Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Jibberish in a few minutes

Today we arrived in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. It appears to be the end of our little caravan for now. The Sandbox Savants are heading off to Niger, If it don’t work hit it is heading straight to Benin, Ben and Bob are heading home with the outside chance that Bob will jump into Kirin’s car and join us on the Togo route, while the Irish are heading home as well.

Tonight we are having a combo party for Doug’s birthday and for our imminent departure. Then in the morning we’ll be blasting to Togo and hoping to get through to Benin on the same day. Hopefully; we’ll be meeting up with Tom and Steve again at the Nigeria border so we can have a three car convoy to deal with the corruption together.

Otherwise, besides a serious bout of diahrea brought on due to fatigue and a random incident at the Mauritanian border things have been going great. Nouakchott was cool and the people were friendly they tried helping us repair our tire and the other teams windshield.

The remaining time was spent resting and eating. We decided to get an early start on things the next day because it was a long dusty trail out to the Mali border.

After a few hours outside Nouakchott you could tell that you were heading south. Grass started to appear and the trees more frequent. At one point I thought I was looking out on a golf course with smashed up cars dotting the area.

Finally; once we got to Mali everything was beautiful. The border crossing; the sunset, the scenery, the people, it all was a pleasure to look at. Everything was nice and you could buy beer!!!! It was actually a shame that we drove straight through the southwest side in only two and a half days.

Then once we got to Burkina Faso it was nearly the same as Mali. The only major difference is that the rains had started. Every night since we got to Burkina it’s rained all night and my poor tent just can’t handle it. So we’ve slept inside a church garage and under a makeshift tarp/tent/car apparatus that keeps some of the water out. But otherwise it is quite refreshing to be able to go out at night and rinse the salt and sweat off your body before you sleep.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

by the way, when you are done racing why don't you sell the car..?? So you don't have to ship it back.