I am in Ouagadougou right now, after spending a week in the teensy tiny country of Togo. It is one of those countries just brimming with tourism potential, but plagued with a bad government that probably turns some travelers off. We only had the time to stay in two places, and are happy that we decided to skip Lome. We drove through the capital a few times, and I honestly don’t know what the Lonely Planet is talking about when it calls the place pretty. Sure, when you are driving down the main drag, if you look to your right you will see a lovely, freakishly clean beach that stretches for miles. But look to the other side and you’ll get a vision of a decaying and moody kind of city.
So we decided to first go to Togoville, which is on Lake Togo and is apparently the center of voodoo in Togo. So much so that the town inspired Togo’s name. Togoville was interesting, picturesque, and delightfully creepy. I’ve been to a lot of places, but nowhere has given me the spooks like Togoville. First of all, we were the only people staying in a huge hotel. Second of all, we were told that Togoville residents are quite secretive and wary of tourists. And finally, walking around the town (which is filled with voodoo fetish statues, animal sacrifices and fetishers chanting in the street) made both Jamie and I feel uneasy. We didn’t actually feel threatened, but we felt uneasy in the way you feel at night after watching a horror flick. So we hid from the rain and relaxed our first day there, and took a guided tour of the town on the second, so that we could actually learn what some of the fetishes meant. (By the way, I’m not talking about the kinky kind of fetish… in voodoo, a fetish is an object or action that is connected to spirits.) Then, despite Togoville residents’ wariness of tourists, we were allowed to watch a voodoo rain ceremony (as long as we gave the fetishers money and palm wine). In what was probably my most humiliating moment as a white girl in Africa, we were both dressed in traditional garb, much to the amusement of the 200 some people who came out to participate in or watch the ceremony. The ceremony was pretty much a lengthy danc, which we didn’t really understand but was really interesting and powerful to watch. Jamie says that I look absolutely petrified the entire time, which is sort of embarassing. However, the ceremony was intense enough that I probably believe him.
After Togoville we went to Kpalime, which is a lovely town up in the mountains. It was a very pleasant place, the sort of town that reminded me why I love Africa. We went for a very unstrenuous hike up Mount Klouto, which really isn’t that high but did allow some great views of the region. Other than hanging about, walking around and enjoying the cool air (a great way to pass a few days if you ask me) I don’t have much to report, other than the artisanal center there has the most fantastic, creative stuff I have seen in my African travels. Dear God were there some beautiful batiks. I’m trying to limit my spending this summer so I didn’t buy any, but it was nice to see some artisans moving beyond the “mother carrying child and balancing water on head” formula that most batik “artists” follow in Ouagadougou.
On Friday we sadly left Togo so we could catch one of the few buses to Ouagadougou, but I feel that I at least saw the country’s two biggest highlights. The bus was a pretty agonizing trip. I’ve taken the long-haul STC bus from Ouagadougou to Accra before, and it was actually more comfortable than a Greyhound bus in Canada. The STMB bus from Lome, was a different story. There were five, not four seats a row, no airconditioning, and people insisted that I keep the window shut so it didn’t get too “cold” inside. The bus stopped a zillion times, often for no apparent reason, and we were stalled at the border for at least three hours. And behind us, there was a man who ranted and raved about the world at the top of his lungs for hours on end. I won’t tell you everything he said, but here are some highlights:
-White people are criminals.
-AIDS actually comes from Europe and North America, because there “there are homosexuals, lesbians and people sleep with dogs.”
-Africa should withhold its cotton from the West, because then we will die because white people are allergic to synthetic material.
-Poverty in Africa is an illusion, and only exists if you talk about it (meanwhile, this guy has a nice watch, lots of gold jewellery, and has just come back from Germany.)
Anyways, needless to say I was happy to finally arrive in this dusty, chaotic city that I love.
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