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!

Grand Bassam

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!

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.

Hitting the road again ...

Or should I say the skies?! Leaving home in -5 we hit fog on our way to the airport. All went smoothly and we got into the terminal building to meet 250odd French Foreign Legion soldiers who were milling about waiting for their flight to Corsica for training.
Our flight was delayed thanks to Royal Air Babouche (Maroc) sitting for 2hrs at the gate with one nervous but excited 12yr old was a little tiresome but finally we saw it in the fog, disembarking passengers and finally we got on board! A Moroccan guy put his bag in the overhead locker and with it brought down the lighting strip, he couldn't put it back up, neither could the cabin crew who then went off and got a plaster to hold it into place!


Our arrival in Casablanca was fairly straightforward and luckily 20degrees! Checking that our transit status was OK, we headed through to immigration and out the other side to the station. A massive queue at the ticket office, lots of pushing & shoving and Dani was wide eyed with all the goings on. I heard the train arrive, no closer to the ticket office and decided to jump on the train minus a ticket. Somehow we found our way into 1st class and met 2 lovely Moroccan men who said we'd done the best thing as getting a ticket before the train left would have been impossible. Arriving at Casa Voyageurs station, we went out, got hassled by petit taxi drivers who wanted 30-40Dh for a fare to the Hassan II Mosque, we continued on and walked across the square to find a taxi who would put his meter on and arriving at the mosque we paid 8Dh for the fare!!!

Dani's first time in Africa, she was stunned by the mosque, the people and the mad tendancies of driving. We caught another taxi up to the Grand Marche and found a restaurant to eat in, she tried the a la menthe but preferred coke. A couple of pastilla & brochettes later we paid the bill and went for a walk before finding another taxi to take us back to the station and the train for the airport.

Our taxi already had one lady in it who was quite happy to share with us, within minutes we hit a man on a bicycle - well, he rode his bike into our taxi. He came and yelled at the driver, heated Arabic was exchanged and we drove off with the 4 of us laughing, the next lights were red, and our cyclist caught up with us, still yelling and then like on a suicide mission rode his bike across the traffic - we almost cried with laughter! We drove past him again at speed, smiled and waved goodbye whilst he was still yelling obscenities at our driver!!!

Getting back to the airport we went back through immigration who took forever to put someone on the desk and met up with a half French/Ivoirian family who'd been on our flight from Toulouse. Again our flight was delayed, we went off to the bathroom and I got out all our euros in cash gave Dani a third of them, then we both sat in cubicles stuffing them in our various hiding places. Leaving the bathrooms the gate area was empty. Panic hit - the flight had gone???? The gate number was still the same on the board but the delayed message had gone. I found a member of staff who assured me it hadn't gone but was at Gate 28 which then had me running around the airport trying to find 28, which was obscured downstairs. We waited another hour there and finally got on board.

Another hour or so on board, we were still on the tarmac everyone was in high spirits but a little annoyed that we'd not left. Finally a Lebanese lady with her 5 children got on board and caused chaos moving everyone out of their seats as she wasn't happy with her seat numbers. We roared down the runway with everyone clapping thrilled to have finally left at 11.40pm, 2.5hrs late!

Don't feel ready

I don't think I am ready. Woke up with a horrible hangover (thanks to drinking some red wine which I won't be doing for a while!) after dinner with a neighbour last night.

Whether we will make the airport in 24hrs time intact with all my clothes, I'm not sure. Very silly mistake last night, really should have known better than to live it up 36hrs prior to departure! Ho hum .....

A week's countdown

We've got a week to go before leaving. I'm not sleeping, waking at 6am and getting online to work, daydream of Africa & feeling exhausted by 6pm but not actually managing to go to bed until midnight. I think this could be called stress!

Thanks to a contact in Assinie that Nico from http://thirdratetropics.blogspot.com who passed on the name of someone who has been incredibly kind & helpful. Landing at 2am anywhere in the world doesn't fill me with joy. Landing in Abidjan at that hour is probably the most ridiculous piece of airline scheduling I know! But beggars can't be choosers!

However, our wonderful contact, JB a Burkinabe, is due to send me a number by text of a small auberge who apparently does a pick-up service to the airport. Again, with the power of the net, this auberge's name was given to me by Olivier, a Frenchman who owns http://www.busuainn.com & lives in Busua, Ghana. We hope to see him & stay with him & his wife at Busua Inn during the trip.

With the amount of clothes that have yet again kindly been donated by Deirdre & Yvonne, childrens clothes & shoes that their children have grown out of; we have a ton of weight to carry. I've been trying to find somewhere in CI or neighbouring countries to drop this stuff off. By complete chance I came across 'Enfance Meurtrie Sans Frontières' http://www.emsf.org on the net the other day. Ringing it's Montpellier based Founder & President, Pasteur Claude - I discovered that they are in need of all this material & Madame Auguy (orphanage director) will be waiting for our arrival in Bassam ... so luckily (& selfishly) we don't have too far to carry all the donations!

We're just about ready!

It's been a busy few weeks ... planning & preparing, we've got a little over a week to go & the 'priorities' are in place. I have never been so worried about a trip as this one, taking a child to a country just out of war isn't something I'd normally do!

However, everyone on routard.com assures me that its all fine & as I well know, children in Africa are well looked after. We're not going to Iraq after all!

So, the major hunt has been for drugs; of the clinical kind. We both have Lariam ready to start tomorrow. Together with the necessary dunking of her clothes & our mossie nets in premethin, we should have enough drugs to last us for a 12 month trip! Antibiotics, anti-histamines, anti-everything else are all packed up & ready to go.

Whether or not I remember to take stuff for me, such as clothes, shoes & something to wear bushwalking in northern Ghana is another matter but Dan has it all! Including a new backpack as we decided a suitcase was going to be a little on the difficult side for her!!!

Today I had a meeting with her history/geography teacher, a lovely man called M.Duriaux & I was thrilled to find someone else with my passion for Francophone Africa. He's lived & taught in a number of countries and gave me an outline of what he wants on our return for a school project. Someone went to bed earlier saying 'I thought this was meant to be a holiday'!!!!