Financing West Africa

Our journeys in Africa until now have been pleasantly affordable, if not always pleasantly comfortable. We wanted to do the entire region at once, so here is what we can tell you about finances in West Africa. As a reminder, these prices generally include our visas (and visa prices may vary depending on where they are issued) and all expenses for the two of us. They are obviously a rough guide, but should be helpful to other traveling in the area.

Morocco- $47 per day over 15 days. Thanks to Morocco not requiring visas, cheap lodging and transport, and easy do-it-yourself tour options, this is one of the cheapest countries we have visited. We stayed in a few terrible hotels, but also a few rather nice ones, but you could easily stay in nice ones the whole time and not add more than $10/night.

Mauritania- $68 per day over 8 days. This reflects the $45 visa, but is lessened by us staying with a family for a few days. Hotels are a bit pricey in Mauritania for the quality, and most of the food is imported, so it can also be pricey if you want Western-standards. However, transport is cheap, with the iron ore train being almost free.

Senegal- $61 per day over 7 days. Senegal is the other country in this part of the world that does not require visas for Americans (or most Europeans), which reduces the cost. Hotels are reasonable except in Dakar, where you should definitely stay in the very nice Catholic Guesthouse or couchsurf if you are on a budget.

The Gambia- $106 per day over 4 days. This is skewed by the $50 visas and only being there for four days, but in The Gambia, you have to take tours (often costly boat tours) to see much. Guides can be hired very cheaply if you can find them, but boats cannot. We do have some good suggestions for bird and wildlife guides if you decide to go.

Mali- $76 per day over 8.5 days. Visas are $25 each. Mali has more tourists, so everything is a bit more expensive, especially tours of Dogon Country, which are costly, but interesting. If you are really on a budget, you can often get a mattress on someone's roof for very little money, which is actually your only chance to be cool enough to sleep if you are there in hot season unless you pay the outrageous additional amounts (normally $20/night) for air conditioning.

Burkina Faso- $66 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $20 each at the border, but only good for 7 days. Transport is fairly cheap and often nicer than surrounding countries (even sometimes air conditioned on the main east-west road). Without your own car, you do have to hire a guide and car to see some of the interesting spots in the west of the country, which was not crazy expensive, but raised the average.

Ghana- $46 per day over 14 days. Visas were $30 each. Ghana feels more expensive than it is because at a few touristy places, you feel like you are being overcharged. Food on the street is good (if you can find it without fish sauce) and really cheap. Hotel rooms are very reasonable, though you may want to look at a few in Accra to find the right cleanliness/cost balance.

Togo- $49 per day over 4.5 days. Visas were $30 each. This is completely skewed by us staying entirely with Peace Corps volunteers while in the country. The average would have been about $30 per day more without that. Take the Post Bus, which is nice and reliable (and air conditioned) when traveling.

Benin- $65 per day over 5.5 days. Visas were $20 each. Good value since we had to pay $50 each for the car/tour to Pendjari tour and paid for hotels throughout the country. Take InterCity bus when possible--it was cheaper than most and air conditioned.

Nigeria- $80 per day over 11 days. Visas were $130 each. The visas make it expensive, but our couchsurfing in Lagos offsets that since hotel prices there are very high. Transport costs vary a lot from place to place in the country, sometimes with little reason. Street food availability also varies a lot, and restaurants are expensive. Make sure your hotel has a generator (almost all do) since the country is without power most of the time.

Cameroon- $59 per day over 15 days. Visas were $100 each. Hotels aren't that expensive, though the water and electricity in Cameroon is spotty, so you could find yourself without one or both even at decent hotels (good hotels have generators for power, but the backup for water is to give you a couple of buckets). Travel prices also vary a lot here in different parts, so just bargain hard and hope for the best.

Gabon- $78 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $100 each. Gabon is expensive. Transport is two or three times more expensive than any other country in the region. Hotels are not cheap, though of a high standard (couchsurfing in Libreville greatly helps our expenses). If you venture to the national parks rather than Lope, they start at $300 per night per person. Yet, we have had a decent time here.

