by his own constitution.

Heading west, road lined with colonial mahogany trees. Then open, more sparsely populated. I daydream about a cotton processing and cloth making women's collective here in Burkina Faso.

Lots of rickety foosball tables - every village has one, some so patched as to be homemade.

Ghost town markets. Empty. Emptier than a Malthusian's soul.

How do you have development without education? Literature? Libraries? If leisure time is not spent learning? People (men) spend a lot of time lounging. Even if a child wanted to learn where is the opportunity to do so? Tentacles of tradition paralyze and ossify and yet another generation of UN analysts tut tut in worry and file another set of yawning recommendations.[17]

Big grey mud patch and the two-foot remains of walls of two huts. Entire house dissolved into an archaeological layer of detritus and dust.

Off the cross country dash it is paved highway and a stop at the Hotel Sissilis for lunch where I gawk longingly at the swimming pool and right angles and wonder why we can't stay in places like this.

Might get fat as a pig:I have a knack for ordering whole birds instead of portions; in this case it is Guinea fowl.

Guinea fowl are juicy like chicken, bland like turkey.

So much architecture over the past few days is fundamentally defensive. Given these peoples were fodder for the slave trade, hardly blameworthy. Interesting that the trade thrived on the notion that blacks were not human. And the slavers on these raids were also black Africans: were they not human? I’d argue that nothing proved their humanity more than their barbarity.

Like an adobe fort, a small Alamo, a Dagarti house is built around a central square with living and storage quarters along the wall.

Big urn granaries, water pots inside to stay cool. Flat roofs for drying food: sorghum, corn, ground nuts.

Poorer here: rags, not clothes.

The walls have slits and holes for bows and arrows. Clay staircases run up to the roof of the main building where there are storage hits and a room for papa to sleep in and keep watch for enemies.

Enemies. The Dagarti are a sub group of the Lomi who gradually migrated here from Ghana. The Lomi like to fight and the Dagarti arm themselves like their cousins: as well as using the traditional bow, arrows, spears, they travel with a three legged stool that doubles as a club. So they always have a comfy place to sit and something to start saloon fights with.

The Bubifo people on way to Gaoua. Another subgroup. All have variations on traditions, but it is the Lobi we see tomorrow who fight most visibly to maintain theirs.

The town of Bourdum-Bourdum: late afternoon all storefront steps crowded with people drinking chatting relaxing

Then into the city of Goura, a stop at the Loni museum which is impressive by African standards but slightly less informative than a National Geographic article. Some reproduced buildings, and an exhibition of photos from the 30s, with a few artifacts of note.

Here for two nights at a Lebanese hotel. Hummus and eggplant - luxury. Gin, finally.

[17] Where’s today’s Carnegie Libraries? We don’t have to impose new cultural norms onto people but we should have places where people can teach themselves. Though the Boko Haram in Nigeria would disagree. God, we are a messed up species.

Lobi people of SW Burkina Faso

Oct 29

Originally from Ghana, the Lobi have about 7 sub groups here but you can look that stuff up if you are interested.

The key thing about this group is that it's the one you've seen in National Geographic with the women who put plugs[18] in their lips. Or used to. It's a dying practice.

The Lobi are a warrior people and proudly try to retain their culture. Not that the men still wear just a piece of string holding their prepuces into their navels so their testes can dangle magnificently. Oh no, they wear western clothes. I think, writ large, anyone keeping tradition alive in the modern world just wants to ensure their wives don't get ideas.

Marriage is by parental decision or theft. The latter is now illegal so they have to flee to Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire.

A matrilineal society but essentially patriarchal, the Lobi were the closest I came to a Masai-style photo op. They're used to tourists. This manifests as a general disdain and aversion to cameras. For the first time on our trip there was no sense of interchange, of human exchange, of conviviality.

The houses are magnificent mud and wood labyrinths that grow as papa adds wives. The newer the wife, the further back into the house she lives. They all have roof access, though. Women never visit each other's chamber unless one is sick. Good thing, because they'd trip over all the pots. Each wife lives in a rectangular room with all of her children and her collection of pots. Pots are the wealth of the Lobi. There's even à matrimonial pot that the husband can break if'n he wants a divorce.

Upon death, the husband and wives are buried commonly in a chambered tomb outside the front door - essentially it resembles a granary underground with its separate chambers. If a wife was a termagant or troublemaker she wouldn't be put in - too much afterlife to spend with fighting amongst one's wives.

We visit Siwara village where Papa has three wives and 18 children. Not one of them can butcher a cow properly: like everywhere else in Africa, butchery consists solely of whacking at a skinned carcass until it is nothing but a deadly bunch of bone shards and tough meat. The hide is stretched out on a wall gleaming slickly red in the sun. Our local guide buys a kilo to take home for dinner.

Women sit in the shade of a palm frond lean-to, shucking corn that they will put out to dry so the kernels can be pulled off an eventually pounded into polenta.

Here as well we meet grandma, or mama, hard to tell. Teri is 70 years old, looks 98, and we are plunked in front of her and told to take her photograph. She had plugs in both get upper and lower lips and a double goatee of drool dangling from her chin. In her hand she clutches the fistful of francs she has been given to rise from her bed and pose rheumily at the cameras. Grotesque.

A naked baby has fresh scabbing where the shaman advised cutting the radiant lines of a star around its navel.

I am happy to leave. The intrusiveness is unsettling.

