Too shy shy, hush hush, eye to eye

Well I've been in Ouagadougou for nearly a day but there's still no sign of Limahl.

Never mind. Things are a bit costly here compared to Ghana so I'm quite glad that this will be a reasonably short visit. We'll be leaving Africa in just over a week - the plane flies from here sometime next Friday, although the airline's being all coy about exactly when.

Burkina's a lot less developed than Ghana. Coming over the border there was almost no transport heading to the capital at all. There's also no electricity in most of the towns en route, although there are some amazing mudbrick houses painted with monochrome geometric designs. A procession of shiny metal electricity pylons marches overhead without giving any power to the houses squatting beneath. Given that Burkina has few mineral resources and decent quantities of timber, the use of metal for these stinks of misdirected aid money. I'd bet that some rich-country government gave a wodge of cash to Burkina on the condition that it was spent on this vital infrastructure project and on condition that the contract went to a rich-country construction company with close links to said government.

That sort of thing is depressingly common. Near Dobiso (see previous) there was a long roadside stretch of electricity poles which were put up a few years ago. However, there was no electricity running through the wires and it's doubtful whether such a poor area could come close to affording it if there was. You suspect that the whole project was just set up so that some people in positions of influence could push some kickbacks their way. The road to Dobiso was constructed in 1978, but in 1979 heavy rains washed out some of the roadway close to a couple of bridges and nothing's been done since. In the dry season, vehicles can drive across the dry streambed, but in the wet the place is cut off to motor transport. The road has never been repaired, and there are now trees as tall as houses growing on the bridges.

Into exile...

So it's the swansong of our Ghana sojourn, as we're off to Burkina Faso today. We've had our last morning omelette-toast-and-Milo combo a la Ghana, and we're about to head off and pack our bags. Tomorrow, the morning hot drink will be African cafe au lait (see previous posts). Then we're going to head to the desert and hang out with Tuareg.

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and being in Ghana we felt we ought to pay homage to the Real Meaning of Easter, ie chocolate. But it's a strange thing: despite being the world's second-biggest cocoa producer, and sitting right next door to the world's biggest cocoa producer (Cote d'Ivoire), Ghana really doesn't do chocolate. The closest you normally get are various Nestle-produced hot drinks, such as our friend Milo.

I think this is more about milk and refrigeration than anything else. Dark chocolate's probably a mite too expensive to really fly on Ghana's domestic market, but you can't really do cheaper milk chocolate because it doesn't cope well with hot climates. And maybe people just don't have a taste for it.

In a few places you can get a locally-produced chocolate which isn't bad; the milk chocolate's a bit powdery, but they do chocolate-orange and chocolate-lemon versions. It's a serious luxury product though, with lavish Kente wrappers; an average bar costs 6,000 cedis, about 30p/75c but a relative fortune in Ghanaian terms.

Anyway, Tamale is by no means a shopping Mecca, especially on Easter Sunday. So we contented ourselves with sitting on a couple of bollards and sucking away at a couple of FanChocos, which are by all accounts one of Ghana's most venerable ice cream products. They weren't all that good and they weren't egg-shaped, but what else do you do for Easter in northern Ghana?

Ah, village life!

Sleeping under the stars next to a mud hut ... hanging out in the shade of a mango tree ... dancing by the light of the full moon in a dusty village square ... chronic water shortages ... searing sunlight ... cloying humidity ... mosquitoes biting your toes to gristle...

So it's been an intense week. Not that we ever thought that volunteering on a guinea worm eradication project would be a cakewalk. But this week's lesson has been drawn from that proverb about being careful what you wish for. Because, of course, what I was wishing for at the start of this week was, y'know, an authentic experience of Ghanaian village life. Which would perhaps (in my imagination) be harder than we were used to, but still bearable over a short period of time. After all, we would be getting a sanitised version of the real thing, with hosts who would cook for us, lodging provided, and no need to go farming in the midday heat.

Now I'm sitting in an aircon Internet cafe in Tamale and I can be more rational about these things. But truth is, by Friday my four days of village life were driving me up the wall. I was feeling hot and bothered and frustrated, and desperate to leave, and trying my best to keep a lid on my emotions for fear of offending my generous hosts. Kate was holding things together a bit better, but was pretty close to the edge too.