That wraps up expenses. As always, ask if you have any questions.

Obsessions of West and Central Africa!

This post is a long time coming, but we figured we'd wait til the end of this segment of the trip and do one big post covering all 15 countries we've visited so far! Either that, or we've just been lazy. You decide...


I guess we'll start with the three European nations we hit en route to West Africa.


Belgium - Chocolate. That one's easy. Brussels's streets are line with chocolate shops, each one fancier than the next. Luckily, if you hang around long enough and look serious enough about possibly buying something, most of them will give you a free sample!


Gibraltar - "Apes." They're actually baboons, which are monkeys, but all the tour guides call them apes. They were brought over from Africa by army soldiers in the 1800s (I think) for...um, company? Now they run "wild" over the Rock of Gibraltar, except they seem to know exactly where the tourists with the food congregate. Saying Gibraltar's obsessed with them may be a stretch, but hey, we only spent a few hours there and don't really have any other candidates.


Spain - Ham. Or jamon, in the local parlance. Brussels's chocolate shops are replaced in Spanish cities with shops with huge haunches of pig hanging in the window, selling all manner of pork products! In Madrid there is even one emporium called the Museo del Jamon. (It made for a strange gateway to the Muslim world, where pork products are impossible to find...)


On to West Africa!


Morocco - "Berber artisan cooperatives." A.k.a....carpet shops. A guy starts guiding you through the medina (old town) and you think you're just gonna see the sights. Then he steers you to the amazing "artisan cooperative" where you are in luck the Berbers are in town, selling their amazing crafts, just for one day only! (Except that miraculously, they're still there when you walk by the next day, and the next.) Suddenly you find yourself trapped in a carpet showroom, with carpet after carpet being unfolded for your "viewing pleasure" and a slick salesman countering your every objection to purchasing ("Can't carry a carpet around the world? We ship to America!"). And then you start thinking, to your horror, "Hm, that carpet does look nice, and shipping it wouldn't cost so much..." You barely escape. Luckily, this only has to happen to you in one city (OK, maybe two...) before you catch wise and just refuse to even enter such places!


Mauritania - Tea. We thought Morocco was obsessed with tea until we got to Mauritania! A super-strong blend of green tea, fresh mint, and loads of sugar, decanted over and over until your tiny glass is just basically filled with tea foam, and drunk in three rounds over the course of an hour with your new friends, tea is an unavoidable but excellent Mauritanian experience.


Senegal - Pretending to have Internet access. In no other country have we entered so many buildings that had the word "cyber" or "internet" over the door, only to find that the place didn't even have electricity, much less computers or a connection! Senegal's sign-painters are apparently afflicted with an optimism that they will one day have Internet access, and are painting for the future, not the present...


The Gambia - "Happy couples!" For some reason, Gambians like to shout the phrase "Happy couples!" at pairs like me and Andy (i.e. whities)as we walk down the street. This is then often followed by some sort of fairly innocuous attempt to sell you something. We surmise that there was some sort of tourism-promoting PR campaign at some point that proclaimed The Gambia the place for happy couples.


Most of the time it didn't bother us, but one time we had just lost a bunch of money to a malfunctioning ATM (since recovered) and Andy was really mad. Upon emerging into the street, we heard someone call to us "Happy couples!" and begin their approach. Andy barked, "We're not happy right now, leave us alone!" And you'd better bet he did.


Mali - Mud. A lot of West African countries have houses made out of mud, but Mali takes mud art and architecture to a whole 'nother level. It has the largest mud-brick mosque in the world at Djenne, a town filled with other intricate mud-brick buildings. It also sells beautiful bogolan, or mud-cloth, dyed with different pigments derived from, you guessed it, mud. If you don't like mud, you might not enjoy Mali.


Burkina Faso - Mobylettes. The Burkinabe are crazy about their motorbikes, or mobylettes. The nicest store in Ouagadougou is a fancy mobylette emporium. Mobylettes swarm through the cities, and you see pairs that have crashed sprawled across intersections. But if, like me, you are reluctant to take one (without a helmet, down a bumpy dirt road!), people just don't understand.


