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!

Baobab juice, millet beer, fresh yogurt, and other delicacies of Mali and Burkina Faso

I hope you'll forgive us for lumping together the foods of Mali and Burkina Faso in this post. Food in West Africa definitely has variations by region (which sometimes line up with country divisions, but often don't), but as I think Andy mentioned in his Senegal/Gambia food post, there's definitely a continuum and much you'll find in common as you move around, too.

OK, here we go with foods of...

Mali!

Our first meal in Mali was eaten in a food stall in a bus station during a short dinner/pickup stop our bus made between the Senegal border and Bamako. A giant bowl of slightly sweet-tasting haricots, or beans (yum) with some fresh tomatoes (yum) and an unexpected splash of fish sauce (yuck, but we survived). One spoon each for me and Andy--communal eating is big here, and people often share a plate. Total cost in US$, 60 cents.

When we finally arrived in Bamako almost 24 hours later, we decided to celebrate and treat ourselves to a fancy meal out on the town. Our main dishes at San Toro (sounds Spanish, but it's a West African specialties restaurant) cost $10 each, which is kind of astronomical for us, but they were very good.

Andy had chicken in coconut sauce with some fries...

And I had wonderfully tender lamb in "sauce feuille," made from the leaves of the sweet potato plant. I believe this is actually a Burkinabé specialty. Note also our drinks--my purple was made from hibiscus flowers and ginger and was quite strong, while Andy's was ginger and maybe lime, we can't remember, and it could clear your sinuses with one sniff. Good stuff.

Not pictured were our much cheaper lunches the next day at Restaurant le Gourmet downtown, where we had rice with delicious peanut sauce and lamb (me) and even better curry sauce and chicken (Andy) for less than $2 each. Included was a bonus giant pitcher of cold water, too. If you are ever in Bamako, you must have lunch at this place.

While waiting for the bus to Ségou, we bought these muffin-looking "gateaux" (cakes) from a woman with many such bags on her head. You see these all over West Africa and make a decent cheap breakfast when you can't find anything else to eat.

Mmm, fried balls with spicy sauce. These were made from a batter of some kind of pounded starch, probably millet, and could be found in many places in Mali and Burkina. When the heat breaks in the late afternoon, many women build a fire and set up a mobile fryer (i.e. a big pot full of oil) on the street and start frying things up, like these or plantain or banana chunks.

In Djenné, I bought our first mango of Africa. It was amazingly sweet and juicy and delicious. Since we don't have a knife, you can see me doing my magic with my spork here...

(Two tangential notes about mangoes...

1) Djenné is the most touristy town in Mali, and I paid about 25 cents for that mango. A few days later in another town in Mali, a woman was selling mangoes to our bus and they cost only 5 cents each, and I felt like I'd been ripped off in Djenné. Now, in Ghana, where it is apparently mango harvesting season, I have been able to buy mangoes for about 1 cent apiece, making all of Mali look darn expensive...though I will say that the 25 cent one was by far the tastiest one I've had.

2) Andy is quasi-allergic to mangoes (and cashews)--he can eat them, but if they touch his lips, his lips get all crazy chapped for days after. This means that whenever I get a mango, I have to cut chunks for Andy that he can pop into his mouth in their entirety, bypassing the lips. It's kind of amusing to watch.)

A popular snack that people sell to bus passengers in Mali are these slightly sweet sesame balls. Not bad if you like sesame, though one really is enough--they're kind of dense.

If you're looking for cheap street food in West Africa, you can often find stalls selling spaghetti. I would say it's in some sort of tomato sauce, but the red may just be from palm oil. The balls on the top are not meatballs, but some sort of starchy fried dumpling they were selling at the same stall in Djenné, so I had the woman throw some in to my to-go bag.

Hiking in the Dogon Country, our guide found a baobab fruit on the ground and broke it open, letting us all taste the fruit inside. Don't judge from my expression here, it's delicious--kind of sweet-and-sour, though, strangely, it has the exact powdery texture of freeze-dried fruit. Not surprising, I guess, given the very dry climates baobab trees often grow in...

You can see a whole fruit here--the big white chunks are the flesh. The bottle beside it was later used to make baobab juice, or bouyi, for our whole group. You just break the baobab flesh into small pieces and push them into the bottle, add water and sugar, shake it a lot, and voila, juice!

(Side note: Trader Joe's already sells freeze-dried mango and dried hibiscus flowers...I suggest that they get in on the baobab trade next!)

More beverages of Mali: Here is some homemade millet beer, brewed in a Dogon village for the next day's Easter celebrations. Considering that it's uncarbonated, served warm, and only weakly alcoholic, it wasn't so bad. (That's our Ecuadorian tripmate Estefania in the background.)

