112 degrees and our car breaks down

Africa rally blog

Burkina Faso – On Jan 24th we left our campsite Polygamy Point (We stayed with a farmer, his two wives, seven children and livestock) and headed south towards Burkina Faso. The road if you could call it that was extremely treacherous, by far the worse that we have seen so far. Large pot holes were so frequent that at times the road ceased to exist and we resorted to drive on the side embankment of the road. It was a very long, bumpy, hot ride with the temp reaching well over 100 degrees, more than once I truly thought we were going to crash. We jammed to our ipod and drove for a good 5 hours dodging, weaving, and plowing over dirt, asphalt, and rocks to the Burkina Faso border. Compared to the Mali border this one was a breeze, it was pretty much just five stops along a mile of road where they just checked, double checked, triple checked and rechecked all of our paperwork looking for any small flaw that could result in the need for a bribe. While Tate dealt with the border guards I entertained the local kids and myself by dancing to several tracks off the Ipod, the song “millions of peaches” was a big hit.
We successfully crossed the border and headed towards Bobo-Diuolasso, which is a city famous for its drums and butterfly masks. Despite being the third poorest country on the planet, the poverty we saw in Burkina seemed no more then its Saharan neighbors. According to Lonley Planet over 80% of the country’s population live on less then than 2 dollars a day. Once in Burkina the roads actually got surprisingly better, I think it must be because there are so few cars on the road. We were cruising along at the rip roaring top speed of about 60 mph, when all of a sudden there was a loud bang followed by scraping metal and the roar of our usually quiet Sami……. our entire exhaust system was dragging along behind us. We had not passed another living soul in miles and the nearest town was a good 100 miles away. By now the sun was at its hottest and the thermometer read 112 degrees. We quickly got to work repairing the broken exhaust under the baking sun. Then seemingly appearing out of thin air a half naked mentally handicap girl showed up. I am dead serious. It was almost like out of a strange horror movie, she walked up to us sat down in the grass and just stared at us the entire time we repaired our exhaust system. We had no clue where this girl came from or what she wanted so we gave her some candy and hoped for the best. It only took about a few feet of wire (unknowingly donated by RK farms) to repair exhaust and we were back on the road, the girl was still sitting and eating candy when we left.
. Once we were back on the road it was smooth sailing to Bobo where we stopped for a short pit-stop that eventually led to Tate and I purchasing extremely loud bongo drums. We left Bobo as the sun was setting and headed out into the bush to make our camp under the light of the moon. After clearing a few bushes out of the way and narrowly avoiding stepping on a snake we made a nice camp fire and broke out our new drums. We had not been playing for more then 10 min when a few local people came up to our campsite after hearing the drums. They joined us and we danced with a group of about 7 locals to the beat of our new drum. It was a long and adventurous day.

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