So FaSo Good

Bobo-Dioulasso is the second largest city in Burkina Faso and I spent a few days exploring it and its surroundings. One surprising factor was that for the first time really since Morocco I experienced hustlers, trying to charge you to visit places and even to enter certain neighbourhoods. Whilst I can kind of understand this phenomenon in the Moroccan sights with hordes of tourists everywhere, it was strange to find it here, as I was the only tourist as far as I could tell. As a result I didn’t visit the old quarters or the Grand Mosque built out of mud, but I saw it from outside and it was under construction anyway. One day I visited the nearby village of Koro, where the adobe structures are all built up on a hill, but to be honest it wasn’t that interesting and once more there were people squeezing you for money.

I did have a couple of good nights out though and saw an interesting live concert, with the talented musicians playing traditional wooden instruments. The morning after I got on a bus taking me to the capital Ouagadougou. Since a very young age I have been interested in maps and world geography (rumour has it my first word was Reykjavík) and one of my all-time favourite capitals has to be Ouagadougou, it’s just such a wonderful name that rolls of your tongue, the kind of name that if it were made up in a fictional novel would probably be accused of being too racist. When I arrived, I once again found cheap refuge at a Christian location this time in connection with the large cathedral. That would probably be my top travel tip for budget accommodation in these parts of the world, as hostels don’t really exist the best choice is often these religious institutions usually located in good central locations, the only downside can be that they have early curfews and make you feel like a terrible person for arriving late and intoxicated.

In Ouagadougou I met up with Marcus, a friend of a friend from back home, who has been living here for almost a year now with his wife who works for the Swedish Embassy. Although the city didn’t have very much to offer it was a lot more developed than I had expected, Marcus was a great guide driving me around all the different parts and introducing me to his wife and some of his expat friends, as an extra bonus he also gave me five boxes of snus, so as you can imagine I was over the moon. On my last evening I met up briefly with Irene and David again before getting up early the next morning to catch the long bus south across the Ghanaian border all the way to the town of Kumasi. The journey and border crossings were hassle free, it took almost 20 hours though, and once I arrived in the wee hours of the morning it took a while to find a place that was open, but in the end I managed to find a cheap lodge to crash at.