We travel an hour or so to meet a local shaman/ soothsayer/ fetisher/ healer, a man with a sweet face, radiating peace and calm. People come from the Ivory Coast and Ghana to get healed by him. There's a good three dozen people there, his family as well as invalids he is caring for. One woman is a paraplegic he is slowly returning function to.

The yard is full of fetishes, pairs of men and women, the two key spirits. Wood or mud, some decorated with cowrie shells, some with bottles and other offerings in front. One gathering of fetishes are for medicine, the other, between the doorway to the house and the underground tomb are the family fetishes. They all look similar to me, but I guess that's not the point: the spirit is the thing, not the material.

His Lomi house is monstrously large, it seems to have a dozen low dark rooms, including the shrine, which is a pestilential place full of fetishes, large and small, chicken feathers, the acrid tinge of ammonia and the dull scent of blood.

Such houses can last 50 or 100 years. They are filled with the smoke flavour of the cooking fires, the smoke hardening the iron wood and keeping the termites at bay. Though these are essentially caves they are clean, despite the bats nesting in some rooms.

The potions he concocts are in pots. Whether they are taken away or used in situ they are returned to the shaman when the cure proves efficacious and placed in a big pile and never used again - the bad spirits have gone from the body into the pot. It also serves as advertising as to the power of the shaman.

Tedgalte Seb is his name. He looks like he'd be a fun grandpa.

[18] I originally wrote “dish plate” having confused the Lomi with the women of that Ethiopian tribe who can fit a whole table setting in their lower lip.

The Gan People of Obire (Lorobeni)

Oct 30

The Gan are a subgroup of the Lobi, and curiously are the only ones who have a king. Gan means slave and they came from Ghana in the fourteenth century. As with many of the chiefs/kings in this part of the world, the mantle falls not from father to son but to one of the nephews of his sisters. Matrilineal, but patriarchal. Although there were four queens of the Gan when male heirs were not to be found.

If I got the translation right, it was the last of these queens who established the nephew system to broaden the net of candidates. Obviously the ultimate choice will go to the oracle.

To get there: yet another dirt track road, a car-and-a-half wide, a trench really in a tall green grass world. A short rainfall yesterday knocked the heat down and a light cloud cover is keeping things nice under the strong sun.

We pull up at a village and are met by Sidonie, one of the king's wives. She acts as our guide, taking us to the tombs of their kings (and the four queens). There are 19 shrines here, 9 elsewhere. Those 9 belong to a different family. Story goes: bad king, gets sick, tribe abandons him, one woman nurses him to health, he repents, comes back, declares that her family is now equivalent to / part of the royal family, thus two different families.

Now, though, women have chosen to leave power to men, we have been told. Amazing how often women “choose” to let men run things.

Each little stone (one mud brick) sanctuary has a representation of the king/queen. They all look alike to my eyes, but again, that's likely not the point. Representation is a curse of the West. Once a year, sacrifices are made to the ancestors. It takes place at harvest time, paralleling nicely All Soul's Day.

A child had an epileptic seizure and had to be taken away. It wasn't epilepsy, though. One of the king's other wives is jealous of Sidonie and this is the result. Voodoo.

Thence to meet the king:

The king is supreme, chosen by the heads of the families from among the male candidates. He them appoints ministers from among them. He will be given a trustworthy wife to marry on his coronation day, as well as a trusted confidante to be his speaker.

The king also inherits his predecessor's wives and children.

The present king is a handsome fellow. Much younger than expected. King since 2003. He meets up under a lovely shade tree, reclining in a gravity chair, a few advisors nearby. We chat, he tells us that kingship is the most important aspect of tradition, that their strength is in their architecture, that their challenges are the various family feuds.

His name is King. Upon ascending to the throne he gave up all others. He is 38 years old.

Gin Diaries

Oct 30

It seems that we are caught up in a coup d'état here in Burkina Faso.

Rest easy, the ODD-yssey is too powerful for mere politics to stop.

Marie points out that I'll likely never get closer to becoming dictator of a small African country than now. God's will?

We'll continue to report the news as it comes in.

Gin Diary 2

Ensconced in Banfora, south west of the country. Misinformation and physical roadblocks to navigate, but in very comfy quarter. Breton sausage and fries for dinner with crepes to follow.

Gin and tonic right now

Gin Diary 4

1930: army may just have taken over

2145: curfew in place but some few group of cars and motorcycles in place

The army has declared their control so four parties vying now: president, PM, opposition and army. We've been in opposition territory so our perspective of their popular support is likely skewed.

Army is strong but over half of population is under the age of 25. Never trust a mob of young men, especially in a country with so many machetes.

Intend to head to Bobo-Dioulasso tomorrow and Ouagadougou the day after but we'll see what the day brings.

Oct 31

0640: Reports that in Bobo the city hall and presidential HQ are burning. Will we continue there today? Assessing options. The key priority now is to get out of the country. Airport in Ouagadougou? Run for the Ivory Coast? Ghana? I can't imagine G Adventures is going to say ‘stick to the itinerary.’

0650: Get news that President is holding on, some army support. This won't sit well with the mob we suspect.

To be clear, we're removed from most of this and the TV images are as new to us as to others.

0725: Essentials in day pack. Ready to go at a moment’s notice.

0815: Looks like we'll continue towards Ouagadougou, aiming for the Al Gouda Hotel in Bobo tonight. Will stop in to see local mountain and possibly some hippos en route. I was wrong about G Adventures / Transafrica. Their view is: get us closest to the embassies.

In a crisis, my view is that we should head to French Embassy. The Canadian Embassy is closed and the French have 3000 nationals in the country as well as a military base.[19]

0915: Sent onward flight details to Transafrica, the local operator for G Adventures. We might do a long backroads drive back across country to Togo and fly out of there.