And here's one of my favorite bottled beverages of West Africa, Fanta Cocktail! Tastes like a can of fruit cocktail made into soda. It's no Lemon Fanta, but after two hours of hiking in 125-degree heat in Dogon Country, it sure hit the spot...

The last place where we had a meal in Mali was at a street stall in the border town of Koro. We have no pictures, but we were served absolutely enormous portions of tasty beans and spaghetti for maybe 50 cents each by a woman who we privately dubbed "the fattest woman in Mali"--she wasn't even that heavy, but I guess we didn't realize until we saw her how long it had been since we had seen an overweight person at all. (Let's just say that Mali has more of a feeding-itself problem than an obesity epidemic going on.) Anyway, based on what she apparently thought was a reasonable portion size, we can kind of see how she managed to pack on a few extra pounds.

On to foods of...

Burkina Faso!

In the capital city of Ouagadougou, a popular and cheap breakfast served on the street is French bread with avocado chunks that have been tossed with oil and onions and some spices. Based on the size of your French bread, you pay between 20 and 50 cents for your sandwich. Delicious.

Yogurt is also extremely popular in Burkina, moreso than in any of the surrounding countries. Every town sells cups and bottles of some locally-made yogurt, and many towns also have big vats of it out on the street alongside a display case full of millet, which gets mixed in. I got this enormous bowl on the street in Ouaga for 40 cents--the lady even threw in two ice cubes, which was ingenious because it was probably 115 degrees out. (If I kept mixing and made sure to only take bites from near the ice cubes, the whole thing was actually refreshingly cool.)

Also, I was full for about six hours after eating it...that millet is fibrous!

Since Andy doesn't eat yogurt, we had to find him some lunch, too. We didn't have to go far to find a vendor selling rice and sauce on the street to hungry locals. $1 got him a big bowl, and he went at it with his right hand, African-style.

Here is a weird Ouaga find--pineapple milk. Pretty sure it was imported from somewhere else. I didn't like it, but I had all that calcium from the yogurt, anyway, so I let Andy enjoy.

In Ouaga, I was really excited when we stumbled upon an Indian restaurant near the airport. Unfortunately, the food was only so-so, and then they really ruined it by tacking on an extra $3 charge for rice. Boo.

The next day, we arrived in Bobo-Dioulasso hungry. Luckily, we didn't have to go far to find a lady frying stuff on the street. We got our first yam (aka cassava, or manioc--a dry and starchy tuber, not to be confused with sweet potato) chips there, with plenty of salt and some sauce. These are popular in Ghana, too, though the chunks tend to be longer and bigger. In both places, they are usually priced by the piece, with prices ranging from about 1 to 7 cents depending on size.

Throughout West Africa, Andy had I have enjoyed little cold baggies of juice--and sometimes if we're lucky, we can even find them still frozen. You just bite the corner off the bag and suck. In Bobo, Andy got a bag of mystery frozen juice that we think turned out to be bouyi (baobab juice), though this color is also similar to gingimbre (ginger juice) and to a slightly gingery millet drink called zoomkoom that is only found in Burkina.

We bought these mystery nuts in Bobo thinking that they would be savory, but they turned out to be strangely sweet, almost like little bites of coconut. Based on that, we concluded that they were probably palm nuts. I didn't like them, but Andy did. (Moments after we bought them, the first big rain of the season hit, and we spent an hour huddled in a sewing shop, snacking on nuts with some locals and admiring the monsoon.)

Mmm, sweet Burkinabé yogurt. (Too bad the flavors are usually limited to vanilla, strawberry, or "nature sucree" (plain sweetened).) Got this cup for 40 cents at a little shop in Bobo that specializes in dairy products, meaning that the whole shop is basically a table and a fridge case with yogurt and milk.
From this picture of a restaurant meal we had in Bobo, you can see how meals in West Africa often work--you get a starch, and a bowl of sauce, and eat with your hands (or maybe a spoon). That's rice in the background, but in the foreground is tô, a starchy paste here of pounded corn, though it can also be made of millet or other grains. It usually has the consistency of mashed potatoes, and I really like it. You grab a bit of it, dip it in the sauce, and eat. Variations of this have many other names in different regions and countries--it is similar to fufu, foutôu, TZ, and banku, and I'm sure we'll learn new names in Togo and Benin!

Outside of Banfora, here I am with a gourd full of palm wine, the slightly fermented sap of the palm tree. It's not strong, but still, this picture was taken around 9:30 AM, so I only had a little sip.

At the Banfora market, more baggies of juice. That's bissap, my favorite hibiscus drink, on the left, and some crazy ginger juice on the right. Baggies like this usually cost around 10 cents or so.

