Mopti Mali to Upper Volta (Now called Burkina Faso)

We Broke our camp at first light and hit the trail. My friend driving was in a hurry for some reason. I always get suspicious when I meet people that act like this man. He could be fleeing from the police or military, fleeing from drug dealers or smugglers, could be any of the above or could just be insane. I needed the ride so I just accepted his eccentricities. We traveled all day. I dumped the fuel into the tank from his cans as needed and he did all the driving. He was a crazy driver. Seems to be the most common type of driver I encounter. The little box he wanted me to be careful with was costing me bruises as I bounced around from his wild driving. He kept telling me how valuable the contents of the little box were and how fragile it was but he didn't seem it was important enough to slow down and drive a bit smoother. We came to paved road finally and then entered Bamako.

My driver knew where he was going and headed straight there. We stopped for some beer and food but nothing else. He arrived at a compound and we were allowed to enter the gate by an armed guard. He asked me to wait in the vehicle and I did. He went off for a few minutes with some men that met us as he parked. A few minutes later there was another package in the back of the vehicle and we were off again. We were almost overloaded by this point. He never mentioned what he picked up and I thought it was better not to know. He was looking and acting more and more suspicious by the minute. He was a red headed stocky man with a full beard and wore a dirty safari outfit and a goofy hat. He sweated profusely. We had fun together but he was on the silent gruff side of normal. If he had smoked a pipe he would have been a total stereotyped professor out of a Walt Disney movie.

We drove for a couple of days sleeping by the vehicle at night and driving all day. We stopped at a few places that sold coffee and tea with food. We always filled all of our jerry cans with fuel every opportunity we came across. When we found one with beer we stocked up on that too. We drank beer all day and all night. This would be my water of life for at least the next year. The water was not safe to drink without treatment but the beer was tasty and cheap as well as safe to drink. Even though we drank copious amounts of it we never seemed to get drunk unless we added booze to the mix. Every night we did just that after we set up camp.

At one point he suddenly veered off the trail and drove overland in a giant semicircle and then rejoined the trail again. I finally couldn't take it and had to ask him why he did that. He told me that he had just driven around the border crossing. I was surprised and asked him about our passport stamps we would need if any police stopped us and also to get out of the country again. He told me not to worry about it he would take care of everything if we got stopped and that I should say not say anything to anybody. I quickly shut up and rode along.

We drove into Ouagadougou in the late afternoon. We parked and were immediately mobbed by people dancing, singing and shouting. I thought we saw a big celebration before. This time there were hundreds of people. Bonfires again lit up the sky and drums again pounded a beat into the night and hundreds of people chanted, sang and danced all around us. We sat in our chairs and my friend mocked the people relentlessly as they went about their party. I had to laugh at a lot of his crude humor but he was extremely racist and evil with his comments. If I didn't need the ride I may have confronted him about it. I didn't confront him, instead I just laughed along with him. We watched until we got tired and drunk from the beer and booze then again we had to drive out of town in order to get some sleep. This evening was a real memorable African experience for me. I thought about it a lot over the rest of my life. This type of spontaneous party happened often as I continued through Africa and every time it did I remembered this night as the most spectacular of all.

We drove on passing very interesting houses on stilts with pointed thatched roofs that were scattered among all the termite mounds sticking up out of the ground. Most of them were round but they came in all shapes and sizes. There were some small family farms here and there as the countryside got less arid. The families would stop and watch us as we flew by them. When he did another large off road semicircle I did not ask him about it. I was sure now that he was smuggling his artifacts out of the country without any permits and was he afraid to go through customs and immigration in case he could not bribe his way through. I just hoped I didn't end up in prison with him.

I assumed the we were in Ghana now since we had gone around two borders already. The scenery was getting somewhat greener and greener as we drove South. There were even a few trees now. We drove through a game park in Northern Ghana that was full of grasslands and we saw a couple of animals at a distance. I never saw them close enough to identify them and my driver did not want to stop or even slow down. He told me he had a ship sailing that he had to get his items on and he was behind schedule. We pushed South harder than I wanted to travel. I liked the slow paced city by city approach. As soon as I came to a good place that I wanted to see more of I planned on jumping this ship.