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 ...

Abidjan & visa hunting ....

We were meant to have caught up with Mme Auguy in Abidjan but it was a busy few days apart from Tabaski on 19th.

Thanks to Nicolas offering his spare room where we camped out for a few nights which meant we were able to go visa hunting in earnest without having any accomodation worries. JB refused to leave our sides. He was so good to us, it worried me as his father was in hospital but he wanted to make sure that we were OK before heading off to see him.

First thing on Monday we went off to the Ghanaian Embassy for a visa we sat in a room in the Embassy before being thrown out whilst filling in 4 identical pages for each of us ... tedious is not a word I'd use! Dani tried to fill in one page of hers but I couldn't run the risk of her making a mistake so did all 8 pages alone and handed it all over to them with 15,000CFA for each single entry visa. With a bit of pleading we managed to get them to promise it to be ready for Tuesday morning so that we could run up to the Benin Embassy by 10am Tuesday to get our passports back Tuesday at 2pm as Maddy was flying into join us at 3.30pm from Dubai (some people are intelligent when booking flights!)

We walked up to the Benin Embassy about a 1km away and got our paperwork so that I could be ready for the following day and jumped in a taxi to head back towards Nicolas' flat. We spent 2 hours in a taxi from Les Deux Plateau down to Marcory Zone 4, traffic was horrendous, smog & pollution even worse! We had lunch at a friendly maquis (restaurant) the St Christophe opposite the most enormous supermarket I've ever seen in sub-Saharan Africa - Prima (the prices were horrific too!). Followed by little doughnuts from the ladies outside!

The following day, we went through the same rigmarole, getting a taxi back across town to Les Deux Plateau, grabbing our passports and walking as quick as we could to the Benin Embassy to hand them in again. Whilst in the queue, I was asked by the man behind me what visa papers I had, I explained the VTE (visa touristique d'entente) as he'd never heard of it but agreed for 25,000CFA it made sense to have a visa covering 5 countries. I'd done a lot of research into getting one and found that Burkina had turned down my request for one whilst Togo + Niger seemed to be on a weeks holiday due to Tabaski. Thanking me for my explanation we went our separate ways. JB wanted to meet up with his friend Moussa while we had 4 hours to kill, Moussa is a tennis coach at a club nearby. Walking back down the main road, we heard a horn and someone waving at me ... it was the man from the queue at the Embassy. He told us all to hop in and asked where we were going and instructed his driver to drop us there! Typical of the kind of hospitality we were met with in Cote d'Ivoire. Moussa took us off the main road into a muddy market type area, we had an omlette sandwich & coffee (Dani reckoned it was the tastiest she's ever had!) and we sat in a bar for a while before having an early lunch, Dani had asked where she could get her hair braided. Moussa walked us back up to almost opposite the Embassy and got one of the girls who were offering to braid on the side of the road to go into his club and braid her hair in the garden! She was on a bit of a mission as we had to be back at the Embassy by 2pm in order to get across town to the airport.

Finally Dani's hair was braided, we had our visas and we were on our way to the airport to collect Maddy. Getting to the airport was horrendous, the Tabaski sheep market was taking place just at the intersection of the main road out of Abidjan and the airport; our 4 lanes became 6 with our taxi and thousands of others spilling over into the oncoming traffic - thats where the dark glasses came on and I pretended not to notice!!! Dani was busy inspecting her new braids we had had done outside the Benin Embassy - her hair had a pink tinge to it!



We found poor Maddy waiting patiently outside the airport; we were an hour or so late. I jumped out of the taxi, who then shot off as he was being screamed at not to park in front of the airport. Knowing he wouldn't go far as he hadn't been paid the four of us wandered out of the airport area and saw him waiting for us at a garage. But lo & behold, a gendarme had spotted him too & decided to try to fine him for picking up passengers illegally in the airport area.



I jumped in and told the gendarme he'd done nothing wrong, we'd been in the taxi all along, I got some supicious looks from the gendarme & luckily he let him go. We got Maddy back to the flat, where our room became a little smaller with one more person & pack! We took her up to Patrick's maquis (restaurant) St Christophe for dinner and chilled out back at Nicolas' flat.



The following day was Tabaski, that night JB & I were talking on the balcony of Nicolas' flat and some firecrackers went off, JB ducked, shook and then stood back up looking a bit sheepish. The effects of the war are still etched on everyone's minds! The block opposite Nicolas modern expat flat was once Orange Telecom but completely destroyed in 99 and stands as testimony. Nicolas himself was evacuated in 2004!























Tabaski was spent incredibly lazily, the morning we watched the neighbours 3 sheep that had been grazing happily for the last few days having their throats slit ... with a lot of laughter and smiles all round . The whole afternoon was spent in the pool that's part of Nicolas apartment block. Then Maddy & I bravely found our way around Nicolas' kitchen to cook dinner as a small way of saying a big thank you to him.





We went back into visa mode the following morning, the four of us got a cab up to Les Deux Plateau, JB jumped out and left us to sort out the visas alone promising to catch up with us later in the day. We got to the Ghana Embassy early, Maddy had her papers ready that I'd picked up earlier in the week and our visa lady hadn't arrived yet ... when she did arrive she was astonished to see Dani with braided hair, holding the door open for her, we got quite a reception! Promising to have Maddy's visa ready in a few hours we headed off to find breakfast and an internet cafe. Breakfast was back in our market area and then I found by chance a small internet cafe with 3 PC's ... it was at the rear of a Lebanese restaurant. The PC's were useless, only one worked properly and as I was typing an e-mail three cooks came racing into the room - chasing a mouse out of the kitchen. I wasn't too worried, mice are OK, rats are not. Satisfied that it had vanished they left us; but I soon heard scuttling around my feet and jumped up screaming out of the front of the restaurant much to the amusement of Maddy & Dani!!! The cooks came back in, Maddy confirmed it was a rat and I shivered & shook outside until they killed it, my e-mail was finished incredibly quickly after that little episode!

