Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

We hit traffic as soon as the outskirts of Ougadougou were conjured up. We weren’t going to travel any further, because the car wasn’t able to last much more. I was glad that I was at least having a brief stay in Burkina. We pulled into a convent, a place where the couple had stayed previously. It was the cheapest place in Ouga, and was run by Catholic nuns. I asked Mitya if he was worried about all the Popish symbols and the threat of Arminianism but he didn’t know what I was talking about. He thought it was cool we were staying in a convent, and mused over whether the nuns would be hot and “up for it”.

 

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, Ouagadougou looking far more advanced than I had come to expect having heard Burkina was the second poorest country in the world. The roads were paved, the people purposeful, and the monuments abstract rather than personalised. The convent was in a deep driveway, but there was no-one to talk to. The guy wanted to fix something up in his car, and Mitya offered to help. The woman and I went to another wing of the convent to get our rooms sorted, but before we could go ten metres past the gate, two men approached us. They spoke English to us, asking for us just to listen to them.

“Sure.”

“Can you lend me some money?”

“Oh, er…I’m sorry. I’m not…” I trailed off so I could walk away.

“Please. We’ve come all the way from Liberia. We tried to go to Morocco, but we were deported from Algeria.” I wasn’t sure how you end up in Burkina if you didn’t make it past Algeria.

“We want to go home. But we don’t have any money.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please. Please help us. We can’t speak French.” I stared open-mouthed at him, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have Mitya to tell them to go away, or drag me away. The woman and I just looked at each other.

“Have you tried the nuns?”

“They can’t help us. They won’t help us.”

“We’re really sorry.” We walked away.

“Please? Money for a phone would help. Please?” was heard in the distance. We grimaced at each other. I didn’t know if they were being genuine, but I didn’t want to think that they were. I tried to trace through what they said, for signs that they had been lying, trying to steal my money.

“Shit,” was all that we could both say. I had spent nearly a day just talking to Westerners. Now talking to someone from Liberia of all places was draining.

Bamako, Mali

I organised the boy to get our beers, we would pay him once he had got us a crate. He had to go haggle over a price first. We had dinner in the same Chinese restaurant where I ate half my meal the night before. My stomach hadn’t returned to its former capacity yet. I had bok choi that dripped with a bottleful of oil. When we got back from dinner, the boy set off to get a crate. He returned an hour later, and the posh Englishman, the Japanese and us three New Zealanders sat around drinking and talking. A Dogon guide, who had wandered into the complex, joined in for a beer – I guess to make our New Year more Malian. He talked about the Dogon, and told us Dogon tales. It was riveting, if it was from a “white” man it’d have been laughable, but from a bona-fide tribesman, or so he claimed (he did have a Rastafarian vibe about him), it had that tourist-worthy level of authenticity. To add to the feel, he kept on trying to sell his services as a guide, though he and the Englishman got into an argument that lasted at least an hour.

“More-syeur, more-syeur, fifty-thousand is too much. It’s too much. It’s a joke no? A blague? More-syeur.”

“No joke. It’s a good price. It’s a fair price”

“More-syeur. That’s a joke. More-syeur.”

“Fifty-thousand is a good deal. I know the area well.”

“Oh more-syeur. More-syeur.” It soon became part of the background soundtrack to the night.

The English couple came along when the crate was nearly empty, and insisted we get another crate. They anointed themselves with the mystique of being the cool kids in the room. I asked the boy to get us another one – I felt bad, he was sitting watching TV at 8.30pm on New Year’s Eve, and we made him run errands.

The English couple disappeared briefly as they had friends, who they were on the rally with, coming here to meet them. Their two female friends bragged about their lipstick pink VW as soon as they arrived. Both had lacquered themselves in make-up in expectation of the night to come, wearing tight clothing and steering themselves with the rudder of entitlement. I saw them look around the Japanese with some dissatisfaction, and probably me, though they must have thought my observing them was simple lust.

I asked one of them the usual question of travellers, “where in England are you from?” She said “London”, which was narrow but broad enough to be of little use. She reluctantly reciprocated, asking where I was from, and I said “New Zealand.” My New Zealand accent requires rapid enunciation, and a muffling of the vowels, almost as if I had tissues shoved into my cheeks, but she responded as if I spat out some acrid patois. “Nusila? I haven’t heard of that. Is that near Bombay?”

“Ummm no, New Zealand.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, my accent is quite thick.” I don’t know why I was the one apologising in hindsight.

“Oh, I just thought…” and she trailed off into asking her friend about which bar they were to go.

She and her friend were drunk, and with the English dreaded girl, they retreated to the bathroom to talk. When they came back, they didn’t want to wait for the crate, instead, they wanted to find the bars. They stood there squealing like pre-pubescent girls meeting a pop star, except they were squealing about themselves.

“Your hair looks great!”

“I love those jeans!”

