Je ne comprends pas!

That is one of about 4 things I can say in French (and it's not pretty...). Between Mo and myself, we could confidently navigate any country in which the primary language is English, Dutch, Spanish, German, or Italian. They speak French in Burkina Faso. It was the first time in all my traveling when 98% of the people we encountered did not speak a word of English. It certainly added some excitement to the trip. Each encounter became an interesting mix of charades, guessing games, and lots of laughter. Since we didn't speak the language and wanted to visit some of the more obscure spots, we decided to travel in style. We hired a car and a driver. Unfortunately, our driver was part of that 98%. Despite the impenitrable language barrier, I found Burkina Faso to be an amazing country and the people as nice as could be.

Burkina is rated as the 3rd poorest country in the world, but I would never guess that from traveling there. The people are happy, helpful, and proud of their heritage. The streets are clean (at least cleaner than Ghana's). There is almost no crime and I certainly never felt threatened or unsafe. We encountered very few beggars and did not see many people living on the street. The nicest thing for me was that I felt much less aware of my whitemess in Burkina than I do in Ghana. People didn't stare, point, laugh, or scream when we walked by. Taxis hassled us less, and there were very few calls of "abruni" (well, it's "le blanche" there). I always felt relaxed walking around.

And now, in no particular order, a few of the fun and memorable things we did in Burkina: I rode a camel, slept under the stars in the desert, bribed the Ghanian embassy to give our passports back, ate roadkill (for Breakfast!), swam in waterfalls, sat on a crocodile, went to a cattle market, and bought a kora (that's a beautiful traditional west aftrican instrument I studied last year).

That last one has made traveling back through Ghana on tro-tros very interesting. It was a great trip, but it's also good to be back in Ghana. Though I enjoyed the challenge of learning French in 10 days, it's nice to be able to communicate with people again. Plus Burkina was HOT!! They are already in their dry season; it didn't rain the entire time we were there. In fact, the first time I saw clouds in the sky, we were on our way back to Ghana. I would regularly drink 5-7 liters of water in a day, without changing the frequency of bathroom trips. Unless it was just bought (which involved stopping every 20 minutes or so), the water we drank was hot. Not luke warm, but close to boiling. When I carried 3 satchets from the car to our room one afternoon, they burnt my arm. Then we drank them. It was unpleasant. But completely worth it.

I'm sorry I don't have pictures to add to this post, but we are still not done traveling. We are in Techiman now, slowly making our way down to Accra.

Happy belated Halloween. We were in Ouagadougou for Halloween here, so we went to an overpriced supermarket, bought some overpriced snickers, and handed them out to people we met, desperately attempting to explain why we were giving out candy. It worked sometimes, mostly they just walked away very confused. Then we ate the rest of the candy for dinner. An interesting halloween, I must say.