Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso – Country 31
After flying back to Niger from Chad we spent a day resting in the pool to beat the heat 6 hours in the water and it just kept getting hotter!

Our first day in Ouagadougou we woke up to a sandstorm, it was quite scary, the sky got darker and darker the wind picked up and blew the sand in waves across the street (it looked like a scene from the Mummy!), then as suddenly as it started, the rain came and washed it all away and thankfully dropped the temperature to the 30’s for a day. The locals loved us as they thought we brought the rain (of course we did, DHL delivers!!!!)

Ouaga is a city of bikes, it seems like everyone has one, the roads are full of 1000’s of bikes, if they are not being ridden they are on the top of cars, buses, trucks. We were told the bikes and chickens are what makes the city tick.

While we were here we did a couple of the tourist things, visited a granite garden, cool sculptures carved into the rocks.

We visited a place of “sacred crocodiles” This was quite something, normally there is a huge lake where the crocs live, but due to the dry season there were just 2 small pools of water. We thought we were going to look over a wall into the pond – NO, we were at the edge of the pond with them! Hundreds of them!! A lot were babies but a lot weren’t! Our guide told us we could sit on a big one… He wasn’t joking, I’m game for most things (that don’t involve jumping out of planes) so went and sat with my heart in my mouth on the croc (he didn’t care!). As we were standing around looking at the big crocs others were walking all around us (they have free run).

They say these crocs won’t eat people(!), they only eat what they are given. People live right on the lake edge, kids, goats, chickens all play and walk across the dry lake (not a bother). The “story goes” that a young boy that couldn’t swim fell into the lake and drowned, one of the crocs retrieved him from the water and brought him back to the village (I liked this story, especially when I was standing with them all around me). I do want to say that no croc or human was harmed in any way during the filming (I did though keep flashing to the headline “Stupid tourist eaten by Croc” while I was standing there!).