Friday and Saturday, Traveling

We had tickets – thanks to Nisha’s endeavor on Thursday, we had tickets in hand that actually cost half the fare. Good work. The bus was set to leave at 12:30 – now, this system of transportation (who am I kidding – the entire country/continent) is notorious for running hours late. I go to class Friday morning (7:30-9:30, 40 minutes away) and return to pack. Liza comes over at around 11 and the four of us discuss what we’re bringing, remind each other of vital missing items and generally make sure we’re all on the same page. We’ve already exchanged our money into the African Franc, or CFA (see-fa), and we are set to go. We arrive at the bus station at around 12:30. The lady at the desk says the bus will leave no later than 2:30. Seven bags of 1Gh Cedi rice, three Fan Ice, 10 water sachets, and 10 bags of plantain chips later, we pull out of Accra at 5:42pm. We didn’t eat all of that food – most all of it got shoved into black plastic bags in the overhead storage compartment for later, which was definitely a useful idea.
So the journey went. The bus was much more comfortable than anticipated – good seats, leg room and a/c – we were definitely pleasantly surprised. On the TV, there were ridiculous Nigerian movies playing/blaring until about two am, at which point five popular Ghanaian Hip-Life songs began looping. Five songs looping over and over again – while we do love this music…that was a bit much. The four of us managed to get some sleep, at some point, though with varying degrees of success, throughout the night. As it became light outside, it was obvious the landscape was much different than in Accra. There were circular and square adobe huts with thatched roofs situated in small groupings of perhaps 10-20 or so, and sometimes smaller. There were also a lot of Mosques, indicating the increased Muslim population of Northern Ghana. At 7:15am, we pulled into St. John Station in Bolgatanga. After trying to determine if the bus was continuing to Paga, a town still closer to our destination and finding that this was indeed the last stop, a man came on the bus and offered to take us to Paga, and then the border. This was the ticket. He overcharged us – by a lot. We wound up paying twice what we realistically should have, but in our defense, we were tired, didn’t have a very steady plan of the next step and weren’t sure what other cars we could get to go where we were going.

Smo was the taxi driver’s name, quite a jovial young man. We were all snacking on our wonderful plantain chips, and he apparently felt left out. After asking for one to share, Liza continued to feed him chips for the duration of the half hour or so ride, which was just sort of bizarrely funny. We made it to the border, and went into the Ghanaian customs building. The officers there were awesome. They were really nice, joked with us and turned out to be really helpful. They hassled Kaivan because he was traveling with three ladies – they apparently thought he should be share. We filled out our forms, used their restroom and walked into Burkina Faso.

After crossing the border, it wasn’t long before we found that English really wasn’t spoken at all – it’s a Francophone country, but we weren’t sure if people living close to the border would be bilingual. Nope. We were lucky enough to meet this man who spoke enough English and understood enough of my French to convey that one of the customs guys had called him and told him we were going to Camp Nazinga. This is just a testament to how cool the Immigration guys were – one of them said he knew of Camp Nazinga, but when we went to find him to figure out if he knew how to get there, he had vanished – he had called this guy, and told him to take care of us. Sweet. So anyway, we pay much less than we planned on for Mahamo (sp?) to drive us in a small, white Volvo to Camp Nazinga. This turned out to be a full two hour drive through Po and the park. Po was a neat little border town, but we didn’t wind up getting to spend any time there. Most of the journey (about an hour and half or so) wound up being down the main road of the Camp. This was a bumpy, dusty, hole- filled road – we’re still not sure how that little car survived, but it did. Along the way, we saw warthogs, a gorilla and elephants. Seriously. Before we had even gotten to the actual camp, we saw elephants in the watering hole.

Upon arrival at the camp, we checked in, were shown to our Bungalows and realized it was a really good thing that I a) spoke a little French b) brought a French in West Africa Vocabulary book along. There really was very little to no English spoken, so it was an interesting experience.  The bungalows were awesome. We had to rent two because only three people were allowed to stay in one of them, and we were traveling with four. It worked out well. They each had beds, dressers, a table and a bathroom with running water, which was extremely comfortable and much more than I had expected. A pretty cool thing about the camp was that the electricity only turned on from 6-10 at night. We think it may have been on around noon as well, but we never wound up being able to confirm that. Since no one was around the camp during the day, the electricity was only turned on when they needed it to cook, or in the evening when people would need to see. Great idea for decreasing expenses, and it wasn’t any sort of inconvenience.

There was a restaurant at the camp, which was good, because the next closest place that we could have secured food was two hours away in Po. The prices were really reasonable, and the food was absolutely delicious. They had great rice that came with a delicious, flavor rich vegetable stew with cabbage, carrots, peppers and various squash, spaghetti with a fresh, water based sauce and chicken. The chicken was probably the best chicken I’ve ever had – incredibly fresh and perfectly done. More about that later in the week. So, we eat, watch the elephants play in the watering hole right in front of the dining hall, and take a walk around the camp. We just eat some snacks for dinner because we’re full from lunch, and find that the man at the front desk and I communicated well enough to get us a Safari tour for the next day at 6:20 am. Success! We were all exhausted and managed to fall asleep even before the fan turned off at ten.

So this was day 1 and 2, but they were mostly travel. The rest of the posts will probably be just one day, except for the last one, which will just be all the travel.