It feels unreasonable to complain about such things. After all, we were treated like kings in our time in Dobiso. People who perhaps earn less in a year than the average westerner would earn in a day were looking after us with selfless generosity. To get water in Dobiso involved a one-hour round trip to the lake, and yet people still provided us with a bucket of water - or more - each day for us to wash in. They cooked us three complete meals each day, checking traps, pounding fufu (mashed yam dough, an acquired taste), giving us their houses to sleep in, putting up with our hopeless attempts at their language.

One village chief gave us three bottles of beer which, on local incomes, would have amounted to a truly substantial gift (the whole area was impoverished by an epidemic of guinea worm caused by an infected person returning from a funeral in another town back in 1997; crippled by the disease, people had been unable to work the fields and had missed out on several years of income). All we had to do was wander around fulfilling our few responsibilities and enjoying being looked after: the villagers had to keep the whole thing running.

But it was exhausting and frustrating as well as fascinating and inspiring. One of the main reasons for this is that we found ourselves thrown into the middle of a complex passage of village politics which neither of us knew how to deal with. Our contact in Dobiso was John, the village health coordinator. He was embroiled in a very polite, glacial power-struggle for pre-eminence in town with Dobiso's chief, and we were a major element of his arsenal.

John was an anomaly in Dobiso. Most people in town regarded Dambai - a one-street market town nearly an hour away by car (although there were no cars in Dobiso or any of the neighbouring villages) as a major metropolis to be visited only occasionally, the way Londoners might make a trip to Paris. Dambai had such luxuries as shops, electricity, and piped water, whereas Dobiso didn't even have a proper road connecting it to the outside world, let alone such luxuries as a borehole or even a well.

The regional capital Kete-Krachi seemed impossibly remote from the perspective of Dobiso, and Tamale, the biggest city in the north, might as well have been paved with gold. Few people in Dobiso could dream of saving up the money to manage to even pay for transport to these towns, let alone support themselves once they got there. So John, who had studied in Ghana's 1m-population cultural capital of Kumasi for three years and visited Accra several times - John was seen as being almost impossibly cosmopolitan.

This had an impact on his prestige, and threw him in competition with the less well-travelled chief. John was clearly cultivating his image in the town, and the arrival of a couple of obrunis (white people) from remote corners of the globe provided an opportunity to demonstrate this. Unfortunately for us, this meant being on the receiving end of hospitality that was as much about demonstrating John's status as it was about making us feel comfortable.

Again, it feels inconsiderate to moan about this. I'm quite sure that John was interested in us mainly for his own ends, but it doesn't change the fact that he displayed wonderful generosity. But this carried its own burden of ethical and etiquette dilemmas, of a complexity that would make Jane Austen blanch.

For instance: for the third time today, you are served fufu with meat stew. Meat stew for breakfast is a tough one, even tougher when you get meat stew for lunch and dinner, still tougher when it's 35 in the shade and you're dripping with sweat. But John's made it clear that he'll be sad - for which read offended - if you don't eat up all your meat. This because he's gone to a lot of expense to buy it for you, even though all this meat is as much about showing off his prestige than feeding you with stuff you want. This also because if you don't eat it, it reflects badly on him as a host. (What you actually want is the wonderful sweet mangoes hanging from the trees, but you can't be fed those because they're cheap and therefore not suitable for feeding to Honoured Guests.)

Then again, the women who've actually spent their time making all this food are eating your leftovers, and frankly deserve what they want much better than John does. If you leave the meat, they get it. But then again, if you don't eat the meat John will take it out on the same women and get them to go to even greater lengths to match your exacting diet. And even if you eat all of it, he'll be disappointed if you don't make it through your head-sized swell of fufu.

You can imagine the dilemmas. Add to this the absence of any privacy - when we went to bed outside (it was far too hot to sleep inside) the ceremony attracted an audience who formed a semicircle around us as if they were watching a TV set - and you can imagine there were elements of the week that stretched us a bit.

