Ouagadougou Do

Ouagadougou, I can't help but feel a bit let down by you. I mean, you're great, and all, but you're called Ouagdougou, you're the capital of a country no one has heard of and you're the host of Africa's biggest film festival. I was expecting a whole heap of weird from you and, in all honesty, you haven't delivered. It's like you're not even trying.

Okay so I fed a live chicken to a crocodile yesterday but that was Sabou's doing - that was nothing to do with you - all you did was provide a bus service.

Even your little brother Bobo managed to put an ambulance on the roof of a bus for me.

Frankly, Ouagadougou, if that is your real name, you need to sort your weird out.

Bobo Come Back

I'm back in Bobo Dioulasso and I think I've got a new favourite mosque.

I've also got a new favourite method of watermelon transportation, but that's a whole other story...

Sunset on the Ivory Coast

I'm in Burkina Faso. Who goes there on holiday?

So far it's not disappointing, we spent a night in Bobo and that seemed like a proper city, a far cry from what I was expecting the seventh poorest country in the world to be like. I should probably qualify that last statement - the moment I decided that Bobo seemed like a proper city I was sharing the front seat of a taxi, weaving through donkeys on a dirt track, in the city centre so it could just be that Mali reset my benchmark to a lower grade.

We headed straight into the Burkinabe countryside, to Sindou Peaks, the country's premier tourist attraction. It lived up to the hype, we watched the sun set over the Cote d'Ivoire. The colours were something else.

In other news, I swapped my t-shirt with a random in a bar. As one does.

The Well of The Big Navel

So Timbuktu and back again.

We left Mopti last Thursday and headed up to Timbuktu on a cargo boat through - sleeping-on-bags-of-rice-tastic. The journey up through the Niger Delta was incredible, not least because I saw a hippo and Luke didn't, mwah ha ha.

Timbuktu was suitably renote, dusty and Saharan, just like it should be. And, as we'd figured, there wasn't a fat lot to do there. Spent just under thirty six hours tehre before slowly winding back along dirt tracks towards civilisation.

Mosques or Donkeys?

Luke's misguided. He thinks that when you're at one of those 'places to see before you die'-type places you're supposed to take photos of them and not the nearby donkeys. T'uh. You and I both know that there's no need photos of stuff like that, but donkeys... Photo gold.

So yeah, we're heading north. We've passed Djenne and seen that there 'places to see before you die'-type mud mosque. It's big and muddy and mosque-y and looks quite a lot like it does in the photos.

The road into Djenne was ace, each of the tiny, tiny settlements had their own small mud mosque which shouldn't really be a surprise, but it was.

Am in Mopti now. It's a port town, so is everything you expect it to be.

Country Number Sixty

"No, you don't need one."

"It's not a question of needing one, it would just be nice to have."

"But what would you do with it?"

"I don't know, ward off evil?"

I didn't buy the monkey head. Luke was right, I didn't know what I'd do with it and besides, in this heat it would start smelling pretty quickly.

Still, I'm in Bamako, where the streets are paved with cardboard, where As qre in q different plqce on the keyboqrd and where everyone wants to sell you drums.

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Apologies if you've sent me an email, I can't seem to access my account.

The Road Less Cliche

Apparently a Mali-Burkina Faso double header is an unusual choice of holiday. Still, I've got my reasons, none that make sense, but my reasons nonetheless.

Turns out I'm going to Bamako about four days too late. Luke was there for Eid and by all accounts it was somewhat of a hoot. He got involved in a ritual slaughter and spent the evening gorging himself on sheep brains and dancing around wearing nothing but sheep blood.

I've made some, or all, of that up but let's not let the truth get in the way of a good yarn - Bamako sounds bonkers and as far as I can tell, is as good a place to start the trip as I could possibly hope for.

I'm pretty stoked.

Right see you all in a couple of weeks. Lukey, I'm coming to get you...

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If you want to know what really happened to Luke try: http://www.travelpod.com/members/phileasfarx

Let's be honest, if you want to know what I'm up to over the next couple of weeks you should probably following Luke's blog rather than mine. I'm just going to smear inchoate whimsy over the internet, whereas Luke's more thorough, more sensible - or at least he was before he turned into a sheep-killing psychopath.