Annette and I were seated next to each other in the bus. But across the aisle. As for her, she had a gentleman from Nigeria as her closest neighbour, whereas next to me there was a pretty young local lady.
And the bus itself was outright luxurious.
I would bet that management in quite a few bus companies in Europe would calmly purchase such a vehicle into their own fleet. Everything was there, comfortable seats, air-conditioner and a TV screen above the driver and conductor with constant feed of Nigerian soap operas on DVDs.
I hope I’m not going to offend anyone if I state that those soaps were awful. Ridiculous acting, a lot of affected theatricality, shallow plot – as a true soap should have – and all that above the base of some screeching and incessantly irritating music, which more than often was not a base at all, but rather covered everything. So actors had to yell their heads off in order to be heard in the first place. But nobody in the bus minded. On the contrary, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves splendidly. Annette, too. Such stuff seemed to be a staple on African TVs, and they obviously had their ears fully tuned to it. So for all of them, this was a great diversion.
I preferred looking though the window and watching the slowly changing landscape as we went on. Of course, this was neither the Africa of Hollywood Tarzan movies nor the continent of Stanley and Livingstone. That lush and all but impassable world full of jungles and jungle creatures would be East Africa, I guess. Shades of dark green of leaves and dark brown of soil were somewhere across the continent. Here, in Burkina Faso, on the route I was on now, this was another world. This was sub-Saharan part of the continent, scorching sun, parched yellow grass and red dirt. This wasn’t even romantic.
I saw leafless trees and mud or mud brick houses, which were often nothing more than shacks. Or huts. I saw a pretty arid landscape with almost no agriculture aside from occasionally grazing skinny, rib-rattling cattle. Maybe some subsistence farming, but we couldn’t see that from the bus. There were only one or two bodies of water along the way, like shallow, oversize ponds, nothing more. From time to time a tiny cluster of makeshift huts, would lie along the road and there we saw people whiling away their time in what shadow they could find, sometimes with their domestic animals around, sometimes without any in sight. There would be a bicycle leaning against a wall, a pile of used lorry tyres, occasional food cooked on the wood fire in the yard, in battered pots and cauldrons, a rickety car here or there, and from time to time a bunch of clay bricks drying hard in the baking sun.
And in between a lot of singed earth and parched yellow grass.
I guess I was easily the only one in the bus who found the passing landscape fascinating. I kept shooting pictures on and on. I tried not to disturb the young lady next to me. She pretended she minded her own business.
And that was the kind of country somewhere midway through our journey to Bobo-Dioulasso. That’s what the area looked like from the bus when we came to our only serious stop in the local provincial town of Boromo.
I may even say provincial capital, as the town of Boromo, really just an oversize cluster of shacks and few dirt roads, is the capital of the namesake province. Or department, as they call it locally. The most imposing structure from the civil engineering viewpoint, and wider, was the bus terminal building.
Not far from Boromo there is the Parc National des Deux Balés, a national park where you can allegedly see elephants. As far as western tourists go, the only reason to stop by longer than fifteen minutes in Boromo is if you want to visit that park. I was the only white man on our bus. And I didn’t go to the park. And I saw no other whites around.
However, sometimes there’s more than meets the eye, and Boromo may just be one of such cases. As a matter of fact, there’s so-called Banfora Gold Belt, a strip of land located in Western Burkina Faso that extends for over 150 kilometres and continues into Côte d’Ivoire, where allegedly significant gold occurrences have been reported. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But some Canadian companies are said to have obtained exploration permits in an area covering over 1600 square kilometres. If they really come up with something, I am really curious to know how much of it they’ll leave in Burkina Faso.
But if they do find something, Boromo may well undergo some kind of face lift in the future. I may imagine that Canadian engineers won’t be exactly dying to lodge in shacks of the mould that locals seem to live in.
We stopped in Boromo for fifteen minutes. Locals immediately swarmed all over us, trying to sell us food, some of it cooked and fried right on the spot like fish and meat, and some just fruits and vegetables, or sweets. And of course, you could buy yourself an unavoidable mobile phone card. No matter how poor and dirty looking a place seemed to be, the phone card was one thing you could bet on being able to buy.
Annette didn’t mind stretching her legs, but I had a feeling she wished we’d never stopped just so I would not take pictures. As always in such cases, she was visibly apprehensive. Of what, I couldn’t understand yet. Besides, I was taking most of the pictures in secret, anyway. But nonetheless, she was clearly far from being at ease.
I roamed around all fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes is not much. So my short encounter with Boromo ended very soon. It was now time to move on.
