Trip to Nazinga Game Ranch

There is no way not to have adventures in Africa, even if they are different than what you expected. We are now safely in the guesthouse in Ouagadougou, but have definitely had an adventure the past 2 days. We left Nalerigu early yesterday morning and it took us nearly 8 hours to get to the Nazinga Game Ranch, where we expected to see elephants. The roads are so bad - almost 100 km in dirt roads where there are huge craters and mud puddles and you can't go over 10 miles an hour in some places! Plus, you have to go through the border, which takes over an hour (nothing is easy here), but thankfully we got through before they closed for their 3 hour lunch break. Our lunch was a “picnic” on the side of the road. We tried to pick a spot where there weren't many people around, but I guess there's no way that white people can't draw attention here. :) By the time we were leaving, we had a small crowd of people just watching us eat.

It is the end of rainy season and apparently not the right time to see animals at Nazinga (yes, useful information to know before you drive 8 hours in Africa but what could we do at that point?). The grass is so tall that you really can't see much of anything. The other problem is the puddles (and small rivers) in the road... which proved to be a bigger problem on our safari. We did make it to the ranch, to our “mud huts”. We thought we had reserved a 3 room chalet but we got 2 small huts with a lock that took 5 mins to open, two twin beds with rock hard mattresses, and electricity from 6-10 pm... pretty rustic but at least it had a toilet and shower. Sleeping was interesting... after the power cut turned our fan off, Angela & kept hearing animal sounds. We couldn't go to sleep because it was so loud so we finally went outside to have a look around (probably not the best idea in Africa but the noises stopped when we walked outside). We finally decided that there must be monkeys or baboons in the tree. I slept off and on – the monkey sounds, the feeling that bugs were crawling on me (although I never saw any), and having a hard mattress. It definitely could have been worse conditions, but we were all thankful to leave this morning.