0935: Still in Banfora. We've been ordered into our hotel rooms because we've heard that hotels are being attacked. We've invited the other into ours as we were fortunate in getting a little suite. No gin, no tonic. I've got crossword puzzles. A poor substitute.

0945: Dispassionately looking around room for potential weapons. Unlike the Conservative caucus room, no flagpoles. Nothing to do in the interim but sleep.

1230: Awake now[20]. Others report no movement, no news. Fluid situation. But we have sandwiches coming. Silver linings to every cloud!

1335: Beer and pipe. President supposedly resigned. Hotel gates are open.

1350: Heard fourth hand reports that flights are going out of Ouaga.

1400: Klaxons, horns, shouting, celebration. A swim in the hotel owner’s pool across the street is in order. All calm.

1430: Staff have vacated the hotel. Supposedly they'll be back at dinner.

The French teachers are making a run to Bobo before curfew. Most of the Belgians are also going. They all hope to get to their flights in Ouaga.

1640: Pool was gorgeous. Silent city. Hotel feels abandoned with just some lizards, geckos and whites wondering (deliberately sic) about. It looks like a set for 'The Walking Dead.' Odd.

1755: Darkness descending. Any place open for dinner tonight or is it a cookies and Valium diet?

1815: Three kitchen/waitstaff have shown up and are just chatting in the bar. The eagles in the trees above us are shrieking like crows. A lone policeman is standing in the street outside our gates.

1845: Hundreds of bats overhead. Happy Hallowe'en!

2125: To Ouaga tomorrow early. That’s the plan.

[19] An old traveler in Thailand with three passports in three names once told me that as a Canadian I should go to the US Embassy first, the Brits second, and the Canadians last. The Canadians aren’t known for decent crisis management.

[20] My proudest moment: sleeping through the scariest part of a coup. I really just couldn’t face the prospect of sitting in a tight group talking in circles about the situation. So I slept, figuring screams would wake me up.

Gin Diaries: Looking for Tonic

Nov 1

There is a war between the rich and poor
A war between the man and the woman
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say that there isn't

- LEONARD COHEN

0730: In our Toyota Hiace. Janvier announces: 'as we discussed last night, our primary objective is to see ceremonial dancing which a villages wants to perform ...' OK, but that ain'tour (Marie's and my) primary objective.

We stop for bananas and cashews.

It's a good road but with stops I expect a 10 hour journey. We'll want to be in before dark/curfew? for safety's sake.

It could be worse, news today reports that in Congo villagers killed, burned, and ate a man, hopefully in that order, they suspected of being an Islamic militant.

0745: Countryside and crops.

0800: Will quickly pop into Bobo to check out the grand mosque. Itinerary is fluid it seems. Checking into barricade situation. Still 20km out.

I like the Berkinabè and think they've been getting the shaft. Arab Spring, this, other events: is it a cry for freedom or is it intergenerational conflict? Is it the youth demanding the powers and wealth of their babyboom-related generation? At least until the military claws it back? I worry that instability will open cracks to allow Malian and Nigerain Islamists and other butchers to penetrate further into Burkina Faso.

0820: Outskirts of Bobo-Dioulasso. Roadside stalls are open for business. Shops seem shut but it is Saturday in a largely Muslim city.

As we get closer, normalcy approaches. Ordinary street life.

One smashed bank. Police and military in clusters, protecting capital. Mairie (town hall) is a blackened gutted wreck.

Old mosque, Sudanese, mud and wood, smooth like an iced, mosque-shaped cake with toothpicks protruding throughout. Rounded edge towers that taper to points.We wander through it with a group of local men keeping a watch for any potential mob action. Women and men, westerners in the historic mosque ... not good. I am struck by the little things: the multicoloured plastic kettles that locals use for ablutions, the wear in the steps, the dignity of the place.

0915: Leave outskirts of Bobo. Get bread.

0930: Drive past a corpse in the middle of the highway. Did he fall off a truck, was he hit by a car? Arm torn off. No one remarks and all drive on in this land of honest people. Red meat, black flesh.

0940 Makognadougou auto corrects to maligns doughy. Usual town, more of the rounded towers we saw at the mosque. Otherwise, life is about filling the granaries.

Whatsoever King shall reign,
I'll be Vicar of Bray, sir
- ANON.

0950: Djuie is no place, and Dougoumatou the stumpy eroded ruins of some three dozen mud houses. Just the floorplans. Kongolekan has life and a fabulous ferris-wheel-sized wheel for operating the village pump.

Got out of the habit of travelling with a jar of peanut butter and a ballpeen hammer. Just when I could use them most. And some tea.[21]

Koumbia has beautful bundles of sorghum stooked up on the roofs. Golden.

1015: Houndé - we just hear that borders will remain closed until Tuesday, November 4.

1045: Stop at Boni village to se Bwa mask dancing. Yacouba Bonde is the artist of note here. Lots of old men drunk on passion for dancing or millet beer joining in. The Bwa dancers are in shaggy suits with massive carved animal/spirit masks. Cacophonous band of xylophones, drums, clay monotone whistles. Like an unreleased Tom Waits backing track. The Bwa dancers and old men with their kicky dancing and frenetic head tossing, like muppets out on a toot. Probably my favourite of the dancing ceremonies, the joy, the costumes, the villagers.