But as I say, how can we complain about these things? The people who worked all day keeping us in board and lodging, who did that hour-long round trip to get us water to wash in, who smashed giant pestles into giant mortars all day to make our fufu and were up with the dawn to make our breakfast - none of them were complaining about their lot. When I very gently lost it on Friday, sitting in my chair in the town square brooding over our misfortunes, we couldn't but reflect that the conditions that had driven us around the bend in less than a week were the stuff of daily life for people in Dobiso. And they still managed to raise a smile when John brought out his stereo and filled it with batteries to give some music in the evenings, although maybe that was just them laughing at my attempts to dance.

Hot Tamale and it's red hot

Actually it's not too scorching but I couldn't resist the namecheck of this Robert Johnson song, seeing as we're in a town called Tamale. Nothing to do with the Mexican corndough thingies, which apparently are named after nixtamalisation, some Guatemalan corn preparation technique according to Google.

We're just off tomorrow to a town near Lake Volta where we're going to take part in a Guinea Worm eradication project. We spent all morning in a training session learning about The Worm, and tomorrow we bump off to the village where we'll be spending the week. Guinea Worm is a terrible bug which you get from drinking water containing copepods. I can remember collecting these from the school pond and looking at them under the microscope in biology classes. Then I thought they were a bit cute, but now I know they're EVIL. If they're living in infected water they end up with worm larvae inside them, which get inside you when you drink the water. About a year later you get a blister on your leg and a little white worm comes out like something out of the Alien films, to lay more eggs in the water and continue the cycle.

Needless to say, we're taking a water filter with us.

ISAIAH 43:17 ELECTRICAL

Ghanaian businesses love to brand themselves with inspirational messages. A walk round the commercial district of a Ghanaian town is like wandering around a theme park for self-help aphorisms, of the sort you might find in those counter-purchase books with names like The Little Book of Mawkishness.

Taxis and trotros (taxi-vans) have them decal-ed onto the rear windscreen in a weird font which looks like either brushstrokes or knobbly branches. You'll pull up behind one in traffic and read it saying something like

BE SERIOUS

Occasionally, this is a bit like reading tea-leaves, in that they seem to carry messages to you about your situation. In the middle of a mechanical and nervous breakdown, stranded with an overcrowded and three-hours-late bus by the side of a major highway in Accra, worrying about the chaos and the passing of time, two trotros went past. The first one said

IM SORRY

The next one was more admonitory:

D0NT HURRY

There's often a religious slant to these signs. In the Accra suburb of Adabraka there's a shop called

JESUS FINGER FURNITURE

I can't work out if this refers to a type of furniture - a tiny chair for your index, a chaise longue for the thumb - or some devotional style of furniture. And who knows what to make of

DR JESUS HAIR

? Sometimes their religious fatalism makes you doubt how much the business owners are in control of their affairs:

TRUST IN THE LORD BUSINESS CENTRE

for instance. Still others are just inexplicable. Why do lots of trotros have decals on their back windows saying

THEY ACT AS LOVERS

? And what sort of meal can you expect at a cheap restaurant called

OBSERVERS ARE WORRIED CHOP BAR

? Answers on a decal, please.

Reading between felines

Well browsing on the web t'other day what should I find but that Jasper, Kate's cat, has set up his own blog.

I'm a bit disturbed by aspects of it, particularly that he seems to view Kate and myself in loco parentis. But I think he's got quite a good style for someone who learned to write from staring wistfully at the sides of cat-biscuit sacks and sitting on newspapers when I'm trying to read them.

There's a rumour going round that my mum wrote these posts as emails to keep us updated on the furry one's exploits, but I wouldn't credit it.

West African markets are a bit different from your usual pahnd-f'rer-pahnd Brit variety. In fact, pretty much all they've got in common is tomatoes.

Take snails. I'm not talking cute little garden path snails. I'm talking gastropodian behomoths that look like this. Scared yet?

People use them as flavouring in soups - a sort of natural stock cube - and I've probably already eaten countless of them without knowing it. But they're best used fresh, so a typical snail stall is covered with hand-sized molluscs all lazily contemplating escape. And the piles are often so big that you wonder who is in control. You suspect that the old woman minding the stall is eating snails because if she doesn't, they'll end up eating her.

Then there's fish. Again, I must have eaten this countless times without knowing it. They're one of those things, like recycling water from sewage, that I'm happiest not knowing about. They're sold in huge flyblown piles of sundried stink, in every imaginable size and shape. Catfish are spiked round into fishy bangles, their skins the colour of greased axles. Whitebait is piled up in miniature refuse heaps, with a scoop of them in an old tomato-paste tin on the top of each one. Flatfish are stacked and restacked like sandy slabs of stone, and thousands of dessicated little eyes gape up at you as you pass by. The smell is like finding the secret fish graveyard.