“I’m so drunk!”

“Let’s go find some real fun!”

They left soon after, the English couple muttering about meeting us at the concert, like a comment thrown into the wind.

Just as they left, the crate arrived. We were already reasonably drunk, so an entire crate was superfluous. The Japanese were asleep. But we had to pay for it, only myself, the English and Ivan paid. The kid who got us the beers was heading out the room, and I knew I had to give him a tip, at least. He’d worked so hard for us. No-one else had noticed, so I paid him a 2000 CFA tip.

I then popped outside, and I saw the manager looking worried. The English girls had broken the communal toilet, and left without saying a thing. He had to fix it for the sake of the hostel at 11pm on New Years Eve. 

We got through five bottles. Mitya carefully paying exactly how much he drank, thus making it clear Ivan and I were paying the shortfall. The posh Englishman continued his price skirmish with the Dogon guide. It was nearing 11.30, so it was a good time to pawn off some beers – I gave one to the guide who told a slurred story about a rabbit and a leopard (he had been drinking beforehand and accepted our beer as if it was inevitable). We weren’t going to finish them, not even close. Mitya asked me if the Dogon was going to pay. I retorted “fuck off mate”, and my tone must have been sharpened with the alcohol that Mitya mumbled a “we’ll drink it when we get back”, rather than replying with the more belligerent tone you’d expect when someone gets in the way of a New Zealander and cheap beer.

The Japanese were woken up, hungover, and we headed into the main road. A swarm of people gathered around the Place, muted, waiting like embers about to be blown on. There was a makeshift stage in the distance, like an island off the coast. There were young people, thousands, lined on scooters clutching fireworks, cavalry preparing to charge. No-one knew whether to party, or to lurk. The actual countdown meant something, rather than being a much heralded interruption in a larger party as it was in New Zealand. There was no sign of music, but I assumed that it’d start after midnight. The posh guy complained about the lack of atmosphere, Ivan and Mitya looked disinterested at the lack of action, and the Japanese retaining the confusion of being awake for a short time, and being both drunk and hungover. Only the Dogon and I were enjoying ourselves, my French much more confident – my self-consciousness evaporating with the lack of forethought caused by inebriation.

If the crowd were impatient they didn’t show it. The bikes with a melodious hum stood idling. The countdown appeared as countdowns are meant to do – without warning, and an anti-climax. As it hit zero, I shrugged, cynicism no doubt. Perhaps the thought that last year was good and  it’s just one year closer to death that gave me my detachment. But as soon as the fireworks were let off, I thought 2008 was going to be the year of my death. Sky rockets and all sorts of contraband fire attacked the air like a swarm of locusts, whizzing past my ears and eyes, rearing up from all sorts of impossible angles, with the inhabitants whooping while also being fearful of where they’d beach. The cacophony lasted a few minutes until the fireworks had been used up, and people turned to the stage in expectation.

Silence. For fifteen minutes people stood there, but the crowd became restless. No-one wanted to move lest the concert started just after they left, but mutterings filled the void. Those who didn’t care about the concert did leave – Mitya, Ivan, the posh guy and the Japanese, professing a desire to go back and have a beer. I remained with the Dogon and we moved into the head of the crowd.

Musicians started performing but it looked like no one knew how to get the speakers working. There was a lot of clamour as people struggled to hear the acoustic instruments, but the thousands of people there breathed louder than the instruments. The policemen decided to push people back, with batons rather than with gentle pleading. For a moment their arms were frozen in mid-air as if from a newspaper photograph of police brutality. The night sky all that stood between the arms and justice. Then, everything exploded, the person next to me was pummelled, and he fell to the ground clutching his face. Blood was trickling onto the pavement. The crowd in their confusion moved like water in an emptying bathtub. I lost my shoe as the whirligig of frantic bodies surged backward and forwards. I was worried when I couldn’t find my shoe and the ground was strewn with sky-rockets and glass. I had only brought one pair of shoes, and somebody in the confusion might pick up a smelly, solitary running shoe.

Luckily the person who found it was the Dogon, who saw the curious disappearance of my shoe and grabbed it. We retreated back, as I scrambled my shoe back on, and the music started. The crowd settled as if nothing had happened. The man clutching his face was back up, miraculously spared from the crushing carousel of people, refusing to dwell on the tumourous lump on his skull as he went to re-find his friends. I started talking to a Ghanaian, it turned out, who recommended Kokrobite beach for when I arrived in Ghana. He talked to me about travel, about my impressions of Mali, about why I wanted to go to Ghana, and the upcoming African Football Cup. He also warned me about how crowds like this “can go crazy”.

“What do you mean?”

“Things happen. They happen to foreigners.”

“What kind of things?”

“You could be ok, you look like us. But things happen.”

He didn’t say that I had to leave, just, to be careful. So I left.