I wish I could write more about the Bwa dancing we saw, and perhaps I will. Our minds were just elsewhere. Big Ewoks with enormous wooden masks dancing ferociously then lying down to catch their breath. I really loved it and wish the coup hadn't interfered. Damn warlords and democrats!

1240: Decided not to visit another mosque: everyone quietly looking at insurance policies, worrying about travel arrangements.

1250: Boromo town for lunch and news. Oncoming traffic suspiciously light. First, we stop in on the sun-scorched gravel highwayside to see marionettes. Giant papier-mâché people harnessed to artists. Beautiful. I like working artists more than I like retired bank executives.

1410: Fed and watered we are continuing towards the capitol. Latest reports suggest all is calm, people cleaning up, Zida will make a speech at 1600. Planning on having to spend a few nights in Ouaga, have to contact Ghana hotels, drivers, our insurance company. Hopeful flights will resume early.

1500: Actual real gas stations. With glassed in shops. This is the closest thing to western civilization we’ve seen in weeks. It is easy to forget that Africa is dotted with first-world amenities where the UN, IMF, World Bank, Regional governments, Central Banks etc. Congregate. We’re getting closer ...

1615: At Nabadogo town. A real shithole. Just kidding. ALL these roadside towns are. Racing to get to Ouagadougou before curfew. Power seems to have accreted to the colonel but I thought that of the general yesterday. He's speechifying any time now.

1630: Outside Sakoinsie we hear that the airport is open, flights operating, though land borders remain closed. I'll want confirmation before I celebrate.

1650: Tintilou orphanage - I want to take them all home instead of breezing by. All these lovely little children growing up in institutions, largely to eke out livings as dirt farmers. Hopefully some will be able to read and grow. I’m very sad.

1655: Tanghin-dassouri town come and gone. Entering the belly of the beast soon.

1705: Entering outskirts of Ouaga. Curfew now shifted: 10pm to 6am. Saw first camel. Protest square. Some military presence.

Burnt out car being scavenged at gates of hotel[22] but we are here. Looks like a bordello for big game hunters.

2030: Opposition calling for new mass rally tomorrow. Opposed to Zida as head of state.

2205: Curfew has fallen. Spent dinner reminiscing about the last two weeks. Togo, fetish market, Prosper Papillon, slave trail, shamanic rites, Python temple, Kings, but most of all the small villages, the houses we were welcomed into, the joyous children and dancing, the colours and the light. The coup, of course, and concerns about getting out of Ouagadougou, but that's something that will resolve itself with patience.

Oh, I could talk about the fort of the Loropeni today, the UNESCO heritage site, but it's really just a bunch of stone walls in the bush. Well constructed, but neglected and even my imagination can do little for it.

And the gold diggers outside Banfora: groups of young men digging for El Dorado. The entrance to King Solomon's Mine. The promise of hot MTV bee-yotches, cold champagne and fast cars. What they have are picks and metal detectors.

[21] Always travel with the essentials. A small hammer and a jar of peanut butter (and raisins) will keep you alive when the embassy won’t.

[22] Literally. By the time we arrived, it was in two pieces, ever last removable gone. By the next morning the lower half, the axles and whatever were totally gone.

Gin Diaries: The coup d'etat continues?

Nov 2

0745: Heard an airplane and hopes were raised. No, a military transport. Burned out car in front of the hotel has been stripped as if by mechanical piranhas.

0815: One traveling companion, Wendy, has gone to the airport, supposedly getting a flight to Lomé at 1050. We relax by the pool. Considered checking into whether we could get on a flight today but with the protests planned ... well, it is so up in the air it's impossible to predict which day will be better. Expect the airport to be busy on this initial day of flights. Hopefully all will be calm today and tomorrow.

0940: Wendy has returned from the airport. Her airline has, despite its earlier claims, not scheduled any flights. Our airline is supposedly running tomorrow though.

1000: Quiet at the hotel. Distant honks and whistles. No sightseeing today, darn it. There's marvellous artisan markets here, supposedly, but all shut up tight.

Gin Diaries: Ice is a precious commodity

Nov 2

1145: Took a run to the airport to see if we can confirm our flight tomorrow or even get out on a flight today. Streets calm. Burnt out political HQ, burnt out luxury hotel and numerous cars. If a protest is happening it is still quiet. 2 hours ago, reported thousands of people gathering in the Revolutionary square. Now?

1355: at pool, gunfire, some few shots then two fusillades. Far away but sound carried over the lake. Conflicting reports. 1) new contesting President trying to take over the TV station; 2) military firing in the air to disperese protestors

1220: now told it was dispersal gunfire around the TV station.

Odd to sit in a bathing suit in a near-abandoned hotel drinking beer and smoking bad African cigarettes while gunfire erupts in a volatile city. What the books and movies never capture is the cacophony of dogs and goats going mad in the wake of the fusillade.

Situation leads to deep contemplation (well, not that deep) about the trade offs we accept in the freedom/stability equation: I'm a lite civil libertarian who squints dubiously at the demands of our national security apparatus and its affiliated (pet) politicians for increasing control and funding, particularly when crime has been on the decrease for over two decades. Of course, the increasing social divide and gutting of the middle class may change all that. But anyway, instability is not just a problem for businesses, but for the mental and physical health of the populace. So fat contented bourgeois types like stability. It's the poor and the aspirational (poor) youth who are already undergoing those stresses who are willing to overturn the apple cart. And driving through all this, and being affected by it, in my fat contented bourgeois way, do I suddenly value security more and liberty less? Not yet. I've never seen a benign overlord and that's what excessive security creates: little power toads who exert their authority on a local or regional or national level. Who since Cincinnatus has shown indifference to the power they exert? I chafe at airport security checks but accept them; the worst thing we can do is puff them up as 'first line defenders of freedom' because that suggests they are intrinsically necessary rather than useful. No, I continue to like almost everyone I've met in the services, police, other organizations, but I also continue to view their touts with a gimlet eye.