Significantly more costly was this Tetrapak of Twist brand banana nectar that Andy found in a little shop in Banfora. It was imported from Egypt and refrigerated, so it cost something like $2.50. Our treat for the day. It was thick and very sweet, kind of like a banana smoothie. Andy looks forward to trying it again in Egypt.

There you have it--many drinks and a few foods from Mali and Burkina. Both of these countries represented a serious step up in street food availability and quality from Senegal and The Gambia, so it was easier to find snacks and cheap meals in both countries. I especially enjoyed all the yogurt in Burkina, and the avocado sandwiches, but we found actual restaurants to be better in Mali. (Of special note is that peanut sauce in Mali tended not to have fish in it, while the same sauce in Burkina often did taste very fishy.)

Ghana, where we are at the moment, is a whole new kettle of fish. Literally. More on that one day when we find Internet access again!

Burkina Faso: As good as the name Ouagadougou?

The guy who wrote the Lonely Planet section on Burkina Faso is either an incredibly laid back person or an idiot. Possibly both. He writes about Burkina Faso as though it is some kind of African paradise where everything is cheap, clean, and amazing. As it turns out, Burkina has some high points, but the low points for us began with Ouagadougou. With such a great name, the city had a lot to live up to. It didn't even come close. Let's see some pictures.

As with many cities, Ouagadougou (aka Ouaga) has open sewers flowing through most of the city. However, Ouaga apparently thought it a good idea to only put a bridge over the sewer every ten blocks or so. Tara and I had to decide to walk ten blocks out of the way to get to a bridge, or take the "local shortcut". Here was the choice:
We tried to find the coolest thing in Ouaga to photograph. It was this sculpture dedicated to West African film making. Ouaga is somewhat of a center for artsy African films. That doesn't mean that it actually has a movie theater or anything--just that some film people like to come together there for a film festival every year.
Burkina Faso really likes what are locally called mobylettes. This term includes mopeds and small motorcycles. This picture is probably the nicest store in the entire city and it is devoted entirely to selling mobylettes.
From Ouaga, we went to a small city called Boromo. The main attraction is a small national park with some of the northern most elephants in Africa. After walking about five miles to the park, we did see a mother elephant and a baby elephant, but they were far away and they ran away before we could get a picture. So, instead, we present you with this gray hornbill. Maybe we have a few birdwatching readers who will be more excited about this than an elephant...
In our hotel in Bobo, we had this fun tiny gecko on the bed. Lizards in Africa are everywhere, indoors and out. They are harmless and eat the insects, so no one really does anything to keep them out.
In Bobo, we experienced the first downpour of the year, which officially welcomes rainy season. It was quite a bit early this year. We first took shelter under the entrance to a tailor shop, and soon found ourselves crammed into a tiny shop with the door closed and a half dozen people from the shop. They were very kind to help keep us dry. Women in Africa carry huge loads on their heads, and apparently even the deluge could not slow down these women.
Also in Bobo is another mud mosque. They offered to sneak us into this one for a fee, which is somewhat tempting to see the inside, but non-Muslims are not supposed to enter, so we stuck to the outside. This picture is right after the heavy rain, so we thought it might have melted like the wicked witch of the west.
Outside of Banfora, a formation exists called the Domes of Fabedougou. They used to be at the bottom of a sea bed and rain and wind has slowly eroded the surrounding areas. The most interesting part is how tiny the layers are that make us the rock. And that they are in the shape of domes. We had never been anywhere quite like it.
Further west, in the corner of Burkina Faso, are the Sendou Peaks. They are similar in rock composition to the Domes, but are a different shape. A lot like the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon in the American Southwest. They go on for miles and miles.
Near the Domes is a well known waterfall. The waterfall is much taller, but we were there during dry season and it doesn't look that impressive. Given the oppressive heat, the most exciting part for us was the chance to swim in the pools at the top. Just look how happy Tara is.
While waiting for a boat ride in the nearby lake, we had the chance to take this terrific picture of a monkey riding a goat. The goat seemed not to care at all. When we get back to the States, we are going to start goat racing with monkey jockeys. I think a fortune could be made.
At Lake Tengrela near Banfora, the real attraction is the possibility of seeing hippos. We were lucky enough to see a few hippos, though even with binoculars, we thought they were giant rocks until we got close. This is the best picture we have. They were all out in the middle of the lake during the heat of the day, so this is about as far as they come out of the water.
That wraps up the excitement of Burkina Faso. Not the worst country ever, but not nearly as exciting as Lonely Planet makes it sound. We will add that bus transport between major cities is fairly good in Burkina, which us taking the first air conditioned bus we had seen in a couple of months. People in Burkina are also generally nice and the people trying to sell you something give up very easily. A firm no and they generally leave you alone. The food will be in a separate post, but the plentiful street food is also nice.