Ghana - Fish. All of West Africa likes fish, but Ghana is especially obsessed and puts fish in everything. This was a real bugbear to us as we tried to eat street food, because almost every sauce had at least a hint o'fish in it. Every market has a huge, stinky fish section...and it doesn't matter if a town is many miles from the ocean or river--that's what dried fish is for! There is one toll booth in the middle of nowhere outside of Tamale in the north where women with huge baskets on their heads swarm passing tro-tros to sell people dried fish. How this situation evolved, I will never know, but everyone knows the fish-lady toll booth.


Togo - Pate. This is more learned from our Peace Corps friends than directly experienced, but Togolese people are really obsessed with the starchy staple they call pate. It's made of pounded corn and is fairly tasteless (unless you get the fermented version...bleh) but if they have to have a meal without it, they'll go a little crazy. We had to try it, of course...not bad, but we (like most other yovos we met in-country) don't really get what the fuss is about.


Benin - Celine Dion. You know those immortal lyrics, "Near...far...wherever you are..."? Wherever you are apparently includes Benin! We heard Celine playing at the bus office, at the Internet cafe...well, maybe that's it, but it made an impression. Celine seems to be fairly popular in much of West Africa, singing in French, English, and even Spanish.


Nigeria - Locks. OK, we know that Nigeria has a poor reputation for security, but it seems to have an excessive number of indoor locks. In the apartment we stayed in in Lagos, every room had its own lock and key, and in two different hotel rooms we were given a refrigerator with a lock on it. You know, in case those dastardly thieves tried to steal your yogurt...


Central African obsessions:


Cameroon - Beans and beignets. Or maybe that's just what we were obsessed with when we were there. But in every town you can find at least one lady frying up beignets (balls of fried dough) and selling them for 5 cents US apiece. The same lady also always has a big pot of beans (a bowl costs 20 cents) and another big pot of a warm sweet porridge (a cup costs 10 cents). This magical trifecta was our dinner many, many times.


Gabon - Speeding. Good lord, those Gabonese drivers drive fast. Our guidebook features warnings about reckless drivers for several African countries, but only in Gabon do we feel like we're taking our lives in our hands every time we get in a vehicle. And it doesn't matter if it's a taxi or a bus. In most other countries, if a car is driving fast, it will at least slow down as it goes through a village, but not in Gabon--the driver just leans on his horn to warn all the children/goats/other cars to get out of his way. (Honorable mention Gabon obsession: mayonnaise.)

There you have'em, the obsessions from this first leg of our Africa travels! Take them with a grain of salt, of course, and feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree!

Pass me a mango--foods of Togo and Benin

Eating was one of the top pleasures of our 10 days in Togo and Benin. With many ethnic groups spanning the border, the two countries have a lot of similar foods, but we also felt like we got to try a good number of regionally specific foods, too.

In short, they are yummy little countries. On to the photographic evidence...

We were lucky enough in Togo to be hosted by two sets of PCVs--nope, not a type of plastic or toxic airborne particle, but Peace Corps Volunteers! We were also lucky that our hostess in Lomé, Danielle, loves to cook and had the perfect combination of baskets and fridge (wow!) full of market fruits and vegetables and cupboards full of delicacies she had smuggled in from the United States in her suitcase...like the real maple syrup she served with homemade pancakes on our second day there. Mmmm, a taste of home (OK, technically a taste of Canada, but pretty darn close).

On our first night in town, she whipped up a tasty pasta primavera, and then snuck back off into the kitchen to prepare a delicious dessert of blended mangoes, sugar, and milk, below. Simply delicious.

And Jorge introduced me to the guys down the street who make wonderful yogurt out of powdered and condensed milk. Hooray for homemade yogurt!
Danielle asked me and Andy if there was any type of food we missed from home, and of course our thoughts immediately ran to dessert. Since Danielle had all sorts of crazy stuff like brown sugar and oats on hand, we decided to attempt making a mango crisp (since it is mango season right now, mangoes are abundant and quite cheap) in the "oven"--an amazing stovetop concoction of Dutch oven and sand. Here's the crisp a-cookin'...we served it later à la mode with packets of Fan Ice squeezed on top, and it was such a success that Danielle made another one the following day!

