African Road Trip

Yesterday was quite the adventure! I went to Burkina Faso and back in a day, a long 10 hours filled with memories that words cannot fully explain! :) I had to leave the country in order to renew my visa so I decided to take advantage of the missionaries driving to Burkina. I talked Angela into going with me and we got a ride with them to the border. After going through immigration in Burkina (interesting to say the least... a little building, men speaking French, no computers but a book where they wrote everybody's passport numbers in it), we left the group and walked a mile back to the Ghanian border. 

After waiting for a while at Immigration, we were back in Ghana and ready to begin our adventure back to Nalerigu. We walked for a while and finally found a taxi that drove us an hour to the closest city. So this taxi was literally falling apart -the backseat windows couldn't even open, with every bump I thought the bumper would fall off, and with the strongest smell of kerosene. We finally made it there only to get on a crowded van for the next part of the journey. I was in the back seat between 3 women and barely could sit back. 

The last part of the journey was the craziest and the longest. In Wale-Wale we had to wait over an hour before the bus could even leave. The vans here have to fill up completely before they will leave – no bus schedules here! And once we finally did leave, we spent over 2 hours on this dirt road – probably the worst, bumpiest road I've ever been on! We were crowded into this bus on this crazy road... I looked over at one point at Angela & said “Why did we do this?” We stopped at all the villages along the way to let people on and off and didn't get back in Nalerigu until after dark. 

So happy to have made it, we start walking home only to be followed by a group of kids who are yelling at us, trying to talk to us and then they start pulling my hair. After spending almost 5 hours crowded together with Africans, I just wanted to take a shower and be by myself. Finally we yelled at them to leave us alone and finished our walk home in peace. So, that was our Burkina Adventure! I could have just paid the money to get a visa extension, but the African road trip and going to a new country were way more exciting! :)