1700: M sees horribly inappropriate communiqué from Ouagadougou Airport that basically say: 'investors and travellers should keep coming because the opposition are in bed with the government so nothing will change.

1745: confirmed we are registered on a flight for tomorrow. If there is a flight.

1800: From France 24 - recap of day

Thousands of demonstrators gathered at Ouagadougou’s Place de la Nation, answering an opposition call to protest what they call a military coup a day after Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zida proclaimed himself head of state.

Amid signs of a power struggle among opposition politicians, Gen. Kouamé Lougué went on air to proclaim himself the new leader of Burkina Faso, according to news reports. A former defense minister who fell out with oustered Burkinabe strongman Blaise Compaore, Lougué is widely believed to enjoy the support of protesters on the street.

Gunfire broke out at the state TV headquarters after opposition politician Saran Sereme, head of the PDC party, and about 100 of her supporters arrived at the TV station chanting "Saran President".

Soldiers promptly seized control of the state TV and radio stations, according to local reports.

Veteran opposition leader Zephirin Diabre has issued a statement asserting that self-declared “presidents” of the transition speak in their personal capacity and their claims do not reflect a binding opposition decision.

Transition leader Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zida held a meeting with opposition leaders in the capital of Ouagadougou, but no details of the talks have been disclosed.

The army said it would put in place a transitional unity government assembled by “broad consensus”.

1845: Albert returns from airport, not only no flight, no Air France personnel

1930: Italians from Banfora have arrived. Also, the Belgian schoolteachers we met are the darlings of the Belgian media as they are 'trapped in Burkina Faso.' They kindly added Albert to their list of names!

2145: All quiet on the African front.

Gin Diaries: A pretty little coup, or, Next year in Jerusalem!

Nov 3

1000: Radio silence. Not even the embassies can reach Air France. Air Burkina seemed aghast last night that we would even suggest they might not fly. Janvier is at the airport checking on flights. The airport website only shows flights scheduled leaving for Morocco, Ivory Coast and Niger.

1045: City is quiet today. Fishermen out in their canoes and pirogues on the lake. The sun is hot, getting up to 38 today, so the pool is the best option.

After 3 hours, Janvier 'the Man!' returns after spending hours in lineups tells us to be ready to go to the airport at 2pm. We're all gonna fly except perhaps Albert.

1410: streets full of ordinary life, few soldiers. Lots of bike/moto lanes here with their own advance turn lights. Not the chaos of the smaller towns with people passing on either side of buses, crazy swerving, Looks like a good city. Sorry to have missed it,

1630: Airport hell chaos, and the only way to operate in the thirdest of third worlds is to ignore line ups and push in at the front. Better yet, pay someone to push through, bringing you along in their wake. Otherwise we'd still be queued to enter the airport. Janvier pushes us in to the checkin counters and I just have a second to press more money into his hand and that's it: off to the races.

Queue for the check in. Watch people somehow get service at closed counters.

Queue for the police to stamp us out of the country. Watch people get led by staff to the front and just push their passports to the officer while he is in the middle of a transaction. He prioritizes them.

From that queue, we push backwards through the line in a mysterious display of workflow, and then cut over to the security line up. See people get led to the front and push in to the xray machines. Others just jump the ropes and the women and men in charge just let it all happen.

From arrival at the airport to the departure lounge took 1.75 hours. It was about a 140 metre journey. Just enough time to buy rum, marvel at the psychotics around us, the mass of whites going to Europe and the arrogant businessmen and women going to Accra.

On the Canadair airplane, broiling under the 38 degrees and the sun beating on the airplane, the acrid tang of multicultural sweat as people shuffle and twist in their seats, the airplane door closes, the airplane switches to its own power and then it all goes black. The plane shuts down. Odds of leaving BURKINA FASO suddenly a lot worse.

But then, 1.25 hours late, the door closes again, the flight attendant fumigates the aircraft, and we take off and three red wines and 1 hour ten minutes later we are in Ghana and it feels almost giddily 20th century efficient and we get into a car and we get to our bungalow at the Golden Tulip which is twice the size of our apartment and I go into absolute collapse and meltdown and can't enjoy the slow lovers' combo by the pool playing Wild World by Maxi Priest, Whiter Shade of Pale, Lean on Me as much as M. who has calmly and complacently handled both the last few days and my increasingly frantic need to plan and control an uncontrollable situation. Equanimity and cool grace to my hyperbole and giddy childish delight and eventual stress-induced psychosis at being caught up in what was, in the end, a very pretty but essentially minor coup.

And the Gin Diary closes now at 2148hrs on the happenings in Burkina Faso and the ODDyssey will tomorrow continue west along the Gold Coast.

Ghana

Ghana is as remarkably overly religious as any other country we've visited in Africa, if not more so. But perhaps that's because here people can afford paint. They love their old-timey religion here and every second advertisement is for a church, a prophet, a mosque, a bible college, or some miracle elixir that cured Jesus of the clap and can cure your migraine, toothache, earache, goiter, gout, sexual dysfunction, sore teats, athlete's foot, menopausal heat, hernia, piles, bad breath and tennis elbow.

Businesses call upon various deities and obscurisms:

St. Paul of Damascus Ent.

