Over the first part of our trimester break two friends and I went on a bike trip to and through Arly National Park, in the South of Burkina. We spent three days in the bush, saw some neat wild animals, and did a lot of biking. A lot of biking. Because no Burkina trip is complete without a little randomness, we also were given wine by a regional forester from Ouaga, learned why the 1969 moon landing was staged in Nevada, and met up with (though were not allowed to socialize with) rich Europeans vacationing and paying up to $10000 to hunt Burkina’s big game.
Our trip started with a Christmas celebration in Caleb’s village, east of Fada. We had a nice dinner of guinea fowl, pasta, rice, and watermelon with his family, and folded paper airplanes with his little neighbors. Around dusk the party started to get going at the church. They had a drum set set-up outside, and people were dancing a bit and mingling. A few hours later they started a movie about Jesus; the movie was European-made, but dubbed over in Gourmanche, the language spoken in Caleb’s village. We had no idea what was going on, but we did get to see Jesus raise a girl from the dead and fill the fishermen’s nets with fish. Go Jesus! We hung around after the movie waiting for the dancing to start, but when nothing had happened by 11:30, we decided to go to bed.
The next day we took transport east and south from Caleb’s village to Diapaga, the last large town before hitting the national parks system. Nothing too exciting about transport- only broke down twice, lost one tire, two babies threw up, another kid screamed the whole time. But we made it. Saturday morning we took off on our bikes into the bush. We biked about 75km past very small villages, some gorgeous cliffs, and lots of sand. At the entrance to Arly National Park, there’s a hunting lodge, and we stopped there for lunch. The place was gorgeous- pool, bar, restaurant, bungalows (see picture)- and after our initial shock wore off, we started to feel a little out of place. Sure enough just after we finished eating, “the clients” showed up in their 4×4’s with three suitcases a piece and several guns. As we were (quite literally) shuffled off to the side by the staff, we quickly decided that this place was out of our price range for the night. We asked the staff if there was somewhere else to stay, and they kind of laughed at us as they told us we could continue 15km into the park and try to stay with the forester. So we did.
We figured that the forester’s would be located at a village of some type, and since we had camping gear, we weren’t too concerned. Well, we got to our “village” to find that it was literally one family plus the forester. There was an old abandoned hotel that the family worked to keep in minimum (and I do mean minimum) inhabiting condition, and that was it. The hotel was built in the 1950’s and had apparently been THE spot for hunters from around West Africa and Europe; there was a pool, dance floor, bar…it clearly used to be gorgeous. Due to new hunting laws however, the big game hunters are now staying elsewhere, and the hotel is slightly rundown. Soon after “checking in” to our room, we went over to the forester’s to find some dinner. As luck would have it, the Park Forester was hosting a regional higher-up in the Forestry Department that night. And we were invited! While we waited for dinner to be prepared, Peter, the man from the Forestry Dept, busted out his laptop and showed us a movie entitled “Why No One Has Ever Been to the Moon”. Conspiracy theory and that stuff. I must say, the flag blowing in the atmosphere-less environment is pretty convincing. But I digress. Dinner included watermelon and wine. Ah, life with the Forestry Department.
Sunday morning we got up crazy early and went on a guided bike tour of Arly. We saw some baboons, gazelles, elephants, deer-type animals, and hippos. We were kind of hoping to see lions, but we were kind of glad we didn’t get eaten by lions. (Despite numerous reassurances that “they won’t attack you if you don’t attack them”, we were a little scared.) We also got to visit a fishing village where they smoke their catches, then ship them off to Ouaga. Talk about living in the middle of nowhere. This village was probably 15km from the place we stayed, which was itself not really a village. The nearest primary school was probably 60km away. After our bike excursion in the morning, we were pretty exhausted, so we decided to take Peter up on his offer of a ride to the next town. We loaded up in his pick-up, and set off. When we got to the campgrounds, we quickly realized that it was another place for high-paying European tourists, and once again we were not quite in our element. Luckily the manager was very nice and let us set up our tents in the back by the staff quarters.
I must say, I believe we had it better that night. We spent the night trading card games with the staff and trying to figure out magic tricks. For those of you who have never played cards with Burkinabe before, you’re in for a treat. The suits are called tomatoes, peanuts, diamonds, and spades. They play a game sort of like “Uno”, but the rules seem to change each hand. We also watched them cut up one of the water buffalo that had been killed that day. After quartering it, it still took two men to carry over a single leg to the butcher’s table. Then they went at it with knives, hatchets, and axes. It seriously sounded like they were trying to chop up a piece of rock, the bones were that hard. While watching them work, we got the inside story on the hunting trips: rich people pay to come to Burkina to kill a certain type of animal; they stay for a couple of weeks and almost always get their kill. Once the animals are killed, the heads go home to Europe, the neck meat goes to the staff, one quarter goes to the government, one quarter to the hunters, and the other half goes to the villagers. The villagers sell the meat and use the money to buy communal things like water pumps and schools. This made us feel much better about their trips- at first we had though they were just coming to Burkina to exploit the land, people, and animals. And though the rich tourists refused to even return our greetings, at least they were doing something for the people here.
Monday morning we said goodbye to our lodge staff friends, and took off by bike on the last 40km of our trip. It was a pretty easy day since the last 15km was on a paved road, but I was still exhausted as we reached Pama. Luckily there was a bush taxi ready to go, so we got on and next thing we know (OK, lots of stops, about ten 100kg bags of beans…but no breakdowns!), we were 100km north in the capital city of Fada. Ah civilization.
And now I must run. I’m meeting Mom, Dad, Nick and Chelsea at the airport in just a couple of hours! I can’t wait to see them! Happy New Year to all!
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