Desperate to be back on the road, we caught up with JB, had lunch together then he & I went off to find a bank and we experienced some interesting racism. As we approached the door talking together they opened it and closed it immediately afterwards. I looked back at them & JB and motioned that he was with me. He was eventually let inside and explained that they'd told him he couldn't enter. Coming out I gave the guards a bit of a mouthful, I still don't quite understand what they thought was going on!

We were all fed up with city life; the traffic was terrible, the smog was suffocating but Abidjan has a lot going for it - very well thought out in terms of infrastructure but its lost such a lot since the coup detat and subsequent war. We waited for JB at Nicolas' flat whilst he went off to see his father in hospital (who died a few days later from stomach ulcers & other complications aged 53). We all got a taxi to Treichville bus station and caught the bus to Bonoua, a taxi down to Samo and another very wet taxi to Assinie, we later discovered that this taxi had just done the Ghana border 'run' along the beach at low tide!

Cote d'Ivoire

Arriving at 4.30am in the morning at any airport does not fill me with joy.

Arriving at an airport that is fiercely protected by 100's of French troops following a war that finished a few months earlier, worried me.

Arriving at an airport at 4.30am, in a country that's just ended a war, with a 12yr old girl in tow, terrified me!

We got there. We got off the plane and walked down the stairs towards immigration and a man comes up to me wanting a handshake saying our names - WTF?!?!?! Suddenly the lack of sleep didn't seem to come into play, the fact that I looked a complete sight, probably something resembling a martian with my hair trying to look like something from the 70's really didn't worry me. What the hell was going on???

I had made a few calls prior to leaving; I'd decided that seeing as we were arriving early on a Saturday morning there wasn't much point staying in Abidjan, it would make far more sense to stay out of town on the beach. I picked Bassam, a town 40mins away on the beach used by a lot of people from Abidjan at the weekend to escape the city. I found a cheap hotel; Marvin Hotel and spent days trying to track down it's telephone number. Finally I rang and got hold of a guy who worked (note the past tense on that - he's been sacked since for stealing) there called Olivier. Olivier was full of promises to pick us up from the airport. However, on the phone from France, I got the feeling Olivier was one of Africa's many touts and asked several times to speak to the BOSS! Finally I got hold of the boss, who wasn't M. Kone but M. Marvin. He agreed to pick us up from the airport and get us to Bassam, which is a feat in itself as Abidjan has a curfew from 10pm and getting out of Abidjan is impossible by any form of transport.

So, this hand belonged to Marvin. Who introduced himself, I was confused, worried & concerned for Dani who hadn't slept all that much on the flight despite using my shoulder, stomach & arm as a pillow, keeping me awake in the process! We all made our way to the immigration booth, got our bags and wandered through the crowds of taxi touts (although some were sleeping on the floor). The airport is magnificent, I was expecting another Dakar/Dar Es Salaam/Nairobi etc affair, complete madness in a concrete box, Abidjan is very plush in comparison!

Marvin steered us outside to a waiting taxi. The fact that he had managed to get to the airport meant that he had got through the police barrage before 10pm, he was expecting our flight at 2am, it was now approaching 5am - but he looked a lot better than we felt without sleep! We hopped into the taxi, our codeword was exchanged which meant that Dani was feeling OK about the situation and the taxi drove us a few kilometres to the police barrage. Jumping out we got our luggage and walked about a kilometre to the end of the police barrage (soldiers fast asleep) listening to the early morning prayer call from a nearby mosque, the sea at the shoreline a few metres away and coping with the temperature which must have been in the high 20's whilst wearing clothes for the cold of France and the relative temperate climes of Casablanca.

On the other side of the police barrage, he'd parked his car. Luckily it was still there, we climbed in and were told that the hotel was full but not to worry, we'd be staying at his house! Twenty minutes later we were in Bassam and at his house. Lovely place and Dani suddenly woke up when she saw the pool, we sat down, had a drink a short chat and went to bed; we had struck lucky ... it had all passed without a hiccup and Marvin was proving to be very kind to us both.

A few months to go ...

Still 3 months and 4 days away from departure but already the excitement of getting back to Africa is building up. Having to organise a visa prior to departure for the Cote d'Ivoire, constantly thinking of the 12yr old who'll be tagging along with me & whether Gianni, my Italian travel partner will make his mind up about joining are all keeping me occupied!

The route 'should' be from Abidjan to Ghana where we'll pass Morree to go & see KingaFreespirits' foundation created by her mother Krystyna who I'm trying to assist http://www.fundacjafreespirit.pl/eng/index0_eng.html

From there we're looking at going north to Banfora in Burkina Faso to keep someone's geography teacher happy - it's in this year's text book, then to Boromo where there's meant to be a great auberge and onto Bobo Dioualasso then a short night in Ouagadougou before catching a bus to Niamey, Niger. From Niamey we should be able to get a pirogue downriver for 36hrs or so; it's a commercial run that many boatmen take and the idea is to get us to the border of Benin. If the train is running from Parakou to Cotonou we'll go south by that but there's some news that it stopped running for good back in April 2007.

Back through Togo & Ghana - hoping to take in a bit of slave history to make this a little more educational than just a 'jaunt' across W.Africa, we'll go back past Abidjan for a few days of R&R in San Pedro near the border with Liberia.

It's a shame, as the original plan had been to go through Liberia and back into my favourite African country; Guinea. Since I left last year the situation with Conte, the dictatorial president haven't been good & I was lucky to leave when I did. I wanted to go back there ... but it'll have to wait until the end of 2008 when I hope to drive down there ... in'shallah