getting home from Togo

  It was a long trip for us to get home from Togo.  It took us 6 days, but it took the car 7 days!  The travel to get to Lome on the bus took 31 hours, and the driving time in the car was 28 hours, it was just split up over all those days.

 

We passed through some towns and villages, but mostly saw a lot of this (above) - crop fields and nothing.  It is still rainy season, so everything is beautifully green and there isn't so much dust, so that was a plus.

This is the "Pyramid" in BoboDioulasso, Burkina Faso, but I see a Christmas tree!

We waited in this lot for 11 hours, mostly sitting in the car.

Here is what it was like:

Day 1: We couldn't leave from Lome early in the morning as we had hoped.  We actually had to wait there an extra day before leaving for the paperwork to be done to get the car out of the port.  We finally left at 1:15 on Thursday afternoon.  We drove until 10pm, which wasn't great because that meant 4 hours of driving after the sun set, but we needed to get to a friend's house to spend the night.

Day 2:  JP took the car to our friend's mechanic to get a few things looked at in the morning, so we didn't leave until after lunch.  We got to the border at the top of Togo to enter Burkina, and the Burkina side said that we couldn't pass until the next day.  We had to leave the car in the customs parking lot, ride on motorcycle taxis with our suitcases to a crummy hotel, and spend the night there.

Day 3:  We sat in the car in the lot from 9-1 waiting for them to let us leave.  Then we drove until we got to Ouagadougou around sunset.  There we were able to stay overnight at a very nice mission guesthouse.

Day 4:  We drove from Ouaga to Bobo, only about 5 hours.  Then we stayed in another nice mission guesthouse for 2 nights because Monday was Tabaski, the biggest Muslim holiday of the year, so we couldn't cross the border to get home then. 

Day 5:  Just hanging out in Bobo waiting.  I bought some vegetables from a lady who brought them to the guesthouse.  I joked that I suddenly knew a new language because I talked with her in Bambara, but she speaks "Jula" which is very similar to Bambara but the Burkina Faso dialect of the trade language of the region.

Day 6:  We left Bobo and got to the border at 10:30.  We had to go through formalaties and pay some taxes to exit Burkina, that took about 45 minutes.  Then we had to go through formalaties to enter Mali.  At the Mali customs office they had us park the car in the lot and come in the office.  They looked at the papers we had and there was a guy who said we needed him to file papers there for us and he asked for $150.  I don't like that there aren't set prices for things, it's just whatever the guy can get out of us, but there is no choice but to have him file papers for us.
JP negotiated down to $100.  The guy left and said that he would get the stuff taken care of but that we'd have to wait until about 4pm because people go home for lunch break, so it would be done after that.  At 4 he told us that it would be done at 6.  At 6 he said that it'd be done the next afternoon.  Some guy in the capital hadn't showed up to work and so  his bit of the paperwork wasn't done. I was not impressed.  We were so close to home, and we'd already been waiting for a long time with nothing to do and nothing to eat.  JP had found some grilled meat to eat out in the street, but I don't eat meat, and there was nothing else.  Things weren't open and ladies weren't cooking because it was the day after the holiday and everyone was still in holiday mode and they probably had lots of leftover sheep meat from the day before.  We had some dried mangoes, so we ate those, but that wasn't really a meal.
There were no hotels to go to and we didn't want to sleep in the car in a parking lot with no bathroom.  And we didn't want to spend the whole next morning waiting and wonder if the paperwork would actually be done the next afternoon.  I went and had a chat with the customs office head man, but there was nothing to be done.
So we called some friends to try to get home.  It was already dark out.  I think we called them around 7.  They were to get the key to our house from our house helper and get our old car from the garage and drive to get us. Well, they got the car and started driving but on the other end of town realized that it wouldn't make it.  The poor old car needed a trip to the mechanic.  We called a friend with a car and asked if  we could borrow it to save us.  That friend agreed, so now our friends started on the road to come and get us after switching cars and getting some gas.  This all took a lot of time, and finally it was 11pm when they arrived to rescue us.  We had been in that parking lot for 11 hours.  We arrived home exhausted at 1am.

Day 7:  JP called and was told he could get the car, so he went and got a bus ticket and took a bus to the place where the car was.  He got back home at about 7pm.

Now we're glad to all be home!  We still have some taxes to finish paying and other paperwork to do to be done, but the hardest part is behind us.