And now, Part Two of Kevin Goes to Togo!
So, four of the five of us crammed onto the king-sized bed and got a decent night's sleep. I awoke on Easter morning feeling a bit refreshed, though still tired and a little under the weather. I had slept in later than everyone else (though Ginnie was only up for 10 minutes or so before I awoke), and three of the others had gone and bought breakfast for us. A lot of breakfast. They had decided to see how much 500 CFA would buy at an orange stand, and the correct answer is something around 50 oranges! 500 CFA isn't even a dollar, and it bought 46 oranges. Not too shabby. They also picked up some bread, yogurt, and chocolate cookies, so we had a nice breakfast. I also broke into the beef jerky I'd been saving for Easter - it has never tasted so good as after going mostly meatless for 40 days!
After we ate, we packed up to head up north to the Parc National de la Pendjari, one of the premier wildlife parks in Africa. We spent a while haggling with the drivers, but it was agreed that the five of us would pay a combined 20,000 CFA to go to Tanguieta (near the park) or 25,000 to go directly to the hotel just outside the park, and that the driver would not pick up any more passengers en route. This was agreed upon both in French and in English, which one of the taxi-men spoke, so there was no communication difficulty.
However, when we got to Tanguieta, our driver decided to pull the whole "let's milk the tourists for all they've got" stunt and demanded 25,000 for going to Thiangou! We, of course, refused to pay (that's an extra $10 almost), and the driver refused to budge on the price, saying we'd agreed to 25,000 for Tanguieta. After 30 minutes, we got our stuff to leave and find another taxi to go the rest of the way, but then our driver decided to fake repentance and told us to get back in the car. We put our stuff back in the trunk...fatal mistake. The driver only wanted to get us back in so he could lock up our bags in the trunk and then hold them hostage until we agreed to pay more!
Saying that I was furious would be an understatement. While I can chalk certain things that have made me mad here to communication barriers and different cultural standards, you do NOT take my luggage (which contained a lot of money, my passport, Ginnie's passport, etc.) hostage. That would be attempted robbery in the US, and we don't play that game. So, Jenna and I went to the police station while the other three waited with the taxi driver to make sure he didn't run off with our belongings.
Surprisingly enough, the police were initially quite helpful. The officer on duty made the taxi driver give us back our bags and believed our story, and had his superior not shown up, we would have been completely vindicated against the iniquitous taxi driver. But no, the chief of police had to show up and decide to jump into the fun game of "let's bilk the white Americans" and tried to make us pay the driver 30,000!!! This was more than I could bear. I'm a pretty laid-back person, all things considered - it takes a lot to make me genuinely angry, and I'm honestly a bit of a push-over sometimes. But oh no, not with this. I can't stand corruption, and here it was, staring at me - the police chief wanted 5,000 of that extra 10,000 for himself, and we all knew it. I spat at his feet and screamed "troint mil c'est merde!" at him - I'll let you translate that one for yourself. Suffice it to say that this was not one of my prouder moments, but at least I'm not so jaded as not to be outraged when faced with an injustice, however trivial it may seem in retrospect. We ended up having to pay 25,000 after two hours of screaming and arguing in French.
A very dejected set of five Americans (OK, four Americans and one guy from China) checked in to the Hotel Baobab in Thiangou shortly thereafter, but the hotel was pleasant and provided reasonably priced park tours. We went out the next day into Pendjari, and got to see a TON of wildlife - countless antelope and warthogs, elephants (including one that charged us!), about 50 hippos, baboons, 3 or 4 other species of monkey, crocodiles, and tons of birds. It was a great day; especially fun was riding on the roof of our van. Our driver had strapped a mattress to the luggage rack so that three of us at a time could get up on the roof for an incredible view of the park and its wildlife as we made our day safari drive through Pendjari.
