The Thing About the Tourist Trail......

Apologies once again for neglecting our posting duties. You must be chomping at the bit for a new post. Tugging at the bridle. Bulging at the stirrups. It's just that we've found ourselves back on the tourist trail and there have been places to go and sights to see. Giddyup!

One of the most popular itineraries through this region is the corridor from Senegal to Ghana via Burkina Faso and Mali and we hitched our wagon onto this route in Burkina Faso. Oh and what sights we saw! Ditching our horses and buggy, we rented bicycles and toured the countryside like Danish grandmothers, soaking in meandering waterfalls and lazing with non-pygmy hippos. We rented high octane scooters and cruised the countryside like Turkish teenagers, and put on our archeologist hats once again to peel off the layers of mystery surrounding the craggy protrusions of the Sindou Peaks. With so many kilometres to cover and such varying landscapes the only constant was the number of flat tires: five over two days.

Of course, our apparition on the fabled trail has meant that our day-to-day interactions with locals have changed. Hands, once extended sideways for a friendly handshake and 'welcome to my beautiful country,' are now extended face up for a 'monsieurs, donne-moi de l'argent.' Trying to uncover prices and arrange transport is once again a daring game of cat-and-mouse where nothing is at it seems and twists are as sharp as the bends in the Niger. Our role as tourists has come up again and again in beerside chats. Has our presence in less-traveled countries contributed to the gradual clockwise rotation of all those hands from sincerity to misguided expectation? Burkina certainly seems to be caught at the cross-roads between the benefits and the drawbacks of tourism, making the division overtly apparent. We're hoping that our smiles and kind declination to dole out freebies will create a model for positive future interaction. Perhaps this is naive. You have a couple of weeks to gather your thoughts: we plan on having a round-table analysis of this and other themes in the final installation of our saga.

The thing about the tourist trail is, contrary to popular belief, it's not actually paved with gold like the Yukon Trail. We've found it's most often paved with gravel and rutted, potholey ashphalt. Watch out for flats.