Anointed Dalt Unisex

Mama Lee Ventures Glory to God

Salon de Hebron

Christians Escape Developers

God's Time Aluminum Systems

Medi-Moses Clinic and Herbal Centre: Specialist in male health problems

As in Tanzania, religious slogans adorn vehicle rear windows in a typeface that is remarkably angular and difficult to read. Perhaps obscurity improves efficacy as the slogans themselves are linguistically more perplexing than on the other side of this marvellous continent:

Heaven Gate, No Bribe (unlike every gate in West Africa, I assume)

All Shall Pass (just the car or perhaps the bribe-free gate of heaven?)

Cry Your Own Cry (?)

No pain no gain (proverbial perhaps but biblically so?)

Hallelujah In Case of Careless Driving

Lucky Wife (I won't even speculate)

All these I recorded on George Walker Bush Road as we attempted to flee Accra in a car sighingly unlike the vehicle we thought we ordered. The driver was two hours late, having tried to fix the aircon (he hadn't) in his Chevrolet Tracker. The smell of George Walker Bush Road was consequently omnipresent as we sat in traffic jams and raced from red light to red light.

But we got out of the city and the long strip mall that leads to the countryside. Twenty miles of vendors and oddities and religious institutions. A giant mosque resembling the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, smaller neighbourhood buildings and signs pointing uninvitingly up bad roads to the:

Resurrection Power New Generation Church

International Gospel Pathways Church

Dr. Jesus Prayer Camp Ministry

Christ Fame Church (new twist on 'I'm gonna live forever')

Mallam Mahmoud the Messiah and Teacher

Great Omega Generation Ministry

Jesus Weapon Ministry

The Great Omega billboard featured a woman in a funky doctoral robe and hat. It's the striking thing about doctoral robes: I find it near impossible to take anyone seriously when they wear them. Very clownish, especially some of the European ones. The more esteemed the university the more colour blind and blancmangishly cut the outfit.

I was particularly taken with the Jesus Weapon Ministry, uncertain whether Jesus would approve of being wielded like an ass's jawbone. Perhaps it was also intended to be a play on Jesus wept (incidentally the shortest verse in the Bible)

The advertised preachers were almost uniformly dressed like aging botoxed gigolos for superannuated nymphomaniacs and their yap dogs. Shiny suits and ties with obscurely prominent stitching. They looked slick with Soul-Glo like Lando Calrissian impersonators. Although one more resembled an older Carl Wethers. Con men couldn't look less convincing. I'm sure that the few Musselmen were in equally wretched robes but I haven't as acute a sense of religious fashion for the West African Islamists.

Ah, well, I'm sure some were authentically pious but I doubt very many.

The average business owner seems more orthodox in her/his piety. Others tempt fate with secularism:

Ebenezer Funeral Parlour

Jehovah's Hand Ventures

the Candid School Complex

and a shack signed as: God is Love Joint

The Candid School Complex sounds remarkably like what I suffer from, detailing as I have the pederasty, racism, sexism, and somewhat-more-than-auto-eroticism of my high school.

And what is going on in this country they they love their Heidegger? Dasein School this, Dasein Academy that? Do enlighten if possible,

But like the other countries Ghana seems to have halted construction on masses of houses and commercial developments. Certainly, West Africa's largest mall just opened here last week but the road to the Cape Coast is overgrown with cadaverous houses of immense size. It's part of a part of the world with ghostal architecture drifting along the highways.

Uncle Ken's Electrical

Antie (sic) Mae's Fresh Tilapia

I have a hard time eating tilapia. It is the pig of the waters. It farms better than other fish so we ... should ... eat it but like swine it is a food we eat that most closely resembles us: happiest when crowded together in its own filth and pollution. I dunno, rambly thought with the humid highway pollution blowing in my face somewhere outside Winneba, which is a corruption of the English traders' Windy Bay.

Imported secondhand vans still with the German advertising on the doors.

Ghana 2

I am much happier travelling in French.

It's an odd realization and one I felt stirring in Mauritius last year. I seem to communicate better, more happily, with better results and less stress when I'm farting around in French than when I have to negotiate dialects and my own hesitancy. I think I am forced to be more direct in French whereas my foppish, tousle-haired waffliness as I faff about in English is a hindrance to communication.

We arrived at our destination outside Elmina, the Coconut Grove Beach resort and after a day or so of confusion and angst realized that the beach is spectacular, the setting magnificent and the human amenities somewhat less mediocre than elsewhere in West Africa.

Good suite (after sorting out that they put us into a nasty dark hole ... by mistake I will sardonically presume) and relaxation. Food is good. Like everywhere else in the Africa we have visited, low prices get you shitty food, medium prices get you shitty food with less risk of the shits, and high prices get you unremarkable but good food.

So, all in all, a fleabag hooker's idea of paradise.

Don't take that the wrong way ... the beach is one of the most stunning we've been on. I'm just pointing out that the concept of affordable luxury isn't an Old World conceit.

So here we are at the Coconut Grove Beach Resort with, happily, nothing to do but get malaria.

Gold, guns, and greed

Tell me, brave captain,
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the Devil leaves his porch light on?

- TOM WAITS

It feels awkward to write about reclining under a happy sun along this coast for it is a barbarous coastline and the sands probably retain trace amounts of slave teeth and bones from the hundreds of thousands of corpses dumped at sea here.

The scale of death in the slave trade isn't precisely known but many scholars think that for every slave that made it to their destination alive, another two died. So, with 20 million people shipped alive there could be 40 million dropped along the route.