In West Africa, Chinese restaurants are expensive, and instead Lebanese restaurants tend to fill the niche of quick and fairly cheap takeout. We all lunched at one in Lomé--Andy, Danielle, and Jorge all had plump rotisserie chickens with salad and chips, but I got a big plate of hummus, which I hadn't had since we left the states. It came with a pile of pitas and made my tummy happy.
This may look like meat on a stick, but it is actually soy! It is marinated in a peanutty sauce and is a popular Lomé snack.
This bowl of dried fish is resting on a saleswoman's head outside of a bus stop on our journey up to Kara. Dried fish is super-popular in West Africa--every market has a whole section of it, which you can smell before you even see it. (And it gives every sauce that hint of fishiness that Andy loves so much...)
In Kara, our second round of PCV hosts, Liza and Charley, took us to their favorite outdoor pintade place. Pintade is guinea fowl, which is kind of like a chicken. Anyway, this places hacks up a pintade, grills the pieces, and serves them with raw onions and two seasonings--spicy piment, and the popular bouillion-like Maggi seasoning--which you dip your pieces of fowl into as you eat them.
Along with a couple more PCVs from the region who happened to be in town, they also took us to a local restaurant that serves an array of starches and sauces for incredibly cheap prices. How cheap? All the dishes you see here cost about $1.50, total. Clockwise from left--meat sauce, cheese sauce (popular in Togo and Benin is a fresh-mozzarella-like farmer's cheese that is often fried in pieces and thrown into a tasty sauce) mixed with a fish-tinged vegetable sauce, pâte (a pounded cornflour concoction, sometimes fermented-tasting, as this one was), and another corn-based starch, baked in muffin molds, called something that sounds like hablo. (Spelling, anyone?) You rip off a piece of starch, scoop up some sauce with it, and eat.
Street breakfast in Kara--a fun-shaped donut.
A very popular drink in Togo is called Sport Actif. It's supposed to have a lemon-grapefruit flavor, but Andy and I didn't really taste the grapefruit. It is sugar-free and is meant to have electrolytes or something healthyish in it...I dunno, but it tasted good.
Behind the starch-and-sauce restaurant in Kara is an even cheaper place that serves fufu (pounded yam) and sauce. Andy and I stopped in for lunch and got three fufus and a bowl of sauce for dipping for 30 cents, total.
We have not been able to find our beloved sugary peanuts for a few countries now, but in Togo and Benin we did find peanut clusters like these. They tended to range in price from 2 cents to 5 cents apiece depending on size.
My friend Kathryn, a former Togo PCV, sent us great tips about things to eat and drink in Togo. On our last night in the country, I had to follow her advice and go to a tchouk stand--a roadside shack where homemade millet beer is served in gourd bowls. One bowl costs 10 cents. It's pretty much the social thing to do in Togo--I made friends with the guy you see next to me and learned a lot of sad facts about the state of education in Togo (he's a teacher).
On the nonalcoholic front, Kathryn recommended that we look for Cocktail de Fruits soft drink, since we liked Fanta Cocktail so much. Good call! We found a giant bottle for about 75 cents (yes, more than twice the cost of our fufu lunch). Slightly different taste than Fanta Cocktail, but very good...if, like us, fruit-cocktail-flavored soda is your thing, of course.
Thanks again to Liza and Charley, our last dinner in Togo was unique--street salad! We had never seen this before, but apparently it's a thing in Togo. The ladies in the streetside shack chop up and toss together lettuce, onions, beets, spaghetti, vinegar, and mayonnaise before your very eyes. I added a hard egg to mine, and Andy had chicken with his. They throw in some bread and voila, dinner. I guess the only thing that's really weird about this mixture is the spaghetti, which seems to be treated as a condiment in some parts of West Africa--I've seen it now added to salads, to rice, and even as a filling option for sandwiches...
Both Togo and Benin had those baggies of juice we love, and Andy was especially excited that lemonade (actually, I think it's usually limeade) was a popular offering. This bag that he bought on the Benin border was very sweet and his favorite.
Whenever your bus or car stops in a town, ladies run over with snacks to sell to the passengers. Sometimes, a town seems to have a specialty--we went through one place where all that we being sold were these bags of what looked like a chopped up yellow fruit along with a few coconut chunks. So I bought one. The coconut was good, but I don't know what the yellow things were...they were crunchy and not sweet. Hearts of palm is my best guess...
In Natitingou, Benin, the name of the game is fried snacks, and there is one vendor in particular who is the queen of them. She makes the fluffiest little savory beignets (donuts), wonderfully sweet plantain fritters, plus little crunchy fried things and yam chips. No pics, sadly, but if you are ever there, she is a couple of blocks north of the Ecobank on the main road--you can't miss her because her stand is constantly surrounded by a hungry mob.