Breakfast of champions

Mealtime at Betty's was an endurance test. 72 and unsteady on her feet due to a kneecap dislocated while collecting firewood six years ago, Betty was still a great cook of fantastic, hearty meals. She had been a cook for the US diplomatic service in Accra, in Togo, in Niger, and in Mali over the years, and had been on the point of going off to work for the embassy in Nairobi when al-Qaida blew it up back in 1998. So now she stays at home, sitting on a bench in her porch and cooking meals for the rare tourists who drift through. Her sitting room is the closest thing that the village of Amedzofe has to a restaurant, and we ate there every day.

Working for the Americans had clearly left its mark on Betty's cooking. Our breakfast banana pancakes were wonderful but each one was the size of a dinner plate, and they came in a stack of four piled two inches high. At first we weren't too worried about this: we would miss lunch because we were on a hike, and Betty had warned us the previous night that an egg shortage (a recalcitrant chicken?) would probably mean that Kate's French toast was off. So we set to dividing this hearty breakfast between us.

We had each taken a pancake and were coping fairly well when Betty tottered in with a plate of three French toasts. We started to doubt whether we'd be cleaning our plates. I did my typical thing of refusing to take some of Kate's food; normally I do this because I'm being all falsely modest and generous, but this time I'm worried that if I eat even a morsel of her food I'll jeopardise my own attempt on the batter mountain steaming in front of me. Kate and I have ploughed our way through one pancake apiece, but we're still only half way down the stack.

I'm lamenting the fact that I've got four pancakes to get through next to Kate's three French toasts when Betty balances things out, bringing a second dose of French toasts for Kate. We're now staring at a table of food more than twice as big as anything we've been expected to tackle since we've been in Africa. If we'd been in an ordinary restaurant things might have been different, but sitting here in Betty's home we somehow felt we ought to make at least a decent stab at finishing, and not quit too early. So we drove on.

It got harder. Each morsel of pancake I forced into my mouth was like a step through a butter-and-syrup mire. I felt I was failing at each forkful. Somehow I made it through half of my second pancake, but I lost heart staring at the pregnant hummock of the last one. I cut the remainders to bits on my plate, hoping against hope that it would somehow be more manageable in small bits than if it was one huge starch frisbee. I could feel self-pity welling up my gullet as I spiked each doughy lump and forced it down to join the mass already jostling in my stomach. I chewed as if my jaw was made of lead, but somehow by doing so it felt like I was putting off the moment when I would move from toying with my food to actually ingesting it.

It's at this point that Kate picks up the sound of frying. "Do you think she's making more?" she wonders, and I think there's a note of mockery in her voice - after all, she's had two servings of French toast. "I think she's still cooking," she says. "She's probably making breakfast for the family as well," I whimper, more out of hope than expectation. And sure enough, a few minutes later Betty sails in with two more pancakes.

I am by now at the furthest extent of my gut. I can't distend any further or I'll rupture, and to my eyes, the latest pancakes have taken on the dimensions of dustbin lids.

But it feels like I'll be offending this generous old woman if I refuse, so I flop one of the fresh pancakes onto my plate and make half-hearted efforts to cut bits out of it. I feel like I won't be hungry again in a week. Whole fields of wheat are swaying in my gullet. The sounds of frying are renewed, and we decide to make our escape while there's still time.

La biere: le reflet de votre puissance

Just got an email from a friend in Ireland, talking (charmingly) about the need to keep to the centre of the pavements around St Patrick's day on account of the Guinnessy vomit on the walls and gutters.

Which reminded me: stout is absolutely huge in Africa. It's the last thing I'd have expected: I'd have thought the whole meal-in-a-pint-glass shebang would go much better in a climate like northern Europe where you lose a pie's-worth of calories shivering through each winter day.

But strangely, Guinness is everywhere. Every bar you enter has promotional Guinness plastic table mats, big cities are crowded with billboards for the stuff, black-and-beige bunting is draped outside drinking spots ... I've even seen plastic chairs with harps moulded into the backs.

