Diebougou & beyond ...

We arrived at 'Le Relais de Diebougou' a nice enough hotel, managed to get a room with a double bed & a mattress was brought in for Maddy after a fair bit of negotiation. We had a few drinks with our minibus driver & his friends and the hotel cooked us a great meal.

The following morning it was decided to unfortunately miss the Lobi region via Gaoua as our driver had said it would take 8 hours to go from Gaoua to Banfora. We decided to catch a bus to Bobo Dioulasso and see the mosque. We walked the kilometre to the bus station, bought tickets and settled down for breakfast in a shack with coffee & omelettes. Some 'nutter' was there entertaining us all when another bus to Ouagadougou turned up with a German couple on board; they came over to join us for breakfast and were busy chatting to us when their bus started to leave! Luckily they caught it! Our bus came and again there wasn't any room to sit down so it was standing room only but Dani got lucky with a lovely Burkinabe lady who offered to let her sit on her knees!


We rolled into Bobo a few hours later in time for lunch and got a taxi across town to the mosque, as soon as we got out we were pounced on by touts - the most annoying & frustrating part of travelling in Africa. Ignoring them we walked across a square and found a small restaurant, ordered lunch and chilled out deciding to take it in turns to see the mosque. I received a text message on my phone which had us all in shock; JB was in Abidjan having buried his father the previous day, I'd sent him a text from us all and the one received said that he now had to bury his brother; the one that had malaria and we thought he was on the mend, the kid wasn't 14 but 9 years old!

Dani & I went off to the mosque, as soon as we arrived we were met by a guy just getting off his scooter claiming to be an official guide and wanting 1,000CFA; I ignored him but he went on & on, so I decided to speak Japanese to him asking him if he could speak Swedish. Completely perturbed by this white woman & child who didn't speak English, French or German (he tried all) he left us in peace! Hallelujah!!!


Maddy went off to see the mosque alone & received similar hassle and we all decided it was time to get a bus to Banfora which we hoped would be quieter and we wouldn't receive as much hassle. The bus station was minutes from the restaurant, we bought tickets and found ourselves in Banfora by 5pm or so. We picked Hotel de la Comoe from one of our guide books and turned up to find a gorgeous courtyard garden and a room for 7,500CFA for the three of us. However the room had two single beds, so I got the short straw this time and had a mattress on the floor which made things a little cramped.

A little closer to the border ...

Arriving in Assinie we thought we'd gone to heaven!

It was dark but you got the feeling of the place immediately & it was beautiful! JB took us through a gap in a wall to his place. Further down the same plot was a larger 'building', I was sorting out packs beside his house while Maddy & Dani went off with him and I cries of pure joy coming out. I joined them and found that we had the most gorgeous but run down large beach shack to stay in. There weren't any locks on the doors, the floor was almost rotten, there wasn't any water but there was some electricity and for us it was perfect. A few old very narrow wooden beach loungers were there which we sorted out to give us three beds; Dani strung up my cord so that we could attach our mossie nets and with our sleeping quarters perfect we went out to join JB for dinner.

We walked up the beach with JB giving me a history of who's house belonged to who in the CI government and Maddy giving Dani a lesson in astrology. We got to the village and had dinner in a small cafe which any European or African Health & Safety board would have demolished, but the food was excellent, clean and didn't give us any problems! JB took us onto a bar with a Ghanaian lady owner, who advised us the best way to get to Ghana the following day - to get a car at low tide and drive along the beach ... problem was that low tide was around 9am and Dani wasn't giving up the chance of a morning swim in the ocean for anything!

Heading back to the beach shack with a couple of 'Drogba's' - an Ivoirienne term used for a litre of Solibra beer, we sat on the beach with the tide coming in around our feet, before finally collapsing into bed (or rather onto hard wooden sunloungers!)

I woke at 5am, due to my body groaning from the hardness of the sunloungers and not being able to get comfortable most of the night. The sound of the ocean and wind were penetrating through the room, realising that the mossie coils were almost finished, I decided to go for a wander with the camera and was met with the most lovely mist outside. Maddy & Dani were still snoring under their mossie nets.

A few hours later they finally got up and we went out onto the beach with Dani finding endless coconuts for JB to crack open for her, some nourishment for breakfast!
An hour or so on the beach and a quick swim later we packed up ready to head off again. The tide had turned and it was too late to find a vehicle to take us along the beach to the border. We would now have to go to Assinie Mafia by taxi and pick up the pinasse from there to cross the lagoon then another bush taxi up to the border. From what we'd heard the night before we should have made Agona Junction just east of Takoradi in 3hrs ... but luck wasn't on our side.


As we were leaving, JB got a call from his family in Abidjan to say that his younger brother wasn't well, they thought it was a mild case of malaria but seemed to have become more serious. Still not happy with what we'd done to repay his kindness and not sure how to repay him, I took out the anti-malarials that Maddy had brought for me from Dubai and told him how to dose up his brother in his fight against malaria.


We got a taxi together up to the canal bridge where JB jumped out to go to Abidjan and we continued onto Assinie Mafia. On the way there we met our first (of many) police posts, I got out ready for a ton of questioning but when they discovered we were on our way to Ghana we got a laugh and they let us continue on. Whether they knew the kind of journey we were in for or not, I'm not sure, possibly it was because very few tourists/non-Ivoirienne use this route to get over the border ...