Another fried superstar of Benin is what Andy calls "bean clouds"--a bean beignet with a wonderfully light texture. Here's a pic of one in Abomey with some spicy piment sauce on top.
Battle of the mangoes! I bought two different-looking giant mangoes in Abomey for a taste-off. One cost 20 cents and one cost 25. The 25-cent one was riper (too ripe, Andy thought) and the other one ended up having a bad spot so we could only eat about half, so it was a draw.
Failed experiment in Abomey--Andy bought three of these banana leaves filled with a steamed millet paste with sugar added. Sounded like a tasty idea, but we didn't like them much. At least they only cost 10 cents...we gave away our last two to more appreciative palates at the Internet cafe and hotel desk.
Fan Milk products are made in Ghana and Togo, but thank God, they sell them in Benin, too. And we even got to try a new variety--FanLait vanille (vanilla ice milk). All the flavor of Fan Ice with (I assume) less fat!

At the Marche de Dantokpa in Cotonou, we found a vendor selling these huge live snails, and she kindly allowed us to take a picture. (These are WAY bigger than the ones Andy ate in Morocco!) The little girl helping at the stall hid under the baskets when she saw the camera come out--people here are really wary about having their picture taken.
This meat on a stick in Cotonou was amazing. Pounded very thin and tender, then coated in spicy piment at the end. (Cheaper than Brazil's cheapest at 20 cents a stick, too.)
What's this, an undiscovered species of fried ball? These cost 2 cents each and tasted like hush puppies.
On our way to Ganvié, Andy tried this gloopy-textured and slightly-fermented tasting porridge. We've had better.
This may not look like much, just a plastic bag full of pineapple chunks. But oh, they are special. First of all, they are the sweetest, most delicious pineapple chunks we've ever had. And second they come from a Cotonou pineapple lady, who for 30 cents and in about 30 seconds will skin an entire pineapple in one spiral and cut it up for you with her giant knife. You find them in the Marche de Dantokpa and even just roaming the streets with big bowls of pineapples on their heads.

Finally, here is a bowl of beans from the fantastic "bean ladies" who set up in the street outside our hotel in Cotonou every night. The beans are stewed with spices and palm oil, then some extra palm oil is thrown on top for good measure. The ladies also sold bread and purified water sachets, and this bowl came as part of what we dubbed the "bowl of beans, loaf of bread, and gallon of water for $1" meal deal.
In conclusion, food in Togo was delicious and cheap, and food in Benin was possibly even more delicious and even more cheap. Things pretty much don't get better than that for us in food world.

Togo Party: Show me your tatas!

Togo is a country that may not have a ton of notable sights, but which we enjoyed. Most people we knew who had been to Togo told us that we could certainly skip it and wouldn't miss much. But it had a few interesting sights, and we had a really great time there thanks in large part to Peace Corps.

One of Tara's friends was a Peace Corps volunteer and she gave us good advice on places to go and foods to eat before ever arriving. Then, in Burkina Faso, we met Jorge, who invited us to stay with him and his wife, Danielle, who is a Peace Corps volunteer working in Lome, Togo. So, of course, we did. They were amazing tour guides and really great to spend a few days with.