In this climate I find it hard to get more than a half-pint of the stuff inside me at one go. The heat is dehydrating enough that more than two pints of anything alcoholic in one night would have me reeling. But locals knock Guinness back like it's water.

In Benin they even had adverts which called to mind the classic old 1930s Guinness marketing. A silhouette of an African man as impossibly muscly as the girder-carriers of the old ads, with "Guinness: le reflet de votre puissance" ("Guinness: the symbol of your power") emblazoned across it.

Now obviously they're trading on the idea that if you're black and you're proud then you've got to drink a black beer as well, rather than this cissy yellow stuff. But it's ironic that African pride is being invoked to enrich a European company at the expense of an impoverished part of Africa - though I guess that's advertising for you.

That said, there's now a local stout called Castle which seems to be catching up, although it must be bankrupting itself trying to compete with Guinness's marketing.

So today we posted something to Britain.

I was under the impression that this postage stuff depended on volume as well as weight, so we butchered an old mineral water box (the brand was "Voltic" - a reference to the Volta river - but I'm not 100% convinced it isn't somehow riding on the coat-tails of Volvic), folded it up and made it small and stuffed it with paper and plastered it with masking tape ... only to discover that there is no volume component.

Anyway, the box seems sort of sturdy although it looks more like a papier mache representation of a box than an actual box proper like. In some ways it reminds me of the box that John Candy gives to John Turturro in the film "Barton Fink", although I think that one was meant to contain a human head and this one carries nothing more offensive than a lamp made out of a calabash and a couple of books of poetry that I'm getting bored with.

Anyway, cost a fortune but hopefully will give out a naice glow in some future London pied a terre.

Pretty!

Yes look. A map of places I gone in world have.

To be honest it's a bit underwhelming. Must visit some nice big countries, like Canada, Greenland. Mali and Niger would have made a nice splash on West Africa.

Or perhaps I should sort out a different map projection, to emphasise the places I have been. Something that makes Melanesia bigger than Russia would be helpful.

Accra on an off-day

Today I can report doing absolutely zip. Truly sod all. Yesterday was Independence Day, which was a bit free of fun festivities - unless your idea of a day out is hanging out in a big concrete square listening to improving speeches from the President. Yesterday being a Sunday, that means that today is a public holiday and there's nothing, but nothing open. Except for those wonderful Internet people.

Casting my mind back a few days... a deeply uncomfortable bus journey. Sadly I haven't grown up yet, and the idea of sitting at the back of a bus gets me all excited on some deep level, because you're furthest from teacher etc.

I'm now old enough to know that back of bus =/= larks, pranks, and the possibility of schoolboy social advancement; back of bus = extreme bodily pain, especially after four hours of bouncing along Ghana's "work in progress" road network.

Occasionally I'd glance out the window (which happened to be level with my arse), through the cloud of dust being thrown up from the rutted streambed of the road surface. A few yards away, like the glittering visions that torment people dying of thirst in a desert, I could glimpse a blissful, smooth surface of black asphalt. Moving slowly across it was a steamroller, with a man at the controls who to my battered braincase seemed to be smiling back at my jumping form, smugly.

Don't mention the warmth

Now I realise that most of my blogs to now have been a very British running account of the weather in West Africa - "How's the weather dear?", "Scorchio" etc - and I'm loath to keep going on about it.

And really there's much more significant stuff to tell you about, like the week I've had lazing on the beach (or rather off the beach, in the shade, somewhere where there's a breeze...), like the exciting brush with diarrhoea which Kate and I have shared (how sweet!), like the great Ghanaian food, like the interesting people we've met ... this morning we went to Cape Coast castle, a grim whitewashed European fort/slave trading dungeon containing an amazing museum and some horrific reminders of its past ...

But none of that really floats up to the top of my thoughts at the moment. No, the sultanas in my mental muesli today are all concerned with the fact that the heat here would draw sweat from a stone. At times I wonder if I'm like an ice lolly left out in the sun, and if much more sweat will see me melt away completely and gradually evaporate. In Cape Coast castle, the principal thought going through my head was about how the whitewashed walls and courtyard were turning the place into one huge crucible, in which I was the subject of experiment...

Will write more later, when colder. Now must have cold shower. Cold. Mmm.