That's a statistic, Stalin snorts.

And yes, Mao killed more, in less time.

And in Mexico, that faithful daughter of the Church, in the year of our Lord 2014, two or three dozen students are butchered by the local government, military, and gangs, burned, and scattered in a river for the sin of being idealists.

But except for Mao, these monsters attempted to hide their crimes, knowing they were wrong on at least some level. Slavers, local chiefs, investors just recalculated the profit.

But, let's face it, no one has ever really had to hide their slaughter of indigenous people because they don't really count.

So the ocean proved an easy disposal method for those slaves that died in the 20 some coastal slave forts and for those that died on the boats.

It's a horrifying thought, slavers being chased by the law (when it became illegal to slave) and dumping live people overboard all shackled together to drown and sink the evidence.

Supposedly the stink of the ships carried for miles.

Ah well, it's a gorgeous coastline with coarse sand under our feet.

The slave trade as was along this coast only truly ended in 1870. It had existed since time immemorial and still does in a different fashion. But the difficulty in a place like St George's Castle, the Elmina fort built initially by the Portuguese, captured by the Dutch and traded to the British is that the Fort continued to operate until the 1960s, being by the British used in the Great War and Second World War to train African forces. I wonder what the Africans thought about that?

The punishment cells, the storage room, and the narrow doors to the beach, so-called 'gate of no return?'

And above the women's pens was the governor's kitchen, and above there was his bedroom where he could entertain the prettiest slaves after they had had the excrement and filth of the pens sluiced off of them.

And the fort has a gorgeous setting and from it the boats in the harbour, the fish market, the old town and new and the crashing surf on palmy beaches can be photographed prettily. Selfie!

Ghana 5

And it is time to leave Coconut Grove for Wisdom has arrived. And I think we're getting tired of endlessly expecting order, rationality, and accuracy in our dealings with institutions and staff. One-on-one, or with entrepreneurs, things seem to be fine; it's the officiousness and doggedness of a uniform that seems to create problems here, particularly when combined with a position of some small authority.

The drive and Cape Coast Castle, high vaults in which the slaves were kept, the floor scientifically tested some years ago and revealed to be an inch-thick layer of nascent coprolite, that is: a compacted asphalt of ordure - excrement, vomit, blood and urine. The women's prisons include some birthing fluids as well. And we walk on all that deep in the bowels of the castle, all the way to this gate of no return, which led again onto a rather pretty beach and the small fishing craft probably not unlike the boats that would transport the slaves to the slaver ships themselves.

Think of the 200-300 years of people passing through these walls. All that death. All that pain. And the lack of preservation of memory is sickening.

There's a big part of aid dependency that revolves around the recipients deciding that some things are a Western problem requiring indefinite, indeterminate flows of funds. There's a strong strain in the international development community that argues for the cessation of all aid.

I won't touch that argument, but we Westerners are soft touches for the wrong things at the inappropriate times, that's for sure. Ghana wants millions to build up its Ebola defences. Well, that's BS. Money and aid should go to the affected countries, not to stockpile hand sanitizer in banks and government offices that don't have ink for their stamps and paper for their printers.

Wisdom suggested that if a slave ship were to show up now on the shores of Ghana people would queue up a mile deep to board it in hopes of getting to America where the streets are paved with gold.

Turn Dick Whittington, thrice Mayor of London.

Is there some of that desperation in these shop signs?

Why oh why rentals

Never again BMW auto repair

Ghana 6

And to Accra we return.

The last three hours were a Wisdom monologue about the histories of the Ashanti, the Ewe, and his own name. I think he was trying to stay awake.

And Accra. It seems a reasonably pleasant city. With a friend we made in Lomé who lives and works here with the IMF we had a wondrously flavourful meal near the Alliance Française and with the marvellous couple who helped up into the country by providing references we brunched at a fine hotel. Tastes and flavours and a fine mix of styles. They also gave us a wee tour but, it being Sunday, little was open.

Apologies for such a focus on food, but it is a constant preoccupation when traveling outside of the First World - a when/where/what messy ménage-à-trois that one remembers with some embarrassment.

The Ebola crisis is hurting this country as well: misinformation and paranoia are killing tourism and even business visits. Look, I would trek across the three stricken countries right now without fear of getting Ebola. The media is magnifying the situation and, as magnifiers are wont to do under a bright glare, the subject of scrutiny is getting burnt.

A bigger conundrum for me than the global media has been solved: what happens to all those Dean Koontz and Jilly Cooper books that get bought in the world? They end up in West Africa, particularly Accra. The city is awash in them at horribly inflated prices.

But we persevere and make it onto our flight still devoid of souvenir gifts for people, and not for lack of trying. It's a part of the world that lends itself to personal memories, not trinkets for others.

And the flight is a snooze overnight, Amsterdam fog burns off under the morning sun and we glide smoothly into the last leg of this West African ODDyssey.

Email received from our guide, Janvier

Dear Great Adventure People

Now I’m back to Lomé, far from Ouagadougou, where the honest people honestly took the power like revolutionaries.

Now that you are surely review in your mind what happened the last week of your enjoyable adventure, and that only the voodoo priest Albert was the only one still waiting at Ricardo waiting for the next flight of Air France, and finally left last night, I leave my mobile phone and take my pen to say:

Thanks to the Supreme God and Thanks to Voodoo OGOU -BALAYIDJO , god of war who protected us during the hard time we had._

I hope that you reach safely in the blessing of voodoo spirits._

I hope that you see your families after the Great adventure/

Experience in Togo - Benin - and Burkina Faso. Oh what I’m saying BURKINA- FACHé ;;.

