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After Ethiopia, bus travel in the rest of Africa has seemed comparatively easy. The only real exception was Tanzania, where I had the worst bus ride of my life (the infamous slog from Mwanza to Arusha, which was only 15.5 hours but felt like several days). I’ve had my two longest bus trips ever here, in West Africa, but I can’t say in all honesty that either of them was really that bad.

Lomé (Togo) to Cotonou (Benin) was easy — three hours in a “quatre-places” taxi, one passenger in the front seat and three in the back. I learned when I crossed from Uganda into Tanzania that you can fit up to nine passengers in a Toyota Corolla if you really want to, so I was glad they didn’t try it here. Togo is really narrow — the city of Lomé is in the “far west,” right across the border from Ghana, but it only takes like an hour to get all the way across to Benin, on the other side.

Cotonou to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) was another story, though. I took the best bus available, which is TCV. The bus left Cotonou at 20:00 and arrived in Ouaga at 17:00 the next day; that’s 21 hours. Five of those hours were spent on all the border formalities between Benin and Burkina Faso, though, including three hours where we just sat and waited for the Burkina customs officers to let the bus go.

There was an unexpected hour-long delay in the middle of the night, too, some sort of demonstration blocking the road at one-thirty in the morning. There were a lot of vehicles in front of us, and it was dark, so I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a crowd chanting and hollering ahead in the darkness. One of my fellow passengers said:

–C’est les étudiants… ils ont barré la route… c’est la grève.

A student demonstration, it seemed. I wasn’t even interested enough to ask what it was all about.

I had trouble getting out of Benin, thanks to the ineptitude of the Immigration Department. There’s a bit of back-story here:

When I entered Benin, on a Saturday, I was given a 48-hour transit visa, with instructions to go to the Department of Immigration in Cotonou on Monday to get this visa extended. I went there on Monday morning, as instructed, and was told that it would take 72 hours to get a 14-day extension, so I needed to come back on Thursday morning to pick up my passport and visa.

By Thursday morning, I’d already decided that I was going to make tracks for Burkina Faso on Friday night. I went back to the Department of Immigration on Thursday morning and was told my visa wasn’t ready yet, but that it would be ready the next morning, Friday morning. That evening, I bought my bus ticket.

Friday morning, I went back to the Department of Immigration, for the third time, only to be told that if I wanted my visa, I would have to provide them with copies of my hotel bill. What the hell? Nobody had said a word about this at any point. I knew better than to get upset, though, and I calmly explained to the passport lady that I was leaving for Ouaga that very night, and that I needed my passport now so I could go to the Burkina consulate right away, as I needed to get my Burkina visa as well. Was there anything she could do?

I figured she wanted a bribe, but apparently she really couldn’t give me my visa without those stupid hotel bills. So, she decided instead to give me a receipt with an official stamp, showing that I had paid the required visa fees and that I was officially and legally free to leave the Republic of Benin. Vous pouvez voyager avec ça, she assured me. N’y a pas de problème. I wasn’t so sure about that, but what could I do?

Of course, it did turn out to be a problem. When we reached the first border checkpoint (exiting Benin) at dawn, I handed in my passport with the rest of the passengers (the few, that is, who needed to do so — if I understand it correctly, ECOWAS nationals are free to travel within the ECOWAS region with their national ID cards, no visas necessary), but I was quickly called out of the group and brought over to the border-police office, where the police told me there was a problem: I did not have a valid Benin visa.

I explained what had happened, and asked them to examine the receipt I’d been given at the Department of Immigration. They hadn’t bothered to look at it, even though it was paperclipped into my passport on the relevant page. They weren’t interested, though, and told me I had not paid the required visa fee for my visit to Benin, that I had overstayed my 48-hour transit visa. Again I explained that I had indeed paid the fee, as the receipt proved, and told them the story again of how my visa hadn’t been ready by Friday morning even though I’d handed in my passport on Monday. Finally they told me to go sit and wait while they talked it over. I expected again that what they really wanted was a bribe, but they chose to stamp my passport without further discussion. So, I’ve still only had to pay one bribe in Africa, and that was to get myself out of trouble for lighting a cigarette on the Kenya/Uganda border back in August. If you don’t smoke, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

We actually saw a wild elephant, taking a bath in a roadside pond, not long after we crossed into Burkina Faso. West African elephants are a rare sight indeed, and my fellow passengers were every bit as surprised and pleased as I was. The bus actually stopped for a few minutes so everybody could watch the elephant do his thing.

The bus trip from Ouaga to Bamako (Mali) was even easier, except for one scary moment when I got on the wrong bus. There were two buses of the same company, identical buses, same make and model, same livery, at the border at the same time, and one of my fellow passengers and I managed to get on the wrong one. We realized our mistake immediately, but our own bus took off in a cloud of dust before we could get aboard. Both of us were really upset, but the conductor of the wrong bus told us not to worry, just climb aboard his bus again, and we’d catch up with them at the next checkpoint, and that was indeed what happened. Getting left behind by my bus has always been one of my biggest nightmares in Africa, and I am certainly happy it ended well this time.

Ouaga to Bamako is a two-stage trip: overnight from Ouaga to Bobo-Diolassou (23:00 to 05:00), then Bobo to Bamako (06:30 to 18:00). The bus was air-conditioned, so it was tolerable despite the hundred-degree heat. Other than the wrong-bus mishap, not much happened. 19 hours is a long trip, but it was really more boring than it was uncomfortable.

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