Waking a few hours after going to bed, Dani & I wandered outside where we met Ami, Marvin's maid. She prepared breakfast for us and we watched a few enormous lizards and then I headed back to bed. She came with me and locked us in the room whilst I slept for another hour.
A little later Marvin came down and we had a 'normal' conversation, ie. I was awake - he suggested we all go out for lunch in town. We got back in the car with our packs in the boot and headed into town, crossing the bridge over the lagoon to the old part of Bassam. A lovely restaurant on the waters edge where a wedding was being held, we ate a great lunch, Dani had her first taste of 'fufu' which in CI is plantain and not yam. He then decided that we should see some of Bassam, so visited quite a few hotels along the beach, the old area of town which was the French quarter in colonial times and then off to Bonoua a town about 20kms away.
Heading back to Bassam, we stopped briefly to buy pineapples and Dani relented & tried one having sworn blind in France she hated them. Realising they were delicious, Marvin treated her and bought 12 of them ... he took us & the pineapples back to his hotel www.marvinhotel.bravehost.net
We had an early night after supper, still feeling the effects of travelling through the night. A bombshell was dropped on me; Dani told me she didn't like it there, wanted to leave and return to France. She felt the staring was all too much and one of the kids on the side of the road when we'd bought the pineapple had tried to touch her arm ... I had a bit of explaining to do but she went to bed still feeling uncomfortable with being white in Africa.
The following morning we went out in search of a taxi to take us to the orphanage www.emsf.org
and the first taxi took us to the other side of town near where we'd had lunch the previous day. After asking the guys in charge I discovered I was at the wrong place, it was the National Orphanage and not the one I'd made enquiries about prior to leaving France. Getting our 20kg haul of clothes & shoes into a second taxi with sketchy directions to the one we wanted, we finally (with a bit of encouragement to get the driver to go down some rough tracks) found it and were amazed it was only several hundred metres from Marvin's home!
We spent an hour or so at the orphanage, meeting the kids & Eric who was in charge as Mme Auguy had waited for us the previous day, so we felt rather guilty! We were invited to their Christmas play but it was too close to Christmas and would interfere with our travel plans, so we promised to return in January. Eric and some of the children saw us down to the main road which we crossed and went to a little maquis (bar) for lunch, having cooked it several times in France, she finally agreed that she loved alooko or fried plantain! Going back into town, we organised a SIM card, sent an e-mail home and generally wandered about.
Later in the afternoon we heard from JB, someone I'd been in touch with for a few weeks, a long story but basically a friend of a friend. JB's a Burkinabe, born & brought up in Cote d'Ivoire he works in Assinie. He arrived at the hotel and introduced himself and had Nicolas waiting outside. I'd heard about Nicolas, a French guy who would probably prefer to surf for a living but actually does work in cocoa! We were offered a lift to Abidjan by Nicolas & JB announced that we were going to stay with Peter, a journalist in Abidjan.
We arrived at Nicolas' apartment in Zone 4, lovely building - typical expat block, very smart with good security. We took our packs up to his flat to wait for Peter; the heavens opened, a storm really brewed up and the road beneath us was flooded. Peter had been caught in traffic, broken down several times and having never been to Nicolas' place he wasn't going to attempt in the current weather conditions - I don't blame him!
So Nicolas offered to drive us there and once in the car with the packs back in the boot ready to go to eat and then to Peter's place, he came up with Plan B, why not stay with him! We were thrilled!
