For the trip back north, we chose a bus that didn’t require us to change buses in Bobo. Which meant it became a very long trip. Eight hours on the bumpy road. Loud movies, and when they ran out, loud Nigerian music. And a constant honking – almost as if the driver wanted to make sure that no one along the road missed his approach. How will I ever survive the 24 hour bus trip from Ouaga to Ghana?

On the bus Elli and I tried a very popular Burkinabe soft drink called Youki. It turned out to be coffee flavored. Like a carbonated Frappuccino. Strangely good, actually.

But when I tried to photograph Elli with the bottle, the road just wouldn’t stay flat for long enough for the picture not to become blurry. And I thought: What a fine illustration of the state of the roads in Burkina Faso. This was the good, paved highway between the capital and the country’s second largest city. And still, full of potholes.

On the way into Ouagadougou, we drove past yet another car accident, this time involving a petrol truck. That made three car accidents that we had seen in a week, one on the road to Kaya, one on the way down to Banfora, and now this. The state of the roads in Burkina Faso is not the best, but neither is the quality of the drivers.

I will miss the goats. They are such comedians.

A papaya flower. It smells heavenly.

In Banfora, they charge their phones with sap. [The sign says Airtel (which is a network operator for cellphones) Rechargez ici! Sap sap. I think sap means something in Jula, which is the local language in Banfora, but still. Isn’t it funny?]

I’ve already dropped all these hints about how terrible the guide that we hired in Banfora was. And honestly, now that it’s time for me to write about him, I don’t feel like it at all. Now, a month later, I don’t want to recall his arrogance and rudeness, how he treated us like we were idiots and laughed at our suggestions. How he cheated and charged us for things that he just made up. How ignorant he was, and how he got mad at us when we asked him to explain something again. How he didn’t do what we had agreed upon, how he was late, how he drove like a lunatic, and just laughed and said “Pas de probleme!”, as if car accidents couldn’t happen, when I asked him to at least have one hand on the wheel. How he started screaming at Helena when she asked him a question while he was on the phone. And how he had the nerve to start flirting with me in the middle of all this. Revolting. But most of all, how he had been recommended to us by a contact. And the realization that: People are corrupt here. Even the contacts of a Swedish professor. Why else would anyone recommend such a nightmare of a guide? And then all the mess with the payment and the scene in the street, threats and an angry professor. Everything went wrong.

So let me just say this: Don’t trust recommendations. At least not if they were made by a middle-aged man with power. What he finds recommendable doesn’t say anything about the quality of the service for a young woman. Because, as everyone knows, young women are gullible and easily cheated. There simply is no reason to do a good job when your employers are blonde, blue-eyed, in their twenties and women!

Make a written agreement of what the responsibilities of the guide are. Pay the guide as little as possible in advance, and fire him the moment he misbehaves. Don’t think about the money, it’s not worth ruining your holiday.

And: Rastafaris are creeps. I’m really sorry to all decent and nice Rastafaris out there, I’m sure you’re in majority, it’s just – almost every single Rastafari that I encountered in Burkina Faso sooner or later forced me to put my feminist warrior suit on. And that’s not nice. Don’t get me wrong, I can definitely hold my own, but constantly having to fend off persistent unwanted attention of a sexual nature, and then being called a racist for saying no. That’s just a lot of bad energy building up in my body. Those are the associations that I get from dreadlocks, Bob Marley t-shirts and necklaces in red, green and yellow now.

Which is really sad, because it made the end of my Burkina Faso visit turn kind of sour. I don’t like being the bitter feminist. I’m just forced into it sometimes.

The joke of a car that the guide cheated us into riding in.

The last sight for us to see in Banfora, before it was time for us to go back north, were the Pics de Sindou. They are actually not in Banfora, but about forty minutes further south, close to a town called Sindou.

Basically, it’s the same concept as the domes of Fabedougou, only on a larger scale. I would say it’s an inselberg with many hoodoos on it, even though that description isn’t really perfect.

It was cool, anyway, rising up like a huge fort in the otherwise quite flat landscape. And that was actually what it was used as, a point of lookout and military protection. The guide started telling these stories of the local people fighting the French here, or was it the Malians, and that they smashed all the puts when they lost in the end, as an act of if-I-can’t-have-it-neither-can-you, but it really didn’t make sense to me. I’m sure he missed something, the guide, I mean, he had already proved to be completely incompetent, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he had gotten things wrong here too.

It was a beautiful place, though. I can understand why the people of Sindou considered it holy. The view was amazing. Sitting on the top of a dome, just breathing. I could have stayed all day. But we had to leave. We had to be back in Ouagadougou by nightfall.

I was too exhausted, and the guide was an asshole. But, excepting that, our trip down to Banfora was really nice. Good, for broadening our perspective on the landscapes of Burkina Faso. Banfora was very different from anything we’d previously seen in the northern regions, and I think it was good for us to learn that Burkina Faso wasn’t just flat semi-desert. There’s also plenty of green, small waterfalls and rock formations.

But most of all, it was nice to travel with Elli and Helena. A good conclusion to my stay in Burkina Faso.

In Sweden, the four Sunday’s before Christmas are celebrated as Advent. I’m sure it’s a church thing everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually celebrated in the same way anywhere outside the Nordic countries. I guess you’d have to be very religious to feel the need to have so many pre-parties to celebrate the approach of Jesus’ birth.