The sun was hot, the waiting room of the airport crowded, the queue very long and the hope of going very uncertain.

I see again like if it was yesterday

Neil and Marie under the shiny sun in the queue,- Wendy worrying about Asky flight, -Claire waiting in the queue with her bag on her back and Albert looking the poster of Air France looking in vain for information on his flight._

It was in that uncertainty that like MOSES using his cane to make his people crossing the ocean, the Supreme God and Ogou Balayidjo (God of war) gave the power and suddenly, the way has been clear for you from that dreadful fright and you access or enter in the check-in hall leaving the long queue.

Safe you were from that time. You’ve gone. What mystery!_But behind of you I was there swing my hands to say Goodbye!

Goodbye!

You’ve gone but I’m sure that you will remember the great adventure we had together.

Yes you will remember those people you met in the villages, the long days spent in the mini-bus through the savannah!_

yes you will remember Albert the new Vood oo priest of Belgium cooling down the adept of voodoo in trance._

You will remember Wendy dancing with the tamberma women in front of the tata tamberma under the baobab trees and Neil & Marie dancing with the Bwa masks in Boni. _Yes you will remember Claire playing with the children and showing them their pictures through the camera screen._

And not forgetting the horrible situation in Ouagadougou which didn’t stop us of the experience of the life of local people.

Now that you are back home, thanks for sharing the great experience with us and see you again because we have much more to see!

Please don’t forget to check on the Evaluation rubric of G- Adventure and send your comment on the tour after being abundantly blessed by the voodoo!

Best regards.

Janvier

Amsterdam

I've written a couple of times about Amsterdam but that won't stop me this time. I like this city a lot. I like the feel of it, the shape of it, the people and the activities. It helped that we had a cozy and spacious attic room in the Dikkers and Thijs Fenice Hotel, located beautifully for midday pauses.

Amsterdam streets are a practical example of anarchism that works. There's little differentiation between sidewalks, bike lanes, car lanes and the streetcar tracks. Nor are there many stop signs. Everyone who uses the streets do so in full knowledge that they are singularly responsible for their safety. Consequently, the system works in the way that third world city streets work but with one twist: might doesn't make right. Drivers probably have fewest rights, cyclists the most. I'd prefer that pedestrians have the right of way more than bicycles but who am I to argue with the Amsterdammers?

We finally made it to the Van Gogh museum on our third attempt in two years. Some lovely lovely works and well organized. I was surprised by what I liked and what I didn't but I'm sort of sceptical about any museums now. Either they are dumbed down and ramblingly huge (Te Papa, Canadian War Museum, National Art Gallery in Ottawa), or they are second-rate compared to the stalls in local markets (most African museums), or they are grotesquely full of shambolic hordes of mediocre personalities plugged into audio guides trying to educate themselves on the fly (take your pick).

The Van Gogh Museum is partially the latter. It is well ordered in that they time entrants so there are never TOO many people in it at any one time; however, they have audio-visual guides to the museum that resemble smartphones. Fine. Well and good. But. But. It's the hyperreality problem on a small scale. I'm trying to look at a painting up close for detail and at a distance for scope but in front of me and around me are drooling zombies who are blocking the view/access and LOOKING ONLY AT THEIR TV SCREENS. They are watching video clips of the painting instead of the paintings themselves. Why bother?!? Stay in the comfort of your TV room at home and let me enjoy myself. I'll bet that a cool quarter of museum goers spend less than five minutes total actually looking at the artworks themselves but over an hour looking at them on a 15cm x 10cm screen.

That's not a problem with the Van Gogh Museum itself as much as our need to market museums to the greatest number of people possible in order to justify state funding.

I admit it, I'm a cultural elitist. I want my government to subsidize arts that I don't particularly enjoy because I think it is important to maintain a critical mass of artistic cross-pollenization. So opera and ballet and modern dance can stay. Not sports, though. Other than the more obscure ones like lacrosse, darts, falconry and sheepdog trialling.

Amsterdam in the fall is a great place to be. We were a little chilly in our tropical layers but we could have shopped for fashionable clothing instead of drinking genever and beer with friends. What's the point, though? As recent studies have shown, money can't buy happiness, but different expenditures provide greater enjoyment and purchasing experiences provides longer-lasting happiness than buying material goods. Memories of wandering the streets with friend Janine from Switzerland, of dining with friends Iain and Maxi from Den Haag, of opening our rooftop window and stepping out onto the balcony for a cityscape sunrise, of stumbling across the pipe museum againand buying a clay pipe, of getting annoyed by the imbecilic arseholes in the Van Gogh Museum, of taking the tram across the city, of eating fries with mayo, waffles with Nutella, Indonesian food, duck gyoza, Chinese BBQ pork buns from a small shop in Chinatown/the red light district, of sipping genever and chatting with locals who may visit us in Vancouver, of drooling over the beautiful reproductions of illuminated manuscripts in the Taschen shop, of getting more excited by the small Rodin sculpture in the Van Gogh Museum than by the painting, and of leaning on railings and contemplating canals with their borders of bicycles and moving eddies of boats, framed by the ubiquitous narrow, tall, be-windowed canal houses.

I love Amsterdam, we love our friends and adventures in Africa and Europe and we're also happy to be heading home. That's a trifecta that paid off better than any horse race.

From 10,960m (36,000ft) above the North Sea between Edinburgh and Begen, this is

The End (for now)

Typist: Manatee

Muse: Lime

October-November 2014