Public transport is a subject I have already given you a flavour of so the dereliction of its vehicles will come as no surprise but I feel obliged to cover some organisational issues with bus services. To most of us it would seem logical, when providing a regular coach service, to relate ticket sales to the quantity of seats on a coach and the departure times, but Cote d’Ivoire in particular has other ideas. Lets say the basic plan is…
There is a particularly sullen breed of West African waitress you will encounter that seems strangely common for a service industry. They move in a despondent slouch, to the plodding accompaniment of their flip flops. In a land where loads are borne on the head, walking, by necessity can only be done with grace and poise – I have even seen this maintained whilst hitching up skirts to have a slash by the roadside whilst balancing a fully loaded, huge…
You may well wonder why I would bother telling you that a 500ml sachet of water costs about 5p, but it helps to illustrate some typical daily economic issues, particularly for many African women, so let me tell you about Cynthia. She lives with her young son in Kumasi, a city in western Ghana and has a room in a building seemingly populated almost entirely by other women without any visible partners. Lets just say the building won’t be appearing…
In fine African tradition the festival opened at an entirely different location to that given in the programme and started with some offerings from the local Voodoo royalty at what looked like a neglected herbaceous feature outside a petrol station on the outskirts of town, a site for which I can offer no explanation of significance. A parade back into town was motivated by a delightfully shambolic brass section with percussion backing, to which the many women danced with a…
The somewhat challenging nature of Voodoo for animal lovers is put to the ultimate test at the fetish markets. These are the pharmacies of the voodoo world: after a consultation the priest will provide a prescription which is then purchased from the market. The stalls look a bit like the trophy collection of some psychotic, random animal hunter: great arrays of heads in varying states of decomposition, dogs, monkeys, cattle, birds and even most definitely endangered creatures such as leopards…
Arriving at night in Cotonou, the commercial capital of Benin and typical of West African cities, you are enveloped in a mist of dust, smoke of cooking fires and burning rubbish, as the dawn breaks these flavours are joined by less savoury ones such as traffic fumes and sewage. The dust is courtesy of the Harmattan wind that is progressively delivering the Sahara desert and every bit of loose dirt in the Sahel region on its southern borders, to the…
If the first thing you think of at the mention of Uganda is Idi Amin and the brutality of his regime then you will be delighted to hear that Ugandans are some of the most polite, courteous and softly spoken people you could meet. With the usual exception of the driving and some regions bordering less stable states, it’s just about the safest country in Africa and its a wonder that such a society could create the horrors of Amin and…
Having been invited to Rwanda for my friend Chance’s wedding to lovely, local girl Fausta I could only have been kept away at gunpoint. Although there were three days of festivities in all, two of them broadly followed the outline of the wedding I attended during the visit two years ago, see http://insideotherplaces.com/2008/03/18/rwanda-2008-not-just-gorillas-and-killers/ . Hence what follows concerns only the traditional wedding ceremony day. Unlike the previous wedding where we were guests I was honored (not a term I would…
The desert town of Chinguetti was once a must see for the predominantly French tourists in Mauritania but the decimation wrought by EU government travel warnings meant that Steve and I accounted for at least 25% of the visitors on any day of our 4 days there. Whilst this may well add to the level of “authenticity” of the travel experience for those of us who have bothered, it is difficult to overstate the desperate plight of the inhabitants of…
Lets be honest, how many of you could point to Mauritania on the map? There is a distinct lack of Thomas Cook package tours to the country to boost its tourist profile and little sign of that changing. However, the welcome Steve and I received was in complete contrast to the UK and French government advice to travellers, which paints the country as a hotbed of Islamic terrorism where foreigners should tread every step with fear. Mauritania does indeed have…