The best part of the day, however, was discovering the most beautiful place on earth. We stopped at a small waterfall on our way back to the hotel, and it was incredible. The water was cascading down the rocks into this stunningly blue-green pool with the most deliciously cool water you can imagine - after a hot, dusty day in the sun, it was paradise to jump into the water and paddle around for a while. And yes, the water was safe - we were assured of this by everyone, and waterfall pools tend to be safe for swimming because of the constant perturbation of the pool-water by the falling water.
We spent another night at the Baobab, then left the next morning to begin the journey up to Niger. We had to go back to Parakou first and had lunch there, then got a bush taxi to Alfa Koure, a village mid-way between Kandi and the border with Niger. AK is home to an elephant sanctuary eco-project in the very edge of the Parc National de W, a trans-national wildlife park in Benin, Niger, and Burkina Faso. It's name comes from the W-shaped path that the Niger River takes through the park. We didn't see any elephants, and our taxi driver tried the asking for more money stunt, but we'd had the foresight to remove our bags from the trunk as soon as we got out of the car. It was Jenna's birthday, so we had a mini-party for her, exhausted African traveller style, and then slept outside to beat the heat in the guesthouse.
Ginnie and I slept in and rested for the morning, and then mid-afternoon we all left to head up to Niger. We got across the border, and...transportation melt-down. Niger is the world's poorest nation; it's sole exports are uranium and onions (both key ingredients in cafeteria food). It's also extremely isolated, so everything was ridiculously overpriced - almost nobody in Niger has the money to travel, stay in a hotel, eat out, etc., and so all these have to charge crazy prices just to stay afloat. We decided to go the cheap way and take a mini-bus (aka a tro-tro in Ghanaian lingo) to Niamey, the capital, but...our tro-tro was the most abyssmal piece of automotive crap that I have ever been in, and considering some of my friends' cars, that is saying a lot. One side-wall was literally separating from the rest of the vehicle because of the literal 5 tons of oranges (and a bicycle) that they had piled on top of the mini-bus, it was ludicrously overcrowded (even by African standards), and it was so overweight that we popped a tire going over a speedbump. At this point, we decided to arrive alive, got our money back, and just got in a pricey taxi that got us to Niamey around 1:00 in the morning.
What followed next was classic; it could, and should, have been in a movie. We got into town with the dust in the air so thick that it looked like a foggy day in San Francisco, and...the hotel we were looking for had gone bust-o since the last publication of the Lonely Planet guide. We ended up at the Hotel Oasis, which was WAY too expensive - it was something like $70 a night for a double room! Our options were limited, and our time was running out. We HAD to go somewhere to crash, and that somewhere was...the Hotel l'Moustache.
As the name itself perhaps indicates, the Hotel l'Moustache is, umm, more than a hotel. Yes, that's right, I spent the night in a Nigerienne whorehouse. I will not go into details about the condition of the rooms, but suffice it to say that it was absolutely vile - there was a condom machine in the lobby, and it went downhill from there. I got a few hours of sleep between cringes over the thought of what had probably been going on earlier in the evening on my bed, and in the morning we checked out of l'Moustache, had a good breakfast at a pastry shop, and found a nicer place to stay.
By this point, I was pretty ill from the dust. I have a huge dust allergy, and it was being compounded by having not gotten a good night's sleep in a week. Ginnie, who was also sick, and I both opted to spend the afternoon napping in the air-conditioning while Liu, Alexa, and Jenna went to the market. We then went out to dinner, met a super nice Aussie ex-pat who told us all about Niger, and then...I left the next morning. I had decided in the interest of sparing my health not to press on to Burkina Faso and instead to return back the way I came. Unfortunately, this meant missing the possible sighting of giraffes at a place near Niamey, but I can live that. It was an 18 hour bus ride back to Lome, where I spent another night at la Galion, made friends with a Danish girl who is going to be traveling around Ghana for a few weeks, and got some sleep. I got back to ISH on Saturday afternoon around 14:00.
So, that was my last big African trip. It was an adventure - sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but ALWAYS memorable. As a little taste of the entries to come over the next week, you can look forward to a Twi lesson (plus some fun English Ghanaian-isms), another trip story from Mole National Park, and...pictures!