We arrived in Togo the day before the 50th anniversary of independence. We expected great celebrations--instead Jorge and Danielle told us we needed to stay in the next day because of the expected protests against the government. Fortunately, the protests didn't amount to anything and no violence occurred. But neither did any celebrations.

The ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) tower is the largest in Lome and also looks really nice and has this cool domed structure in the front. And as a side note, the money used to build it probably couldn't have fed quite the entire population of Togo for the year, so why shouldn't it have been built?

Every time it seems that someone can't be carrying more on his or her head, we see something crazier. Here are two women with snowmen-like structures of charcoal on their heads who also happen to have babies strapped to their backs. Yet, Tara still complains sometimes that her backpack is too heavy...

In Lome, we went to a private museum called the Gulf of Guinea Museum. It is the private collection of West African objects owned by a rich Swiss guy who married a Togolese woman and then decided that the museum of West African objects probably should be in West Africa.

This mask would be worn by a man for dancing during a celebration in Ivory Coast. There is a similar female version to go with it. Maybe Tara and I will return home wearing them.
Some of the oldest well-preserved artifacts in West Africa are the 2,000 year old Nigerian nok terra cottas. They are from the northern part of Nigeria where we won't be going due to ethnic conflict, so we were happy to get to see one in very good condition at this museum.
Carved ivory elephant tusks were used in the past to record histories of ethnic groups and tribes. This is one example.
This guy is a animist fetish. To tap his power, you drive a nail into him. This is probably from Benin, home to voodoo, but the nails in this case were meant to help you get your wish rather than to harm someone represented by the figure.
Jorge described this church as the Notre Dame of Lome. That might be a bit much, but it is a lovely church and it has a nice blue sky that does not let on how hot and humid it was. A huge rain storm came a few hours later.
From this angle, I look monstrously tall. I'm not. These are Jorge and Danielle, our wonderful hosts in Lome, along with Tara and me.
From Lome, we took the Postal Bus (called Courrier), which also carries the mail, to Kara in the northern part of the country. On board, we were luck enough to meet another Peace Corps volunteer, Liza, and Charley, her boyfriend. They kindly agreed to let us stay with them for a couple of days, so we stayed entirely with Peace Corps volunteers while in Togo. From Kara, we took a day trip to see what are called tatas, which are fort-houses first built by people who were fending off Muslims, then used again to fend off slave traders. The people apparently refused to wear any clothes at all until the 1970s, and they aren't exactly strict about it now, either.

Here is one of the tatas in all its glory. Like a personal-sized fort. The mounds outside the entrance are for sacrificing whatever may need sacrificed to appease the spirits. Might include a chicken, a bowl of porridge, or a bottle of schnapps (apparently, Dutch explorers convinced most of animist West Africa that their ancestors' spirits would really, really like a sacrifice of schnapps, and this tradition lives on even today in many places).
People keep the livestock on the ground floor and then live and sleep on the top of the compound so that they can better defend it. Everything is only accessible through small entries. Here is Tara in the bedroom, which was surprisingly roomy once you crawl through the tiny hole.
They harvest the beans of a tree (maybe some kind of locust tree) and then separate out the fruit part inside the pod. They let us try some and thought it was hilarious that we had never had any (it is a staple for them).
This is the granary, the equivalent of a silo. It stores corn, millet, and the yellow stuff is the fruit from the beans above. The woman is also being saved to be eaten later. Or maybe she was just showing us around her house.
The landscape around the tatas is really nice hills and small mountains. Here are some tatas set on the side of a hill.
Tara is shown here modeling a traditional female celebration hat. Well, at least that's what they told us when they wanted her to buy one. Rather stylish, don't you think?
They took us inside of a giant, hollow baobab tree where a family of four used to live. The guide was not sure if the family were hobbits. Like all their living quarters, the opening was tiny so as for easy defense. Here I am crawling out of the tree.
And that wraps up our adventures in Togo. Thanks to all the Peace Corps volunteers who made our trip easier! Onward to Benin!