Let's start with the guide, a local resident generally trained and certified by the ONTB (Burkina's national tourism authority) who takes you around to various sites and handles things like moto rental, driving and conversations with village chiefs who don't speak French. Nitha, Megan and I had hired Amadou to take us around the Banfora area, which despite the repeated moto breakdowns was quite a lot of fun. He dropped them off at the bus station Wednesday night and then dropped me off at the internet at around 6:30. The plan was that he would take an hour to go pick up the one still-broken moto he'd left with a friend in the village, then come back with the good moto to pick me up, take me back to my hotel (also in a village about 7 km out of town) and discuss whether I would hire him again for the next day. Three hours later, in a driving rainstorm, he still wasn't there, his cell phone wasn't turned on, and no taxis operate in Banfora after 7:30, so I wound up calling the hotel owner to come and get me. I was not impressed.
The next morning I took my time getting up, since I hadn't planned anything, so imagine my surprise when I woke up to find that Amadou was hanging out with the hotel owner in the hotel courtyard, waiting for me with the good moto and some story about how the bad moto had fallen on him in the previous night's rainstorm--look how badly his heel was cut--and he'd valiantly still showed up four hours late, only to find that I'd already gone. No particular apology, just an insistence that he never falls off motos and that his cell phone switched off when it was drenched by the rainstorm. Since my plan for the day included no site further than 15 km from town along a main road, I figured I could get away with hiring him again out of sheer convenience, and wound up with no technical difficulties. We visited the SOSUCO sugar refinery, two small factories in town that produced dried mangoes and shea butter respectively, his own mother in the market for a taste of a local dish prepared with bean leaves and millet (quite good), a "vinery" where village women weave palm mats and baskets in cellar-like holes to take advantage of the humidity underground, and a village where women were making beautiful clay water gourds by hand.
I'll admit to having been uncomfortable on the final trip, though, because it basically involved following a village kid on a bike from compound to compound until we found someone who was working, and then paying to sit in their courtyard and watch them work. Like the voyeuristic Vieux Quartier in Bobo, where our tour guide was taking us into people's houses at mealtime, it seemed like an unnecessary invasion of privacy. I was glad to spend as little time as politely possible watching the pottery, beautiful as the technique and end products were. It's the kind of thing people should be able to show off in a less invasive way.
In the end, Amadou was hugely helpful for visiting the rural sites, but I was glad to hop on a bus to Bobo, Burkina's main tourist town, with the prospect of a couple of days to do as I pleased, on my own and at my own pace. Bobo by day is a nice place to wander, with lots of shade and a fairly compact downtown. I ran some errands in the market in the morning (paying waay too much for a gift--even after three months, I'm still somehow too nice to offer a low enough price to begin with, which means I usually wind up paying about twice as much as I should).
After lunch I wandered across the street for a courtesy "coup d'oeil" at the craft shop of one of the numerous and intensely annoying young men whom Nitha refers to as "fashion rastas" and locals refer to as "chasse-touristes"--they can be found either wandering downtown streets or hanging out in the city's trendy traditional music venue, and everyone seems to be an artisan with a charitable association looking to sell the same kinds of necklaces, sculptures and masks. I feel bad for the city's actual residents and artisans, because these guys give both a bad name by constantly trying to latch on to you, offering to be your guide, or inviting you out for a drink so you can "get to know each other." Thanks, but no thanks. Over the past couple of days, I've been honing my polite brush-off skills. This particular fashion rasta's brother, the actual owner of the shop, turned out to be really nice, though, and I wound up chatting with him for about an hour before heading to two museums (one on general local cultural history, and the other on Burkinabe traditional music) and then back to my hotel. It was really nice to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted to today, but the fact that I'm hanging out in the internet cafe at 10 pm brings me to a big advantage of travelling with friends: you can go out at night. As a single white woman, I'd be the prime target of fashion rastas and other lonely boys in bars and nightclubs here, and I'd prefer to spare myself the annoyance and potential safety threat and catch up on my reading and laundry at night instead.
I should note that I'm eating better in Bobo, for a better price, than I have anywhere else on this trip--I can feed myself plentifully on really good local dishes for the equivalent of about 12 dollars a day. Breakfas today was coffee, baguette and jam, lunch was delicious avocado vinaigrette and sheep stew, and dinner was guineafowl braised with veggies and a side of attieke. Mmm, mmm. Tomorrow I'm taking a short cycling trip along the highway to a nearby village that according to the tourist office boasts some nice scenery and interesting architecture, so I'll be picnicking, which promises to be just as nice. Internet time is running out... I will likely be in touch again on Sunday from Bamako, Mali, on the next leg of my trip.
posted by Emily @ 9:33 p.m.
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