Kara

So our passports arrived and we finally made it to Kara, a small town a few hundred kilometres south of Dapaong. We also found out why it took so long for our passports to return. It turns out they were stolen but, not wanting to worry us we were not informed. Not that it would have made much difference, there is no British embassy in Togo.

The buses in Togo are interesting, with collapsed suspension, wrecked body work and windscreens shattered to an alarming extent (occasionally, admittedly, no windscreen). They were one of the reasons we flew to Ouaga in Burkina Faso and not to Lome in Togo. We could avoid the buses over the mountains (benches down the middle to cram more people on, no rest stops, feet in the air to avoid the wee sloshing around and a somewhat lethal road on which the trucks crawl at 1 or 2 mph in case of break failure)! So it was with relief that we spied the new post bus shiny, yellow and new, and like many things in Togo, a Chinese import and barely a month old. Tickets were booked, and off we went.

Kara is greener than Dapaong and also felt slightly cooler, but we still found a hotel with air conditioning which remained on for the duration of our stay (baring power cuts). Size wise Kara is similar, but the market is busier, smellier and more chaotic and the restaurants are excellent. You can also buy Pringles in some of the shops. Heaven! Once we had dumped our stuff we wandered round, trying to find a camera memory card (as we had left ours accidentally in Dapaong – unbelievably we succeeded) and deciding what to do, eventually settling on lunch. The problem here is that there is no tourist infrastructure, so you may want to go somewhere, but how would you know which dirt road is the right one, or which path needs to be walked down? There are taxis for hire - not that they would try (and succeed) to scam us, and they are completely unroadworthy (basically, a West African will destroy anything new in a few days/weeks and then keep it running for decades on string, paper and metal derivatives). Then we saw a sign for tours, and in we went and organised two days for only marginally more than it would have cost us to hire taxi.

The first day was to the Tamberma valley, a UNESCO site via what we thought was a walk up the highest mountain in Togo (but which was actually a drive by), a museum and numerous tourist shops. A Tamberma is a fortified house which spirals upwards (those who want a spiral staircase in their house should get one of these) and is geared to trapping your enemies inside and then shooting them with arrows, proof that nothing changes (apart from the method), and we had a guided tour to one of them. It was pretty nice. It had three bedrooms, one for each parent and then one for the kids, a bathroom, kitchen, grain stores and a room for the animals.

We were also shown a baobab tree which the locals sleep in occasionally.

The thing that struck us here was the amount of sacrifices; blood and feathers were evident in numerous places (the conversation probably goes ‘I fancy pintade for dinner.’ ‘We can’t afford it.’ ‘Hmm, you’re right. Anyone died recently, any gods we have forgotten, anything we want to happen?’ ‘Not sure, we’d better sacrifice a pintade just in case.’) 

The second day also consisted of a trawl round tourist shops but this time with a walk to a waterfall (which was great, as the spray probably decreased the temperature by 10 degrees – ie only 30!). There is so little water here that just a drop turns the landscape into a green heaven - disconcerting after Dapaong.

We also saw our first child workers, making cloth in a local factory (for want of a better word), leading to mixed feelings of ‘they shouldn’t be here, it is outrageous making children work’, and ‘isn’t it great that these guys are learning a trade on a Saturday when there isn’t school which they shall be able to use to support their families into the future.’ I guess this is merely another example of our well intentioned western values turning out to be crap in this culture.

Our second day of touring finished early, and so after a spot of lunch which consisted of bread and ‘kiddy’ chocolate paste (yummily sickly) we went to the hotel Kara, which had a swimming pool. This may not sound as exciting as it actually was; the reader must realise that swimming has been a recurrent fantasy for a while now, ever since the cold tap water rose above body temperature. Sadly, swimming was an optimistic term as the pool was full of:

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  people who couldn’t swim and who blocked all access to the shallow end, complete with floats, rubber rings and all the other paraphernalia associated with swimming lessons.
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  UN election monitors – hey, gotta keep them busy somehow;
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  white American girls showing great cultural understanding and flirting with muscle bound African hunks (ie ‘feel how sunburnt my legs are’ – pout);
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  muscle bound African hunks, flirting with the white American girls and generally showing off;
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  and one Chinese guy with goggles.

But we sat in the pool for a while, and enjoyed the cool water, whist watching the muscle bound hunks ‘relieve’ themselves in the outdoor showers. Needless to say, we showered at our own hotel…

Anyway, our time in Kara passed all too quickly, and soon we were on our way back, on the glorious new shiny yellow ‘Golden Dragon’ post bus, which crashed – hey we said that the road was lethal. Basically, the wheels on a truck coming the other way locked and he swerved into the side of our bus, taking out the wing mirror and hitting the bus about a foot behind the driver, before jack knifing off the road. Fortunately our bus stayed on the road (although many more people were wearing seatbelts when we did eventually got going again). Thank God, nobody was hurt (what would one do? Do you think the locals would/could help… I am a scout first aider don’t you know) although the truck driver was writhing around beside his truck so much that you could easily have confused him with a Spanish footballer (ie too much movement to actually be hurt, probably worried about being lynched).

Our bus suffered a buckled wheel, you could clearly hear the air escaping, and almost see the tyre loosing pressure. Eventually the police arrived, to direct traffic (for a bit, a mate arrived and they were soon chatting, leaving it to passengers) and to get out a measuring tape. Forensics lesson; you can work out how fast cars were going by measuring the skid marks (in the UK anyway, where the tyres are not completely bald), looking at debris by the road and where the skid marks start will give a reaction time, either before or after an impact. You can then estimate whether a driver was drunk etc. Our policeman measured things such as the width of the road and the length of the bus, ie nothing that one would have thought was useful (although I am probably being unfair). Two hours later we were on our way again, although they hadn’t bothered to change the wheel.

Basically the lack of road safety is down to truck owners who are able to ignore road safety laws with relative impunity (in Kenya they are the politicians) and insist on their drivers covering improbably large distances in too little time – leading to stimulant use (that’s intoxicating drugs to you and me).

I think that the next few days shall be spent chilling in Dapaong.