We really enjoyed our stay in the Kangaba Campement in Bamako, though perhaps a little to rich for our blood as a campsite, we were really helped out by the guys that ran the place and we managed to get Keith a part worn rear tyre to replace his bald rear, which should tide him over till we make it to Togo and our next service destination.
Highlights for us in Bamako and Mali in general were among other things, the friendliest people yet, fantastic street food and we discovered Castel – The Queen of Beers!
After possibly too short a stay in Mali we decided to push on to Burkina Faso and then onwards and southwards to Ghana in an effort to maintain some momentum in our progress through Africa… however sometimes you get pleasantly waylaid by a place and just have to stay longer!
So it was with a go go go mentality that we rolled into Bobo Dioulasso, the second city of the tiny country of Burkina Faso. Most of you probably haven’t even heard of the country, or if you have you might not know it’s actually in Africa and in fact right in the heart of West Africa. But what a find it is when you stumble across it! One of the poorest countries in Africa, Burkinabes (as they are called)Â make up for this in spades by being just some of the nicest people in Africa we have met, with a beautiful little corner of Africa thumping to an African beat.
Our original plans for staying in Bobo were happily disrupted by meeting a whole bunch of really cool people and we whiled our days away chilling out eating street food, drinking the local millet beer in bars, bumping into some fellow Irish and listening to them jam with their musician friends over a glass of the local palm wine, exhausting the local yogurt shop of it’s entire supply of yogurt and being taken for wild midnight rides on the back of souped up scooters by the locals!
We also managed to meet a local artist called Elvis who agreed to give our bikes’ paint job an African uplift! Elvis was a really cool guy who lived with a bunch of other artist friends in a sort of artists commune. All of them were really sound guys and they spoilt us with cups of tea while we talked and waited for them to finish their work on the bikes. For the finished result you will unfortunately have to wait till we get another camera in Accra, Ghana and start snapping again – so bear with us for a little bit.
Nearly a week after we had planned to arrive in the fantastically named Ouagadougou (or Ouaga for short) we rolled in. We wanted to spend a few days getting our Ghanaian visas and enjoying the big city life of the capital, unfortunately we had been really spoilt by Bobo and it couldn’t really measure up the same way, it had that big city buzz, a little more hassle, crazy traffic and too many people crammed into one place.Â
Despite not really expecting it though we have been pleasantly surprised by this tiny little unnassuming country and we have really enjoyed trying to blend our white skins into the local street life.