The Dogon Guide came with me, and we went back and drank. The beer was sitting there untouched, while the others were strewn asleep. The Guide and I decided to drink. I gave him as much beer as he wanted, especially as he came to the rescue of my shoe, and the worker boy came in for a while and had a beer with us too. There were still six left, while the English couple came in, grabbed two beers and left. They did pay, but we clearly weren’t trendy enough for conversation. I’m not sure if they bothered going to the concert. The Guide and I talked long into the night with no particular aim. I should have been doing this much earlier in the trip, talking to people without that magnetic charge that would draw me back to my mates – this felt easy. We just talked about anything: Mali, the Dogon, Rastafarianism, New Zealand, punctuated by nonsensical digressive flourishes. I stopped drinking but he finished all but two, which was helpful because we had to drop off the crate in the morning to the delivery boy. He left, and I noticed that my watch said that it was 4.30am. It was one of the best New Years I’d ever had.

Ile de Goree, Senegal

My stomach felt odd upon our return. It had been so for a few days since Nouakchott, but tonight it felt more clangy, white noisy. It didn’t feel like the alcohol either, growing up a lightweight in a binge drinking society had taught me how to recognise the signs of alcohol poisoning. I tried to suppress the feelings, and I fell asleep on my tiny mattress, my legs grasping at empty air but settling for the stone floor. Brief waves of nausea tantalised my sleep, but it was ignorable. It was annoying though, this constant stuttering, the dreams insolent and hallucinatory. I had continuous dreams, long nightmarish narratives that wouldn’t reach their dénouement even if I awoke, the apparitions returning to taunt me like ugly catchy songs. Eventually I tired of the discomfort. My semi-inebriated brain thought it’d be best if I tried to throw up, clear my stomach from this blockage, this inconvenience. As soon as I stood up, the food swelled up like an orchestral crescendo. And it all came out. I made the toilet luckily, but the flimsy partition immediately woke up the others. They were sympathetic, and I, trying to be staunch, convinced them that I was ok and went back to sleep with the faint taste of vomit cradling my lips. They must have thought my lightweight drinking ability couldn’t keep up with the girls.

An hour later I woke up to the same rush. This continued throughout the night, but it eventually became a dry retch. There is nothing worse than a dry retch, I need the satisfying gurgle, the emptying of a full bucket. With dry retching, it’s a lot of pain for no discernible reason. Your stomach feels like it’s trying to escape. But the dry retching was the least of my concerns by the third visit to the toilet. It had all exploded into diarrhoea. It was odd evicting your bowels just metres from your mates, and with no roof or functioning door separating you from them. As humans we try so hard to pretend shitting doesn’t happen – locked cubicles, air fresheners, toilet brushes, impassive post-dumping expressions to show that time had frozen between entry and exit of the bathroom, that we often baulk when reminded of other people’s daily necessities. Here I had no recourse to such pretence. I had no room for pride. The smell was so rancorous it actually made me vomit, and since I was already exploding one way, I had no option but to throw up on the floor. I was pushing things out both ends, like cookie dough being hit by a hammer. I couldn’t see what was going on in the dark. When I tried to clean my vomit up with my toilet paper, I had to get down on the ground and grope like a speculator, and hope I was cleaning it.

Mitya and Ivan were understanding though, immensely so. They didn’t complain about being woken up, they hunted out drugs, they gave me the sympathetic, empathetic man-grimace, which is the best thing men can do to each other short of crying on their shoulders. And the smell was the worst thing I’d ever produced. I didn’t think was humanly possible for something so rancid to be made by own body.

I woke a couple more times in the night for more frenzied assaults on the toilet, and I used up a whole roll of my limited toilet paper clearing the vomited floor and my body. I was no longer drunk, but I knew that the alcohol wasn’t going to help my dehydration.

The next morning I felt better after getting some solid sleep after popping a cornucopia of pills. I stumbled to get some lemonade by myself in the morning, returning to the restaurant which had now turned itself into a store for the day. I walked without direction or vigour, compelled forward against my body’s best wishes. My body felt like somebody had picked me up and wrung me dry. My bones were trying to hitch a ride on the other side of town, my mind wanted to collapse into the lava, my clothes drenched in sweat, and god knows what other internal workings were conspiring against me. I threw up the lemonade straightaway and at irregular intervals for a few hours afterwards. I had loose motions again too, and this lasted for a considerable time. I couldn’t bear the thought of food in me, so my chastised stomach sat in resigned hunger. I tried forcing down a banana, but that came out the wrong hole too. This was the first time in the trip that I wanted to go home. Immediately. I wanted to get out of there, back to a comfortable toilet, back to a warm, comfortable bed, back to home comforts like TV or music. Stomach bugs are as unpleasant as you can get – but this felt worse than an ordinary stomach bug – and my sole comfort was two guys who heard me creak all night.

I suppose it was put into context by being on a slave island. But context doesn’t stop the shits.