In Sweden and Finland, though, it’s turned into this whole family and friend tradition, where you invite people over on Sunday afternoon for gingerbread cookies and saffron buns, light candles and drink glögg (basically, mulled wine). It must be the darkness. I’m sure all the fall and winter traditions in Sweden involving lighting candles, when it comes down to it, are basically just an excuse to do just that, light tons of candles.

It was second of Advent. We were three Swedes in Banfora, with no gingerbread cookies or saffron buns or candles. But, we found Sangria in the grocery store. With a little imagination, this particular brand of sangria tasted quite like glögg. You know, sweet wine with some kind of spicing. Traditionally, you should drink glögg warm with almonds and raisins in it. But we couldn’t heat the sangria. We simply had to make do with what we had.

So we celebrated second of Advent by drinking lukewarm sangria with dried mangoes and freshly peeled peanuts in it. Considering the circumstances, it felt good enough. Almost like Christmas, even. [The photo below taken by Elli.]

Sunday afternoon in Banfora was spent on the grand market.

We had lunch at a place covered in funky art called Mc Donald. I had a hamburger, of course, decent. And some tamarind juice. I had no idea, but one of all those wild bushes that I had been shown during my transect walks in the villages, produced the fruit that the tamarind juice was made of. It was sour, and a bit too sweet, but still, quite good.

At the market, they sold a lot of stuff. Vegetables and fruits, plastic bowls and buckets, toiletries, second-hand clothes, fabrics and cheap jewelry. We bought a bottle of half-frozen bissap juice, which almost tasted like sorbet. The most delicious, amazingly cold drinkable sorbet. It was so good, I didn’t even mind all the young men shouting “Blanche!” after us and the children following us around with puppy eyes. I don’t believe in giving children money. They should learn a profession, not to beg.

I didn’t buy anything, but I like watching people. And markets are excellent places to do just that.

He still popped up where we least expected it, Kaddafi. It felt so weird, seeing his face on t-shirts worn by kids, as if he was an idol, or as the name on taxis and busses. But it was similar in Liberia. Kaddafi invested a lot in West Africa. And the people here can’t afford to throw away a t-shirt or redecorate a car, just because a North African leader happens to have been murdered by his own people. There simply isn’t that kind of margin here.

But the people that have money, like to spend it on large buildings. With large, geometric, colorful decorations. Say what you want about the architecture style of present-day Burkina Faso, but it sure isn’t particularly influenced by western fashions.

Anything following the sun rising over Lake Tengrela was bound to be just fine. We took a morning walk by the lakeshore. Despite the vegetation being quite different from the north, the villages here looked quite similar to the ones near Ouahigouya and Kaya.

Then we went to a banana plantation. And maybe all these plantations that the guide wanted to show us would have been interesting to someone who hadn’t been in the tropics before, or who wasn’t familiar with agricultural practices. But for me, well, I had seen it all before.

Banana plants are like weeds in most parts of tropical Africa and lowland South America.

The tiny banana flowers are quite funny-looking. I can at least say that.

We went up at five in the morning, way before the sun, and were driven to Lake Tengrela. It almost hurt, getting out of bed. For what reason? Why, to wake up the hippos of course.

The boat we went out in was a canoe-like, flat-bottomed and leaking wooden boat. A local fisherman sat in the back with a paddle. The flat bottom made it crucial that we all kept our balance, but it also meant that the boat barely left any trace on the water. The lake remained still as a mirror.

The full moon was going down.

And in the other direction, the sun was going up.

The lake, clear and quiet and covered in water lilies.

(Which probably meant that the lake was pretty badly affected by eutrophication. But still – lovely.)

And then we came upon a family of six hippos, floating with eyes and nostrils barely above the water surface. There is a certain kind of magic, with wildlife as big as that. We sat in the boat, the world slowly waking up around us, watching the hippos watching us and it would be silly of me to try to explain.

The white birds flying, perfectly reflected in the water. The sun rising in pink and purple. Fishermen quietly gathering their nets. And the hippos, occasionally snorting just above the surface, and then smoothly disappearing under the water again.

Suffice to say: It was beautiful.

Mr. P preferred the Domes of Fabedougou. Swimming in waterfalls isn’t really his thing.

I don’t only want to do sight-seeing when I’m a tourist. I also want to try the local foods and drinks. The traditional drink in southern Burkina Faso is called bandji. It’s a kind of palm wine, made by tapping sap from a certain kind of palm tree. And that’s it. The sap gets tapped in the morning, and if you drink it then, it’ll be a slightly sweet drink with an aftertaste of coconut. And if you let the liquid sit for a day or two, it starts fermenting and becomes slightly alcoholic.

So, on the way back to town from the waterfalls, we stopped in a village and had some of the fermented stuff, shared in a calabash bowl. It, also, tasted slightly sweet, but the fermented taste was quite dominant, and for some reason I thought there was an aftertaste of bacon. I wouldn’t say it was disgusting, but it wasn’t a drink I would choose if there was something else on the menu too.

Instead of taking us to the hotel, we asked the guide to drop us off at a roadside bar, and there we had some Burkinabe beer while the sun went down. A drink more to my taste.

We had dinner with a former local parliament member, a contact of Helena’s supervisor. He was nice and all, and the fish was delicious, but I was just too exhausted to follow in the conversation. The weeks of field work, topped by the wasp stings, still hadn’t released its hold of me. I hope the Very Important Man wasn’t too offended by my empty stare. Luckily, Helena kept him quite busy. Yet another good thing about being more than one person while traveling. You can take turns being stupid.